The article seems to point to these two as the main reasons why fruit juice is not as good as fruit:
1) when you make juice, you leave some of the most wholesome parts of the fruit behind. The skin on an apple, the seeds in raspberries and the membranes that hold orange segments together — they are all good for you. That is where most of the fiber, as well as many of the antioxidants, phytonutrients, vitamins and minerals are hiding. Fiber is good for your gut; it fills you up and slows the absorption of the sugars you eat, resulting in smaller spikes in insulin.
2) when you drink your calories instead of eating them, your brain doesn’t get the same “I’m full” signal that it does from solid food, even though you wind up consuming far more calories in the process.
If I put a whole apple with its skin or raspberry with its seed, or orange in a mixer-grinder, how or when exactly do I lose the skin, seeds or membranes during the process of making juice?
I've heard some claims that blending would break up the fruit in too small many pieces leading to sugars that absorb more quickly - but I've never seen anything to back these claims.
One difference is of course that when you eat the fruit, you chew it. This takes time and this may give some "food coming, hunger over" signal to the brain. Smoothies are so easy to drink that you might be getting way more fruits than you would normally eat.
What is the problem with rapid metabolism? Isn't that a good thing, so long as you have the varied nutrients to ensure the long tail of metabolism? E.g. A mixture of fructose, glucose, and more complex carbohydrates.
Not exactly, fructose metabolism does happen in the liver, turning fructose into DHAP and glyceraldehyde. These products are then further metabolized elsewhere in the body. The reason Fructose is used as a sugar substitute for people with blood sugar control problems is that due to the liver enzyme mediated metabolic pathway, you don't get the same instantaneous insulin spike as you do with glucose, which passes right through the liver and is metabolized directly in other tissues.
However, consuming too much fructose can lead to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease which is much like cirrhosis.
Pretty much tl;dr: all sugars are bad for you. They're better for you in fruits because they're trapped in plant fibers which slow down their absorption into the bloodstream allowing your body to spread out the load over time. Fiber also makes you feel full so you're less likely to go back for more.
This is, of course, complete nonsense, because humans are notoriously inefficient at the process you describe, de novo lipogenesis. You've been listening to that fructomaniac and dairy shill Robert Lustig, haven't you? Too bad!
I agree with your point 2, but I disagree on point 1.
> when you make juice, you leave some of the most wholesome parts of the fruit behind. The skin on an apple, the seeds in raspberries and the membranes that hold orange segments together
Since people mean one of those smoothie-like juice which you make with a blender when they talk about "healthy juice", I'll talk about that. It's actually the opposite for me. I never eat apple skin, and never really like raspberry seeds, also no grape seeds. But when I put them all into a juicer and make a juice, i drink all that.
Who drinks "squeezed juice" nowadays when they can make one with a juicer anyway?
If you want to put on fat, a diet rich in sugary drinks will do you wonders. Doesn't have to be expensive fruit juice either. Just drink lots of soft drinks every day, like, 3 litres or more, and you're setting yourself on a solid path to obesity.
If you want to put on muscle you'll need to do better than that.
Yep, then spend 2 years in pain from the tendonitis and ligament damage. Those tissue have a lot less blood flow than muscle so they can't keep up with stupid fast growth. Good form to prevent injury takes practice too, years of it! But I suppose if you are taking steroids you might heal faster in the short term.
Or just gain a pound a month and talk to a therapist about your body dysmorphia. A therapist is way cheaper than a surgeon. You'll also learn a lot about the limits of your body and learn a sustainable way to build strength and muscle.
Sugar doesn't cause obesity in humans. This is a trite and dull myth which is easily disproved by researching "de novo lipogenesis" in humans. It only takes a few minutes to do, and it will unburden you from the propaganda you regurgitate.
As one of the weird perpetually hungry, healthy appetite, fairly skinny person I've been told that peanut butter is among one of the better options for maximizing caloric intake. I should be eating nearly a cup of peanut butter per day it seems and the same calories would be in 8 smoothies or so.
I don't have proof for the following, but I think the article should qualify the type of juice being consumed. I regularly make juice from raw vegetables (ginger, cucumber, carrots, beets, celery, parsley, cilantro, yams, kale, chard, brussel sprouts etc) and I suspect that the sugar content is less than fruit juice. Personally I don't understand why a person would juice a fruit when you can eat it whole? Fruits are so stupidly delicious when eaten whole. In the end, everything in moderation...
When I used to juice I did a combo. I would eat some raw veggies while cutting them up for juicing. Then, I would eat a can of rinsed beans for protein(warmed with pepper).
I've tried to eat the same quantity of raw veggies as what I would juice; LOTS OF WORK.
Did I need that much juice? Was I getting the equiv or better of benefit from drinking juice as I would have eating entirely raw? IDK.
Within one generation, the new extra sugary varieties eclipsed old-fashioned sweet corn in the marketplace. Build a sweeter fruit or vegetable — by any means — and we will come. Today, most of the fresh corn in our supermarkets is extra-sweet. The kernels are either white, pale yellow, or a combination of the two. The sweetest varieties approach 40 percent sugar, bringing new meaning to the words “candy corn.” Only a handful of farmers in the United States specialize in multicolored Indian corn, and it is generally sold for seasonal decorations, not food.
We’ve reduced the nutrients and increased the sugar and starch content of hundreds of other fruits and vegetables. How can we begin to recoup the losses?
The sugar content in the fruits we eat today is the result of selective breeding, not GMO. Everything is bred to look delicious and have a high sugar content. Other qualities (such as taste) are sadly secondary. The Golden Delicious apple might be the best example.
Apples are an interesting case though, since they don't breed true at all. What happens is that lots of trees are allowed to grow from promising parent stock and then occasionally a new marketable apple is discovered. That tree is then cloned by grafting cuttings to established roots.
Fuji and Gala are quite sweet, but they also stay quite crisp a long time compared to older varieties, so it isn't just sugar content. Same with Granny Smith, which are popular because they are relatively tart (while still being fairly sweet for apples).
This is nothing new. Nearly all of the food we eat didn't exist in that form a few thousand years ago. "Selective breeding of both plants and animals has been practiced since early prehistory; key species such as wheat, rice, and dogs have been significantly different from their wild ancestors for millennia, and maize, which required especially large changes from teosinte, its wild form, was selectively bred in Mesoamerica." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding#History
GMO are a modern, accelerated way to achieve similar goals (or ones that were previously unattainable, such as pesticide resistance). The criticism is that adding genes from other plants may have unforeseeable, potentially undesirable side effects.
Interestingly and somewhat related conversation-wise, for people with diabetes sweet potatoes are a better choice than regular potatoes. A sweet potato (48) has a lower glycemic index and more fiber than regular white flesh potatoes (76).
Also interesting is a banana (52) should be eaten in moderation by anyone with diabetes, moderate index but less fiber? I have relatives with diabetes but needed to eat a banana for the potassium but all they were allowed was half a banana.
My skinny vegetable eating family on my mom's side have type 2 diabetes mainly the women of the family. My overweight, ex-smoking, little to no exercise family on my dad's side don't have type 2 diabetes except one.
And sugar doesn't cause diabetes like so many people seem to say on the Internet. You certainly crave sweets but sugar isn't the cause of type 2 diabetes.
Eating lots fiber for slowing sugar absorption and for feeding your good gut flora in your microbiome seems to be the key to many things in life and health.
If it is it's not for my mom's family. My grandmother had type 2 she died in the mid 1990s but she had type 2 since she was quite young not a kid but early on as an adult.
