BryantheRyan.com Challenging conventional wisdom about nutrition, fitness and overall health

Fruit Juice: Beyond The Label

photo credit: baube1942

So what is the problem with fruit juice you ask? A lot.

Instead of drinking a soda or Gatorade, most of us opt to consume the bottle of 100% fruit juice in hopes that we are making a more health conscious choice.

However, we have mistakenly associated fruit juice as being just as good as fruit in terms of nutritional content. Unknown to many is that fruit juice is not anything like the live, whole fruit that we pick off of a bush or purchase from a farmers market.

What is Fruit Juice?

Fruit is made up of two components: Sugar and fiber. The sugar in fruit tastes delicious and makes up all of the liquid that fills a Dole juice container.*

*I am writing about 100% fruit juice by the way. If it is not 100% juice then the concoction you are drinking is more than likely sweetened with high fructose corn syrup and some natural fruit juices.

For every pleasure found on earth, God made the remedy or consequence to deter us from partaking in such pleasures. The antidote if you will. Drinking alcohol = Hangover,  Sex = Pregnancy and consumption of sugar is always paired with fiber (did that make sense? .

There is no plant on earth that creates sugar without the presence of fiber. Sugar cane contains massive amounts of fiber, apples have skin that is composed of fiber and so does every fruit that is available for our consumption.

Fiber is present for one reason, and that is to slow the digestion of sugar. Although we have difficulty digesting fiber, it forces us to become full very fast. This is very important because when consuming sugar, we want to slow down the process of digestion.

It would be very difficult to sit down and 4 apples. The fiber present in the apples would make us full far before we ever consumed a 4th apple. Now lets look at apple juice. Apple juice is essentially strained apple sauce. And according to a couple of non-authoritative apple sauce websites, we can hope to get roughly 1/2 a cup of apple juice from one large apple. And seeing that it takes 2.5 cups to fill a 20 oz bottle, we are drinking 5 apples worth of juice. And this is without any fiber!

Our body is then bombarded with sugar. We use what we need as energy and store the rest as fat. Fiber slows this process down and forces our bodies to process sugar more slowly. Which we hope will prolong the creation of love handles.

Nature has already done the hard work for us. Pairing fiber with sugar is an evolutionary circumstance that has our best interests in mind. Without fiber, morbid obesity would be so prevalent that we would be forced to call it an epidemic.

Oh wait, that already happened

Current quick and easy meals, fast food and candy all contain zero fiber. The reasoning behind this is rather simple and makes economic sense. Fiber spoils. Foods that contain fiber cannot be kept fresh and tasty for long periods of time (which is why produce rots if not eaten quickly). This does not fit well in our processed food world of long shelf lives and massive global shipping methods.

What does this have to do with fruit juice?

I hope this is obvious... there is no fiber in fruit juice. Because fiber spoils, it cannot be found in plastic containers that stay "good" for months or even years. No fiber = lots of sugar = quick digestion = increased poundage.

To go even further into fruit juice production, the majority of fruit juice that we drink must be heated to high temperatures before it's bottled and sold.

We have to remember that fresh fruits are live plants. There are living bacteria and micro-organisms in every piece of fresh produce that we buy. Because our food is alive, it must then have the power to die. This is known as rotting, or the decomposition of live food.

In order for the juice of a live plant to be sold, marketed and stay fresh in a cooler, it must be heated up to kill all of the living organisms found in it. This is also known as pasteurization and the same process that milk must undergo in order to be sold on a massive scale.

Heating up juice also does another thing. It kills phyto-nutrients. These are nutrients that have just recently been discovered. They are the micro-organisms found in fresh, live food that contribute to the many benefits that these foods bring to humans.

So what is fruit juice?

I believe it to be a dumb downed version of the tasty part of whole fruit. Their is no fiber, no live nutrients, sure there are some vitamins but the benefits of consuming these do not out way the deadly amounts of sugar that are found in these drinks.

This now brings up the argument of vitamins and minerals found in fruit. Mothers around the world have joined hands in their fight to make their kids healthier by buying Cappri Sun juice boxes and Sunny Delight coolers that are fortified with vitamins.

Sure vitamins are needed in our bodies. So is water. You don't drink a 20 oz bottle of soda so that you can get the water out of it. If you want vitamins, eat the god damned fruit. Whole foods contain much more nutrients than their watered down (literally) offspring.

If we were to take the vitamin and mineral labels and propaganda off of fruit juice bottles, we would be stuck drinking a substance that has as much sugar as the leading sports drink or soda.

And to further cement my argument, what do vitamins and minerals do that are so beneficial? They sure as shit won't help you use the 80 grams of sugar you just consumed or help you deter that sugar from becoming belly jelly.

So in my non-expert opinion I recommend that we stop drinking bottled beverages. If you want some extra flavor, grab a lemon or a lime and squeeze the juice into your glass of water*.

*It may be clear to some that I am contradicting the entire point of this article by telling you use juice from fruit to sweeten your beverage. However, the amount of lemon juice that is present in a wedge of lemon is trivially small. You will be drinking 1/4 of an ounce rather than 20 ounces of pure sugar.

Final Thought

I may sound like a raving lunatic, but drinking soda, Gatorade and fruit juice are equally terrible for our health. Regardless of the so called "healthy" nutrients that they may contain.

Ryan