She lived on a farm, ate only vegetables except the occasional roast on Sunday, walked everywhere, very little sugar, ate locally grown food, no McDonalds or fast food at all in this isolated rural area in the 1940s even 1950s and 1960s, a healthy lifestyle didn't help.
One of my aunts (mother's side) died of pancreatic cancer. So it seems there is some genetic problem for pancreases (sp?) and women on my mom's side.
It is also frustrating to see the waste produced. The machines pulverize and discard lots of fruit that would otherwise be eaten. And the employees at smoothy places end up just pouring out whatever is left in their blender that doesn't fit in the cup so even the juice is wasted.
Smoothies and juice are different. If you are juicing something, you are straining out all of pulp and just ending up with a liquid. For a smoothie, the pulp is still in the drink, just pulverized.
There is a big difference in natural sugars contained in orange juice (and I'm talking about self made orange juice here, not these boxed juices you can buy at a store) than the white, processed, probably also containing high glycose syrup -sugar you find in a coke.
Neither has pulp, and the various sugars are free-floating. With no fiber to slow its absorption or to make you feel full. If you extracted the sugar it'd be white too.
Oranges contain glucose, fructose and sucrose.
The ratios of fructose and glucose are pretty much the same in both fruit and table sugar. Most fruits are 40 to 55 percent fructose (there’s some variation: 65 percent in apples and pears; 20 percent in cranberries), and table sugar (aka sucrose) is 50/50. [1] Your Coke is 42-55% fructose. [2]
Are there differences in vitamins and minerals? Yep. Fiber? Nope. Sugar? Nope. And the latter two are the biggest deal IMO.
Which is true for most statements in this thread. But for no good reason. These are all verifiable/falsifiable statements. There is an obvious objective truth but everyone is just cargo culting.
Question: which vitamins are in your juices? Are these vitamins you dont get enough in your normal diet or from the sun? How much of those do you actually need and does that mean you need 1 or 2 glasses a year?
All of your questions are actually unanswerable with certainty from the current state of nutritional science if you replace the word 'vitamin' with 'nutrient'.
Actual plant food or fruit is loaded with phytochemicals like polyphenols, carotenoids, flavonoids, etc. most of which we seem to be able to survive without, but at the same time exert real testable effects on our metabolism and immune systems.
But we don't know in detail what those effects are yet since there are literally tens of thousands of these compounds, and we've only just started to scratch the surface.
>All of your questions are actually unanswerable with certainty from the current state of nutritional science if you replace the word 'vitamin' with 'nutrient'.
Well, my questions were open ended in nature. "We don't know" would be a perfectly objective thing to say about a lot of stuff.
But even if there are very few 'confirmed' food facts (i.e. we dont know anything), that does not exclude the possibility that there are many 'rejected' food beliefs, since those statements are not open questions.
For example: many people belief that the more vitamins they eat the healthier they get. Every scientific experiment falsified this statement! That doesn't mean we know what makes people healthy, but we can still know that 'health is a proportional relationship to vitamin intake' is a bullshit belief not backed up by any experiment.
Science can and has rejected hypotheses, without the requirement that they replace it with anything. "We don't know" is perfectly acceptable. "Drink this high vitamin juice, it will make your life last longer" means the person uttering those words is either a fraud or an idiot.
Although going to the other extreme and equating truth with scientific verification is also not a helpful belief system.
There are plenty of things that are true that haven't been subject to rigorous, peer-reviewed scrutiny, because of the lack of practicality or the cost associated with it.
I realize this is an argument from authority, but it still holds sway with me: My cell bio professor (M.D./Ph.D from Harvard) used to emphasize often the fact that 90% of vitamins end up in your toilet. Not a crowd-pleasing thought, apparently.
Many vitamins function as catalysts rather than (or in addition to) functioning ad reaction participants, so even if 100% passed out without undergoing any chemical change, they could still be useful. The statement may not be inaccurate (I don't know what the real number is), but it's something of a non-sequitur in the discussion of whether vitamins are useful, or of whether vitamin supplements are useful.
Do you also avoid going to the bathroom and brushing teeth? These activities seem on the same level of time and effort and also can involve a lot of mess and stickiness.
Find me a faster and cleaner way of keeping my teeth clean or my bowels/bladder empty,and I'll be throwing cash at you faster than you know what to do with.
Eating an apple is messy? And if you don't have time to take a minute or so to eat and apple, you are way too busy and you need to change your life style.
Thank you, at least one other voice of reason in the comments. People just don't get it: a hamburger will spike insulin more than a whole can of soda. Fruit juice doesn't do that nearly as much. It is healthy, or at least, way healthier than the standard American diet.
Juicing fruits and vegetables will always result in a product where the sugar:fiber ratio is much higher than just consuming the food whole (or blended in a smoothie).
It's more a push to whole foods. Before they thought fat was the issue, so skim milk wass better than whole. But now we know that the satiating effect of fat means that whole milk is a better choice. Whole fruit, or smoothies/full pulp juices are better than the highly filtered juice.
It's pretty much always the same story with "food science" and has been for the last few decades ever since it came up as a "discipline". "Don't eat that, it's totally bad ... [literally 5 minutes later] ... what? You really ought to eat that, it's so healthy and reduces X and Y risks".
I have literally no idea why (a) this stuff is still perpetuated (b) people still take this seriosuly (c) in extension of (b), why it makes it somewhat regularly to the HN front page.
You're not talking about food science, you're talking about reporting. Dietary science is as valid a science as any other. It is the people who eagerly impose their dogma and zeal onto it in the same way they do subjects like sex, child-rearing, and religion that cause these inconsistencies.
But is it really, for instance the process of finding 'recommended' amounts of nutrients seems to be more or less as good as picking numbers out of a hat.
Although I'm a proponent of smoothies over juices, I disagree with this article's stance. The article argues that drinking juice leads to diabetes:
"She had always been overweight and had relatives with diabetes, but she believed she lived a healthy lifestyle. One of the habits that she identified as healthy was drinking freshly squeezed juice, which she saw as a virtuous food, every day. We asked her to stop drinking juice entirely. She left the office somewhat unconvinced, but after three months of cutting out the juice and making some changes to her diet, her diabetes was under control without the need for insulin."
Read between the lines: "she had always been overweight ... she made some changes to her diet". I highly doubt that cutting out juice, and juice alone, resulted in the patient living a healthier lifestyle. This is misleading. Unless the patient was downing a gallon of juice every day, eliminating juices—from whole fruit, not processed concentrated crap—would not solve her diabetes.
I'm not usually an authoritarian but the article seemed to provide a reasonable explanation why, and was written by three doctors working at a diabetes clinic, so "I don't think so" by anonymous internet dude is incredibly unconvincing.
Although you provided absolutely no reason why, I could provide a reason that seems perfectly reasonable to a normie, in that its well known to normies that relatively minor arithmetic mistakes by diabetics can result in a under or overdose coma related to insulin intake. Therefore if being a serving off for a diabetic can result in passing out, it seems very reasonable that junk food like juice products could be the difference between insulin and no insulin required for someone near the border. If force feeding a serving of stuff (in this case juice, but it could just as well be candy bars) would make my diabetic coworker really sick, it seems extremely reasonable that cutting out that serving from someone almost as sick, would make their doctor happier.
"Unless the patient was downing a gallon of juice every day"
A gallon of OJ contains about 2K calories. Two large 16 oz glasses per day, perhaps one with breakfast and one as a snack, adds up to a quart or 500 calories per day. If you multiply that out, that kind of intake is a gain or loss of fifty or so pounds per year, no laughing matter. A gallon of juice per day would be insane, gain a couple pounds per week.
> Unless the patient was downing a gallon of juice every day, eliminating juices—from whole fruit, not processed concentrated crap—would not solve her diabetes.
It's very possible that you're underestimating the effect that drinking 28g - 40g+ of liquid sugar, per serving, has on a diabetic's body.
If her body produces enough insulin to handle what she eats throughout the day, even if it isn't conventionally 'healthy', that is diabetes in remission. She may have a damaged pancreas that cannot produce as much insulin as a healthy person, but by virtue of not having constantly high blood sugar, she wouldn't be considered actively diabetic.
However, drinking 30-40g of sugar water requires a lot of insulin to reduce blood sugar.
It may just be those excessively sugar-rich drinks, that she drinks every day, are enough to overcome her body's natural ability to reduce her blood sugar to a safe amount.
Misleading title -- Vegetable juice isn't bad like fruit juice. We should be targeting "sugar" and not "fruit" or "juice." Sugar from fruit isn't as bad as processed sugar, but from my experiences, too much fruit has the same negative effects as eating candy or sugar laced cereal. Fruit in moderation seems to be ok.
Strange... the author claims milk is necessary for healthy growth in young children (which is ridiculous in its own right) and links to a study on fruit consumption.
I see a lot of people consuming things like juice, whole grain breads, breakfast cereals, sugar-filled nut butters and yogurts, etc. claiming they made "healthy" choices. Of course everything is fine in moderation but a heaping pile of sugar and simple carbs with no lean proteins, good fats or greens is far from healthy. The solution would seem to be better nutrition education so that more people recognize the fat free yogurt they just felt good about eating had 25g of added sugar per serving.
If it's research that claims fruit and veggies aren't healthy, I usually check to make sure the research wasn't paid for by either the big pharma or dairy lobbies.
I'm just about as suspicious of Big Hippy as I am of traditional food companies. As in why does this organic hippy bread taste like bready cake? Oh right the processed malt and honey. Worse used to be I ate rye bread before it was 'healthy'. Now most rye bread appears to be rye flavored bread with added sugars.
I've noticed real rye bread is sold under monickers like 'jewish rye' or 'chicago deli rye' - of course theres full seeded rye as well. But i agree, as more people try to eat healthier, the 'healthier' sections of the stores have started seeming a whole lot less healthy
Anyone who has ever pressed an orange knows that you need at least 4 or 5 of them to make a whole glass. The amount of sugar is astonishing. I personnally water down my grapefruit five folds...
I don't get. If you drink 500ml of juice your intake will be ~250-300 kcals. Then what? On a non-active day I burn ~3000 kcals a day. If you hit the gym you can easily burn an additional 700 kcals per hour. To be fit, you need to be active, and to be active you need energy.
one may naively think that drinking a glass of juice is 'healthier' than drinking a can of soda- when in fact the caloric values and sugar contents may be similar.
that is the important thing to take away from this article IMO.
This article primarily uses "juice" as a synonym for "commercial fruit juice." In addition, it's suggesting that it's not healthy/necessary to drink such commercial fruit juice daily.
If you're consuming smoothies which use the entire fruit/veggie that you'd normally eat, and you're not adding sweeteners, and you don't have any health issues that might be related to excess calories in your diet, then no need to attack the article, it's not addressing you.
But even then, note that the article still makes the point that people tend to over-consume when drinking their calories as opposed to chewing them.
As an example of one of my smoothies that I make at home that I don't think this article would take issue with: 100g frozen blueberries, 1 medium (126g) banana, 14g raw almonds, 100g spinach, 14g whey protein powder, 6g unsweetened cocoa powder, 10g fish oil, water. This is about 440 calories (18g fat, 56g carbs, 22g protein) according to My Fitness Pal.
Followed just a few sentences later by the commercial juice industry is happy to take advantage of this idea [that juice is healthy].
If you want to attack the article, you can pull out bits and pieces of it to do so, but it's written by diabetes specialists who are responding to misconceptions about juice that they see in their clinic every day. The vast majority of their clients are drinking commercial fruit juice, not carefully measured made at home smoothies.
I'd have appreciated reading this article years ago before I knew anything about nutrition and thought the smoothies I was drinking from Jamba Juice were good for me. They weren't and contributed to my being 40 lbs overweight at the time.
So if this article gets a few people to reconsider (or even think about) their conceptions about juice, then bravo.
a) It is a lot easier to consume much more juice than one would normally consider eating when juiced
b) just because you are consuming both the juice and the fiber still, does not make them equivalent, the post-consumption breakdown of fiber acts as a time release while pre-consumption fiber breakdown acts as a sugar dose.
I don't disagree with you, and I don't think I made an assertion to the contrary. My "if you're consuming smoothies..." statement is very carefully qualified and I intended it as a response to comments elsewhere in this thread trying to poke holes in the article, which I think on balance is delivering a good message.
Indeed, I took more issue with what you didn't say, than what you did. However I still disagree with the point about it being specific to "Commercial fruit juice", particularly when it comes to home squeezed citrus/orange juice.
The "I juice it myself so its healthy", mentality is easy to get carried away with, Cannot resist the bluecumber.
You probably already know this, but others reading may not:
Almonds have a glycemic index of zero.
They are a great addition to a fruit smoothie since, in addition to the fiber of the whole fruit, you knock down the (already low) glycemic index of the entire (liquid) meal.
I wonder if you've considered almond butter ? Most almond butters on store shelves contain sugar, which would disqualify them, but many grocery stores (including whole foods) allow you to grind your own in-store ... I find it much more convenient to add almond butter to smoothies rather than almonds themselves ...
Raw almonds are my favorite snack, just ahead of olives (which funny enough, for a long time I couldn't stand the taste of). Indeed, my problem is not eating too many!
I make my smoothies in a Vitamix. It has no trouble with the raw almonds or anything else I put in it. Aside: for a long time I didn't want to buy a Vitamix because of its cost and size. We started with a Magic Bullet which I found nothing but frustrating. It was constantly leaking. Eventually I gave it away and bought the Vitamix S30. It is a superior product, and it's a joy to use something which is both well designed and well built.
Olives are one of those things that seem like an acquired taste to me.
As a mid-20s western guy I hate the flavour, and it's not something I've ever seen young people eat. But older folks seem to love them. Maybe it's a rite of passage when growing up that eventually you come to like olives :)
So, this is a great question to which I had no answer (not about almonds specifically, but I've heard similar claims for e.g. hummus). I still don't have any answer, but I believe the answer lies in the realm of "glycemic index is a complex measure that doesn't exactly match any simple model for what it would be". For instance, fructose has a pretty low glycemic index (about the same as kidney beans, actually), and it's literally sugar.
From wikipedia, "glycaemic index (GI) is a number associated with a particular type of food that indicates the food's effect on a person's blood glucose."
Because glucose is a sugar, you seem to be confusing it with fructose (another sugar, 5-carbon vs 6-carbon). The glycaemic index specifically looks at one specific sugar -> glucose. Sugars aren't intrinsically bad, but often times they are removed from their origins which contain other constituents that help our bodies digest them (all sugar, no pulp).
I haven't exactly done this exactly, but this smoothie on its own holds me over for easily 4 hours.
Last year I was doing a partial fast twice a week where I'd limit myself to 600 calories on those days. I'd have this smoothie mid-morning along with black coffee and water. In the evening, I'd have a large salad of 150 calories. (It's amazing how large a salad you can make on a budget of 150 calories if you get creative. For example, I'd use kimchi in place of salad dressing. Boy did my family hate me.) Anyway, I was definitely hungry by the evening, but I would estimate no more so than if I'd had it as a meal. One thing I didn't try was splitting the smoothie in two and consuming it as breakfast and lunch.
Out of curiosity, what was the reason for the partial fast? And how did it affect you?
+1 on the giant salad for minimal calories! If you don't use traditional, calorie packed dressings you can really fill up on a small amount of calories since lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers are such low calorie foods.
Fast was just an experiment. A colleague had done it for a year and I was curious. I lost about 8 lbs over 4 months. Other than that, uncertain of health effects.
The idea for it and some health claims are in a BBC documentary you can find online: "Eat Fast and Live Longer."
I agree that they seem to be covering "commercial fruit juice." But it's an interesting question as to how chewing fruit in its natural form compares to blending it. The second question would be: why make juice at all, then? I guess the answer there is as a vehicle for the fish oil, protein powder, etc. I'm sure there's a bit of psychology at play, too: I think our drink concoctions appeal to the alchemist in each of us.
> If you're consuming smoothies which use the entire fruit/veggie that you'd normally eat, and you're not adding sweeteners, and you don't have any health issues that might be related to excess calories in your diet, then no need to attack the article, it's not addressing you.
Be aware that any public health organisation trying to get people to eat more fruit and vegetables will also tell people not to drink smoothies. So, this article is in fact aimed at people blending their fruit and veg.
(There's a discussion to be had about the evidence base, but that's true of most of the posts in this thread).
Here's the English version, but this is common across countries:
> A: Unsweetened 100% fruit juice, vegetable juice and smoothies can only ever count as a maximum of one portion of your 5 A Day.
> For example, if you have two glasses of fruit juice and a smoothie in one day, that still only counts as one portion.
> Your combined total of drinks from fruit juice, vegetable juice and smoothies should not be more than 150ml a day – which is a small glass.
> For example, if you have 150ml of orange juice and 150ml smoothie in one day, you'll have exceeded the recommendation by 150ml.
> When fruit is blended or juiced, it releases the sugars which increases the risk of tooth decay so it's best to drink fruit juice or smoothies at mealtimes.
> 150ml fruit juice, vegetable juice or smoothie. Limit the amount you drink to a combined total of 150ml a day. Crushing fruit and vegetables into juice and smoothies releases the sugars contained in the fruit and vegetables, which can cause damage to teeth.
> Unsweetened 100% fruit juice, vegetable juice and smoothies can only ever count as a maximum of one portion of your 5 A Day.
> For example, if you have two glasses of fruit juice and a smoothie in one day, that still only counts as one portion.
> Smoothies include any drink made up of any combination of fruit/vegetable juice, puree or all the edible pulped fruit or vegetable.
> Your combined total of drinks from fruit juice, vegetable juice and smoothies should not be more than 150ml a day – which is a small glass.
> For example, if you have 150ml of orange juice and 150ml smoothie in one day, you'll have exceeded the recommendation by 150ml.
> When fruit is blended or juiced, it releases the sugars which increases the risk of tooth decay so it's best to drink fruit juice or smoothies at mealtimes.
> Whole fruits are less likely to cause tooth decay because the sugars are contained within the structure of the fruit.
> Watch out for drinks that say "juice drink" on the pack as they are unlikely to count towards your 5 A Day and can be high in sugar.
Smoothies aren't as good as eating the whole fruit! Fruit is better than juice because it has fiber. The insoluble fiber becomes something like a mesh inside the intestine and prevents food from getting digested too soon. When you put the fruit through the blender, the insoluble fiber is ripped apart and you lose a lot of its benefit. Dr. Lustig, an endocrinologist at UCSF, talks about this in one of his lectures. It's on YouTube, but I can't remember exactly which lecture.
I had not heard this idea of crushing fiber with a blender, but it's reasonable. I wonder if just using a spatula to mix without ripping the fruit would be better? I guess you couldn't drink it.
People critique this piece as inaccurate but should instead should realize the way to attract attention is to get you first to read it. It then gets people talking. If you really get his point, he meant drinking juice that filters out the pulp isn't as good as filtered, and maybe harmful given that example he noted.
Most juice is not even "juice". Some of it is concentrated juice which is then reconstituted sometimes with added sugar or fructose. Some of it is only partially juice, the rest being just water, sugar, and flavor. Some of it is freeze dried and then reflavored because freeze drying destroys its flavor, i.e. not from concentrate juice. Some of it is pasteurized which destroys the vitamin content. It is not just missing the pulp, it's also missing all the fiber that fruit has which is good for your digestive system and also keeps the glycemic load from spiking as it digests slowly. There is really nothing good about the concept of juice or juicing. Just eat fruits and vegetables like normal primates do.
I eat a lot of fruit right now. About 4 oranges and 1-2 bananas a day. I'm actually worried that my sugar consumption is too high even from these natural sources. Anyone have some insight?
(I am not a physician and this is not medical advice.)
Recommended maximum intake of sugars per day: 37.5g (men) / 25g (women)
Avg. sugars per banana: 14g
Avg. sugars per orange: 9g
4 x 9g + (1 or 2) x 14g = 50-64g actual sugar intake per day from the fruits listed.
That being said, each person's metabolism behaves differently so there's no specific action that you necessarily need to take. You may wish to ask your physician do the appropriate blood tests to check for pre-diabetes at every annual physical.
It is technically for added sugars. However, this individual is consuming an unusually high amount of fruit, IMO, and sugar is sugar, no matter its source. One can't reasonably claim, for example, that drinking a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice isn't a source of sugar even if no additional sugar was explicitly mixed in.
As I said, the blood tests will show whether or not there's actually a problem with his/her sugar intake.
Thanks for the input! Hopefully this high intake is balanced by the fact that I'm training for a triathlon and marathon, but I'm due for a blood test anyways so I will have a medical facility check me out. :)
Concept of an ingredient being healthy does not exist in science. Is diet filled with fruits and vegetables healthy? Of course. Starchy foods with high nutrients per calories ratio have super high unattainable overdose amount. That's why they are safe.
Eating 3000 kcal of bananas metabolises quite differently than 3000 kcal of glucose sugar.
Fruit is certainly nutritious. You are healthy. If you eat too much fruit, you may not be healthy. In moderation, you will still probably be healthy (and happy; fruit is delicious).
It's one of those assumptions we make that everyone knows is true but do we have any real evidence that fruit consumed in quantities that where it have an real impact on our caloric intake provide "health benefits".
Just looking at the nutrition label, I doubt anyone would think that. An apple is basically sugar plus a bit of fiber. A chocolate bar is probably healthier (just for balancing out the mix with fat and protein) except for the fact that people rarely binge on apples.
> Finally, when you drink your calories instead of eating them, your brain doesn’t get the same “I’m full” signal that it does from solid food, even though you wind up consuming far more calories in the process. […] on the day they ate the apple, they ate fewer calories at the meal than if they consumed the same number of calories from applesauce or apple juice. The chewing really counts.
This article is largely non-sense and not scientific at all. Here we go again with the fruit = sugar = evil, when I have yet to see an overweight person that eats too much fruit.
There are communities of people called fruitarians that only eat raw fruit and vegetables and are largely very healthy. And yes.. they juice.
The problem with diabetes is that the cells of the body have too much saturated fat which blocks in the insulin receptors.
Bezo's Washington Post is an absolutely worthless rag. I have no idea why this article is here. Should we expect Cosmopolitan's Brazilian Waxing Tips here soon?
Forgive me, but saying "enzymes", "jumpstart", and "catalyst" of unnamed body functions triggers my bullshit filter. Could you elaborate on what body functions need jumpstarting or provide a link?
Nonsense. I drink a liter of freshly squeezed juice every morning. Mind you, not store bought juice; fresh, organic fruit juiced on the spot. I've done this for several years and in the best health of my life. I balance the juice with a whole foods, plant based diet.
The article doesn't actually cite a reason why fruit juice is bad. They just keep repeating diabetes and obesity are a problem, but neither is caused by sugar consumption. Even diabetes.org doesn't list sugar as a causal factor. It simply is a myth.
Fun fact: protein and fats are essential to your diet. Carbohydrates are optional. In any case, I'm a runner and it is just one of my sources of protein, typically after exercise.
Another fun fact, protein and fats are already in whole plant foods; you don't need to literally breastfeed off another animal as a human adult. Oh, and glucose is the only power source for the brain, even fat and protein gets broken down into what you can easily get from "carbs".
Another fun fact, examine.com is a biased bs source. Take a look at nutritionfacts.org sometime.
We're a species of primate where evolution pushed a lot of our innards to optimize to eat fruit.
We've got the binocular vision and dexterity to climb trees and identify and harvest and prep fruits. Our livers are tolerant of relatively ridiculous intake levels of fructose and ethanol (by non-frugivore standards). Our ancestors were so successful at exploiting fruit as a food source that unlike non-frugivores (hand wavy mostly) our bodies don't try to generate our own vitamin-C nor do we try to store it, we just pee it out because surely we'll get a meal of vit-C fruit tomorrow, which leads to scurvy in humans that don't get fruits or supplemental sources. Non-frugivores are somewhat more frugal (ugh) with bodily vitamin C stores. Our digestive tract is long enough to digest fruits reasonably effectively but not long enough for cellulose sources (like how cows can graze), much longer than we need to solely eat meat. Our taste receptors are calibrated to sugary fruit juice which in 21st century makes us really fat when provided with unlimited sources of HFCS.
Pre-historic fruit consumption is pretty much baked into the cake.
Our ancestors were pretty much frugivores, although its a spectrum, there's not a binary yes/no like adult lactose metabolism for example. So being a spectrum you can make a strong argument for "omnivore with a heavy addition of fruit" or similar wishy washyness. I'm trying and failing to think of a class of omnivore that doesn't eat fruit, solely does bbq chicken breast on caesars salad type of thing... There's probably some class of omnivore that doesn't eat fruit, but maybe not and its a reasonable argument that the concept of omnivore is not really meat+plant but more like meat+fruit. There are likely scavengers that can live off meat and veg-only although not preferentially...
It shows basic scientific curiosity. If you can say something substantial in reply, say so. Otherwise, putting people down for asking questions is rude.
We've successfully convinced our two-year-old that unsweetened, carbonated water is "juice". She frequently goes to restaurants and is very excited to get "juice" from the bar, and considers it a special treat. Eventually this will surely fail when her friends can explain reality. But until then it's working great to avoid massive loads of sugar in her early years.
Not to hyperbolize like the other commentor, but I was told harmless little lies like that as a child myself. You eventually learn otherwise, but not before embarrassing yourself in front of your peers and feeling betrayed.
Different children will react differently, of course.
Possibly slightly different, but my dad used to amuse himself by trying to convince me of whatever nonsense poped into his head at that moment. My older siblings, who had had the same treatment earlier, joined in and would verify anything he would say. Overall I found it quite harmless, and it did instil a healthy skepticism of whatever people said.
If she is getting fooled that carbonated water is 'juice', then I'm assuming she doesn't know what juice actually is and therefore has no association of juice = sugar drink. So why the need to trick your daughter?
Couldn't you have just called it 'fizzy water', or if water is associated with 'boring', call it 'fizzy drink'. She'd still get it from the bar and have the excitement of that.
My parents did this for me for quite a long time: dried papaya was sweets, and it was a special event if little bits of dried papaya appeared in muesli.
Lots of parents think dried fruit are a healthy sweet treat, and in the UK there's a big market for raisins or dried fruit bars or dried fruit sheet (Fruit rollups) aimed at children.
All of these are terrible for teeth because they're high in sugar and they're sticky, and there's guidance to avoid these things.
Decayed teeth are painful and need treatment; that treatment carries some risk.
Tooth extraction is the leading cause of child hospitalisation in the UK.
A few of those children will have problems such as hypomineralisation, but many extractions are entirely preventable with better diet (milk or water to drink, not fruit juice or sugar sweetened tea or soda, and especially not in a bottle or sippy cup) and better oral hygiene.
In the states, even the majority of plain, "adult-marketed" dried fruits have oil and sugar added, which is terrible IMO. I've always assumed oil is added to allow for higher temps without burning, and therefore quicker dry times -- just a theory. A dehydrator has been on my want-list for a little while now because of the ubiquity of added sugar and oil.
My wife has been making cinnamon apple slices with our dehydrator, and our 2-year-old son loves them (on the occasions where I don't eat an entire bag before he gets to them). They're a much better way than juice to get a snack in, and while they still contain the same sugars, they also have all the fibre as well.
We soak them in lemon juice to keep them from turning brown while dehydrating, but since he loves lemon juice (and will drink it out of the bottle if we leave the fridge unlocked), this is a pretty huge selling point for him.
Dental decay is painful. Tooth extraction is a leading cause of hospitalisation of children (it's the leading cause in the UK), and this surgery carries a risk of death.
It's cruel to expose children to pain and harm, especially when it's normally completely avoidable.
What we do is mix juices with equal amounts of water... the 50/50 mix still taste great (better in my opinion) and it isn't as bad for you. As a small bonus, it makes it slightly cheaper..
There is a deeper problem here. Your child is satisfied with less when the perceived (or socially established) value is larger. It may be better to teach your child to estimate the value of things on their own, rather than rely on others.
Further down the road, you presumably don't want to have a kid that needs to wear expensive clothes to school to feel accepted. And when they are that age, you can't convince them that less expensive clothing is expensive too.
How did your daughter get interested in (the concept of) juice? Our two-year-old has never really expressed an interest, but then we don't keep juice at home and he doesn't get it elsewhere either. He's curious about things we drink that he doesn't get (I drank a bottle of root beer in front of him the other day, he was very confused and curious), but if we put milk in front of him he's got the thing he wants most of all and ignores our drinks entirely.
You are doing her a massive favour for the rest of her life, its easy to underestimate the damage sugar does and after all we want our kids to be happy and sugary treats seem to make them happy
A large distinction needs to be made between juice you drink within an hour of the fruit being crushed, versus drinking stuff a few months later, stuff that's been preserved via various bizarre tricks to keep it safe from oxygen.
Without intervention, the oxygen in the air will break down most of the healthy stuff within an hour or two. If you juice carrots and drink it immediately, there are benefits.
What you see in the USA, with the stuff called "orange juice" often makes health claims that should be disallowed. "All natural" and "contains Vitamin C" are highly misleading, considering the actual process that the juice is put through, so it can survive for months on the shelf in some store.
They're not telling you to run and eat HFC products. They're just saying that eating a whole fruit is healthier than just the juice. And that's something nutritionists have been saying for the last decade or more.
My 95 year old (!) yoga teacher used to say, "eat liquid, drink solid" in his native tongue. It meant that when you ingest something a liquid like soup or juice, let it not rush down the throat; it should spend a nice chunk of time in the mouth, like a solid. In other words, "eat it".
Likewise, when you have something solid, chew it until it "liquefies".
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] thread1) when you make juice, you leave some of the most wholesome parts of the fruit behind. The skin on an apple, the seeds in raspberries and the membranes that hold orange segments together — they are all good for you. That is where most of the fiber, as well as many of the antioxidants, phytonutrients, vitamins and minerals are hiding. Fiber is good for your gut; it fills you up and slows the absorption of the sugars you eat, resulting in smaller spikes in insulin.
2) when you drink your calories instead of eating them, your brain doesn’t get the same “I’m full” signal that it does from solid food, even though you wind up consuming far more calories in the process.
[edit: clarified text is quoted from the article]
One difference is of course that when you eat the fruit, you chew it. This takes time and this may give some "food coming, hunger over" signal to the brain. Smoothies are so easy to drink that you might be getting way more fruits than you would normally eat.
What you're doing is not "freshly squeezed".
Not a native English speaker, so trying to understand the difference.
However, consuming too much fructose can lead to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease which is much like cirrhosis.
Pretty much tl;dr: all sugars are bad for you. They're better for you in fruits because they're trapped in plant fibers which slow down their absorption into the bloodstream allowing your body to spread out the load over time. Fiber also makes you feel full so you're less likely to go back for more.
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose
> when you make juice, you leave some of the most wholesome parts of the fruit behind. The skin on an apple, the seeds in raspberries and the membranes that hold orange segments together
Since people mean one of those smoothie-like juice which you make with a blender when they talk about "healthy juice", I'll talk about that. It's actually the opposite for me. I never eat apple skin, and never really like raspberry seeds, also no grape seeds. But when I put them all into a juicer and make a juice, i drink all that.
Who drinks "squeezed juice" nowadays when they can make one with a juicer anyway?
> Who drinks "squeezed juice" nowadays when they can make one with a juicer anyway?
Lots of people. And to clarify, a juicer refers to a device that leaves all the fiber behind, as opposed to smoothies from a blender.
Does that mean if I'm underweight, I should drink a lot of it?
If you want to put on muscle you'll need to do better than that.
Or just gain a pound a month and talk to a therapist about your body dysmorphia. A therapist is way cheaper than a surgeon. You'll also learn a lot about the limits of your body and learn a sustainable way to build strength and muscle.
If you're underweight, you should eat food.
Edit: yeah. That's how dietary references are done lots of non-US places. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calories+in+100g+of+su...
I feel the same way about veggies. Raw veggies are awesome.
I've tried to eat the same quantity of raw veggies as what I would juice; LOTS OF WORK.
Did I need that much juice? Was I getting the equiv or better of benefit from drinking juice as I would have eating entirely raw? IDK.
However, fruits contain acids that can be helpful in moderation for fighting free radicals etc.
Also, these days sugar is added to everything, including genetically modified plants, which is pretty much every plant you buy in the supermarket.
Citation needed
Corn is in many things: http://fooderyboston.com/corn-is-everywhere/
Corn has tons of added sugar through genetic tinkering, as well as many other plants: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breedin...
Within one generation, the new extra sugary varieties eclipsed old-fashioned sweet corn in the marketplace. Build a sweeter fruit or vegetable — by any means — and we will come. Today, most of the fresh corn in our supermarkets is extra-sweet. The kernels are either white, pale yellow, or a combination of the two. The sweetest varieties approach 40 percent sugar, bringing new meaning to the words “candy corn.” Only a handful of farmers in the United States specialize in multicolored Indian corn, and it is generally sold for seasonal decorations, not food.
We’ve reduced the nutrients and increased the sugar and starch content of hundreds of other fruits and vegetables. How can we begin to recoup the losses?
Yeah, i'm actually surprised about this. Im not in the US, so i don't know how well it all compares with the supermarket here.
As for rethinking my downvote. It seems i can't un-downvote you. Maybe there is a time-limit?
Fuji and Gala are quite sweet, but they also stay quite crisp a long time compared to older varieties, so it isn't just sugar content. Same with Granny Smith, which are popular because they are relatively tart (while still being fairly sweet for apples).
In fact it is exactly this sense that is used when people say "nearly everything is GMO these days".
https://www.cagw.org/media/wastewatcher/almost-everything-ge...
GMO are a modern, accelerated way to achieve similar goals (or ones that were previously unattainable, such as pesticide resistance). The criticism is that adding genes from other plants may have unforeseeable, potentially undesirable side effects.
Sugar beets account for a significant chunk of sugar production but not a majority.
Also, I screwed up when I said table sugar. I meant commercial sugar used in things. Table sugar still comes from sugar plants.
Also interesting is a banana (52) should be eaten in moderation by anyone with diabetes, moderate index but less fiber? I have relatives with diabetes but needed to eat a banana for the potassium but all they were allowed was half a banana.
My skinny vegetable eating family on my mom's side have type 2 diabetes mainly the women of the family. My overweight, ex-smoking, little to no exercise family on my dad's side don't have type 2 diabetes except one.
And sugar doesn't cause diabetes like so many people seem to say on the Internet. You certainly crave sweets but sugar isn't the cause of type 2 diabetes.
Eating lots fiber for slowing sugar absorption and for feeding your good gut flora in your microbiome seems to be the key to many things in life and health.
She lived on a farm, ate only vegetables except the occasional roast on Sunday, walked everywhere, very little sugar, ate locally grown food, no McDonalds or fast food at all in this isolated rural area in the 1940s even 1950s and 1960s, a healthy lifestyle didn't help.
One of my aunts (mother's side) died of pancreatic cancer. So it seems there is some genetic problem for pancreases (sp?) and women on my mom's side.
When people talk about trying to lose weight by eating more fruit, you can guess the outcome of how well they do.
Edit: I agree that the waste is ridiculous
No, that's not part of the definition of juicing, and juicing oranges, especially, without straining out all the pulp is common.
Oranges contain glucose, fructose and sucrose.
The ratios of fructose and glucose are pretty much the same in both fruit and table sugar. Most fruits are 40 to 55 percent fructose (there’s some variation: 65 percent in apples and pears; 20 percent in cranberries), and table sugar (aka sucrose) is 50/50. [1] Your Coke is 42-55% fructose. [2]
Are there differences in vitamins and minerals? Yep. Fiber? Nope. Sugar? Nope. And the latter two are the biggest deal IMO.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/29/fruit-sugar-versus-...
[2] https://examine.com/nutrition/is-hfcs-high-fructose-corn-syr...
Which is true for most statements in this thread. But for no good reason. These are all verifiable/falsifiable statements. There is an obvious objective truth but everyone is just cargo culting.
Question: which vitamins are in your juices? Are these vitamins you dont get enough in your normal diet or from the sun? How much of those do you actually need and does that mean you need 1 or 2 glasses a year?
Actual plant food or fruit is loaded with phytochemicals like polyphenols, carotenoids, flavonoids, etc. most of which we seem to be able to survive without, but at the same time exert real testable effects on our metabolism and immune systems.
But we don't know in detail what those effects are yet since there are literally tens of thousands of these compounds, and we've only just started to scratch the surface.
Well, my questions were open ended in nature. "We don't know" would be a perfectly objective thing to say about a lot of stuff.
But even if there are very few 'confirmed' food facts (i.e. we dont know anything), that does not exclude the possibility that there are many 'rejected' food beliefs, since those statements are not open questions.
For example: many people belief that the more vitamins they eat the healthier they get. Every scientific experiment falsified this statement! That doesn't mean we know what makes people healthy, but we can still know that 'health is a proportional relationship to vitamin intake' is a bullshit belief not backed up by any experiment.
Science can and has rejected hypotheses, without the requirement that they replace it with anything. "We don't know" is perfectly acceptable. "Drink this high vitamin juice, it will make your life last longer" means the person uttering those words is either a fraud or an idiot.
There are plenty of things that are true that haven't been subject to rigorous, peer-reviewed scrutiny, because of the lack of practicality or the cost associated with it.
On the other extreme I think something like Soylent is downright terrible.
Personally I avoid both for my kids. Juice is sugar water, and my kids are not calves, so they have no need for baby cow food.
Correct human babies past say 1 don't need 10 more years of cow milk to be healthy or have strong bones.
Youngest is lactose intolerant so that makes it a bit easier.
Can do almond milk but she doesn't love it.
I have literally no idea why (a) this stuff is still perpetuated (b) people still take this seriosuly (c) in extension of (b), why it makes it somewhat regularly to the HN front page.
It's junk science in it's finest form.
"She had always been overweight and had relatives with diabetes, but she believed she lived a healthy lifestyle. One of the habits that she identified as healthy was drinking freshly squeezed juice, which she saw as a virtuous food, every day. We asked her to stop drinking juice entirely. She left the office somewhat unconvinced, but after three months of cutting out the juice and making some changes to her diet, her diabetes was under control without the need for insulin."
Read between the lines: "she had always been overweight ... she made some changes to her diet". I highly doubt that cutting out juice, and juice alone, resulted in the patient living a healthier lifestyle. This is misleading. Unless the patient was downing a gallon of juice every day, eliminating juices—from whole fruit, not processed concentrated crap—would not solve her diabetes.
Milk seems to be associated with various health issues too, and that it's important for children's growth is a dubious claim.
But it's clear that drinking large quantities of liquids with a high sugar content (including milk) is not good for you.
I'm not usually an authoritarian but the article seemed to provide a reasonable explanation why, and was written by three doctors working at a diabetes clinic, so "I don't think so" by anonymous internet dude is incredibly unconvincing.
Although you provided absolutely no reason why, I could provide a reason that seems perfectly reasonable to a normie, in that its well known to normies that relatively minor arithmetic mistakes by diabetics can result in a under or overdose coma related to insulin intake. Therefore if being a serving off for a diabetic can result in passing out, it seems very reasonable that junk food like juice products could be the difference between insulin and no insulin required for someone near the border. If force feeding a serving of stuff (in this case juice, but it could just as well be candy bars) would make my diabetic coworker really sick, it seems extremely reasonable that cutting out that serving from someone almost as sick, would make their doctor happier.
"Unless the patient was downing a gallon of juice every day"
A gallon of OJ contains about 2K calories. Two large 16 oz glasses per day, perhaps one with breakfast and one as a snack, adds up to a quart or 500 calories per day. If you multiply that out, that kind of intake is a gain or loss of fifty or so pounds per year, no laughing matter. A gallon of juice per day would be insane, gain a couple pounds per week.
It's very possible that you're underestimating the effect that drinking 28g - 40g+ of liquid sugar, per serving, has on a diabetic's body.
If her body produces enough insulin to handle what she eats throughout the day, even if it isn't conventionally 'healthy', that is diabetes in remission. She may have a damaged pancreas that cannot produce as much insulin as a healthy person, but by virtue of not having constantly high blood sugar, she wouldn't be considered actively diabetic.
However, drinking 30-40g of sugar water requires a lot of insulin to reduce blood sugar.
It may just be those excessively sugar-rich drinks, that she drinks every day, are enough to overcome her body's natural ability to reduce her blood sugar to a safe amount.
If it's research that claims fruit and veggies aren't healthy, I usually check to make sure the research wasn't paid for by either the big pharma or dairy lobbies.
that is the important thing to take away from this article IMO.
Edit: from the same goddamn newspaper: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/no-food-is-hea...
If you're consuming smoothies which use the entire fruit/veggie that you'd normally eat, and you're not adding sweeteners, and you don't have any health issues that might be related to excess calories in your diet, then no need to attack the article, it's not addressing you.
But even then, note that the article still makes the point that people tend to over-consume when drinking their calories as opposed to chewing them.
As an example of one of my smoothies that I make at home that I don't think this article would take issue with: 100g frozen blueberries, 1 medium (126g) banana, 14g raw almonds, 100g spinach, 14g whey protein powder, 6g unsweetened cocoa powder, 10g fish oil, water. This is about 440 calories (18g fat, 56g carbs, 22g protein) according to My Fitness Pal.
If you want to attack the article, you can pull out bits and pieces of it to do so, but it's written by diabetes specialists who are responding to misconceptions about juice that they see in their clinic every day. The vast majority of their clients are drinking commercial fruit juice, not carefully measured made at home smoothies.
I'd have appreciated reading this article years ago before I knew anything about nutrition and thought the smoothies I was drinking from Jamba Juice were good for me. They weren't and contributed to my being 40 lbs overweight at the time.
So if this article gets a few people to reconsider (or even think about) their conceptions about juice, then bravo.
Blended fruit retains everything that makes fruit good for you, including the fiber and pulp.
Juice doesn't, effectively making it sugar water with some nutrition.
b) just because you are consuming both the juice and the fiber still, does not make them equivalent, the post-consumption breakdown of fiber acts as a time release while pre-consumption fiber breakdown acts as a sugar dose.
The "I juice it myself so its healthy", mentality is easy to get carried away with, Cannot resist the bluecumber.
You probably already know this, but others reading may not:
Almonds have a glycemic index of zero.
They are a great addition to a fruit smoothie since, in addition to the fiber of the whole fruit, you knock down the (already low) glycemic index of the entire (liquid) meal.
I wonder if you've considered almond butter ? Most almond butters on store shelves contain sugar, which would disqualify them, but many grocery stores (including whole foods) allow you to grind your own in-store ... I find it much more convenient to add almond butter to smoothies rather than almonds themselves ...
I make my smoothies in a Vitamix. It has no trouble with the raw almonds or anything else I put in it. Aside: for a long time I didn't want to buy a Vitamix because of its cost and size. We started with a Magic Bullet which I found nothing but frustrating. It was constantly leaking. Eventually I gave it away and bought the Vitamix S30. It is a superior product, and it's a joy to use something which is both well designed and well built.
As a mid-20s western guy I hate the flavour, and it's not something I've ever seen young people eat. But older folks seem to love them. Maybe it's a rite of passage when growing up that eventually you come to like olives :)
Do you have a reputable source for this? Almonds contain carbohydrate, so surely they have some effect of blood glucose?
http://www.vitalhealthzone.com/nutrition/nutrition-questions...
http://www.vitalhealthzone.com/nutrition/nutrition-questions...
Because glucose is a sugar, you seem to be confusing it with fructose (another sugar, 5-carbon vs 6-carbon). The glycaemic index specifically looks at one specific sugar -> glucose. Sugars aren't intrinsically bad, but often times they are removed from their origins which contain other constituents that help our bodies digest them (all sugar, no pulp).
Last year I was doing a partial fast twice a week where I'd limit myself to 600 calories on those days. I'd have this smoothie mid-morning along with black coffee and water. In the evening, I'd have a large salad of 150 calories. (It's amazing how large a salad you can make on a budget of 150 calories if you get creative. For example, I'd use kimchi in place of salad dressing. Boy did my family hate me.) Anyway, I was definitely hungry by the evening, but I would estimate no more so than if I'd had it as a meal. One thing I didn't try was splitting the smoothie in two and consuming it as breakfast and lunch.
+1 on the giant salad for minimal calories! If you don't use traditional, calorie packed dressings you can really fill up on a small amount of calories since lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers are such low calorie foods.
The idea for it and some health claims are in a BBC documentary you can find online: "Eat Fast and Live Longer."
Whaaaaaaaaaaa? That's brilliant! Definitely going to try this.
Be aware that any public health organisation trying to get people to eat more fruit and vegetables will also tell people not to drink smoothies. So, this article is in fact aimed at people blending their fruit and veg.
(There's a discussion to be had about the evidence base, but that's true of most of the posts in this thread).
Here's the English version, but this is common across countries:
http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/5ADAY/Pages/FAQs.aspx#juices
> A: Unsweetened 100% fruit juice, vegetable juice and smoothies can only ever count as a maximum of one portion of your 5 A Day.
> For example, if you have two glasses of fruit juice and a smoothie in one day, that still only counts as one portion.
> Your combined total of drinks from fruit juice, vegetable juice and smoothies should not be more than 150ml a day – which is a small glass.
> For example, if you have 150ml of orange juice and 150ml smoothie in one day, you'll have exceeded the recommendation by 150ml.
> When fruit is blended or juiced, it releases the sugars which increases the risk of tooth decay so it's best to drink fruit juice or smoothies at mealtimes.
http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/5ADAY/Pages/Whatcounts.aspx
> Some portions only count once in a day:
> 150ml fruit juice, vegetable juice or smoothie. Limit the amount you drink to a combined total of 150ml a day. Crushing fruit and vegetables into juice and smoothies releases the sugars contained in the fruit and vegetables, which can cause damage to teeth.
http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/5ADAY/Pages/Portionsizes.aspx
> Unsweetened 100% fruit juice, vegetable juice and smoothies can only ever count as a maximum of one portion of your 5 A Day.
> For example, if you have two glasses of fruit juice and a smoothie in one day, that still only counts as one portion.
> Smoothies include any drink made up of any combination of fruit/vegetable juice, puree or all the edible pulped fruit or vegetable.
> Your combined total of drinks from fruit juice, vegetable juice and smoothies should not be more than 150ml a day – which is a small glass.
> For example, if you have 150ml of orange juice and 150ml smoothie in one day, you'll have exceeded the recommendation by 150ml.
> When fruit is blended or juiced, it releases the sugars which increases the risk of tooth decay so it's best to drink fruit juice or smoothies at mealtimes.
> Whole fruits are less likely to cause tooth decay because the sugars are contained within the structure of the fruit.
> Watch out for drinks that say "juice drink" on the pack as they are unlikely to count towards your 5 A Day and can be high in sugar.
fresh squeezed juice. They point out that the juice w/o the fiber IS the problem. So that includes smoothies with any fruit juice.
"Dirty Little Secret: Orange Juice Is Artificially Flavored to Taste Like Oranges"
http://gizmodo.com/5825909/orange-juice-is-artificially-flav...
Recommended maximum intake of sugars per day: 37.5g (men) / 25g (women)
Avg. sugars per banana: 14g Avg. sugars per orange: 9g
4 x 9g + (1 or 2) x 14g = 50-64g actual sugar intake per day from the fruits listed.
That being said, each person's metabolism behaves differently so there's no specific action that you necessarily need to take. You may wish to ask your physician do the appropriate blood tests to check for pre-diabetes at every annual physical.
http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/prediabetes/di...
As I said, the blood tests will show whether or not there's actually a problem with his/her sugar intake.
Eating 3000 kcal of bananas metabolises quite differently than 3000 kcal of glucose sugar.
It's one of those assumptions we make that everyone knows is true but do we have any real evidence that fruit consumed in quantities that where it have an real impact on our caloric intake provide "health benefits".
But yes, barring fiber, these are all micronutrients, not macronutrients.
> Finally, when you drink your calories instead of eating them, your brain doesn’t get the same “I’m full” signal that it does from solid food, even though you wind up consuming far more calories in the process. […] on the day they ate the apple, they ate fewer calories at the meal than if they consumed the same number of calories from applesauce or apple juice. The chewing really counts.
The problem with diabetes is that the cells of the body have too much saturated fat which blocks in the insulin receptors.
The article doesn't actually cite a reason why fruit juice is bad. They just keep repeating diabetes and obesity are a problem, but neither is caused by sugar consumption. Even diabetes.org doesn't list sugar as a causal factor. It simply is a myth.
"Stop going outside. The sun literally grows cancer. Are you a baby cow?"
Interactions with Cancer Metabolism:
https://examine.com/supplements/whey-protein/#summary10
Comparison to Other Protein Sources:
https://examine.com/supplements/whey-protein/#summary15
Another fun fact, examine.com is a biased bs source. Take a look at nutritionfacts.org sometime.
We've got the binocular vision and dexterity to climb trees and identify and harvest and prep fruits. Our livers are tolerant of relatively ridiculous intake levels of fructose and ethanol (by non-frugivore standards). Our ancestors were so successful at exploiting fruit as a food source that unlike non-frugivores (hand wavy mostly) our bodies don't try to generate our own vitamin-C nor do we try to store it, we just pee it out because surely we'll get a meal of vit-C fruit tomorrow, which leads to scurvy in humans that don't get fruits or supplemental sources. Non-frugivores are somewhat more frugal (ugh) with bodily vitamin C stores. Our digestive tract is long enough to digest fruits reasonably effectively but not long enough for cellulose sources (like how cows can graze), much longer than we need to solely eat meat. Our taste receptors are calibrated to sugary fruit juice which in 21st century makes us really fat when provided with unlimited sources of HFCS.
Pre-historic fruit consumption is pretty much baked into the cake.
Our ancestors were pretty much frugivores, although its a spectrum, there's not a binary yes/no like adult lactose metabolism for example. So being a spectrum you can make a strong argument for "omnivore with a heavy addition of fruit" or similar wishy washyness. I'm trying and failing to think of a class of omnivore that doesn't eat fruit, solely does bbq chicken breast on caesars salad type of thing... There's probably some class of omnivore that doesn't eat fruit, but maybe not and its a reasonable argument that the concept of omnivore is not really meat+plant but more like meat+fruit. There are likely scavengers that can live off meat and veg-only although not preferentially...
On HN lying to your children is a good thing.
Different children will react differently, of course.
It helped that I had read The Wasp Factory before becoming a parent.
If she is getting fooled that carbonated water is 'juice', then I'm assuming she doesn't know what juice actually is and therefore has no association of juice = sugar drink. So why the need to trick your daughter?
Couldn't you have just called it 'fizzy water', or if water is associated with 'boring', call it 'fizzy drink'. She'd still get it from the bar and have the excitement of that.
Sounds like you parsed it just fine. It was just an error in the actual logic.
All of these are terrible for teeth because they're high in sugar and they're sticky, and there's guidance to avoid these things.
Also, dental health isn't the only reason to minimise sugar intake.
Tooth extraction is the leading cause of child hospitalisation in the UK.
A few of those children will have problems such as hypomineralisation, but many extractions are entirely preventable with better diet (milk or water to drink, not fruit juice or sugar sweetened tea or soda, and especially not in a bottle or sippy cup) and better oral hygiene.
And it's important to start these habits early.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/27/england-hosp...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jul/13/teeth-proble...
http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/dentalhealth/Pages/Careofkidsteet...
We soak them in lemon juice to keep them from turning brown while dehydrating, but since he loves lemon juice (and will drink it out of the bottle if we leave the fridge unlocked), this is a pretty huge selling point for him.
It's cruel to expose children to pain and harm, especially when it's normally completely avoidable.
Further down the road, you presumably don't want to have a kid that needs to wear expensive clothes to school to feel accepted. And when they are that age, you can't convince them that less expensive clothing is expensive too.
Without intervention, the oxygen in the air will break down most of the healthy stuff within an hour or two. If you juice carrots and drink it immediately, there are benefits.
What you see in the USA, with the stuff called "orange juice" often makes health claims that should be disallowed. "All natural" and "contains Vitamin C" are highly misleading, considering the actual process that the juice is put through, so it can survive for months on the shelf in some store.
Quick, someone prove fruits and vegetables are poison!
I'm not saying that there isn't something to what they're saying, but the timing is... shall we say... convenient.