to find the vilification of orange juice just crazy

[banterwiththehunks]

New health scare saying fruit juice is as bad as fizzy pop, sorry but what next only half an apple a day as one apple is too much sugar!

www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10830381/Fruit-juice-and-cereals-push-children-over-sugar-limits.html

I had a smoothie at a restaurant for lunch the other day - whole milk blended with strawberries, raspberries & blueberries in a very large glass

No added sugar - quite tart in fact - lots of fibre & completely delish

How does something like that rank in the health scales?

I think of it as less unhealthy as fizzy drinks, but I view juice (and smoothies) as a treat now. I don't have them in the house really, just buy them occasionally. It's really easy to drink loads of juice/smoothie as it doesn't really fill me up like the actual fruit does - if I buy a bottle/carton at the supermarket it doesn't last long! I only have the occasional small bottle when out now. At home I pretty much stick to water.

Berries are pretty low in sugar. :)

I agree that a glass of fruit juice can be good for you, I'm thinking more of people who cram fruit and fruit juice down their necks who think it's good for you no matter how much you have.

Oh yes I forgot wine!

Alcohol: bad, too many calories & bad for your liver! And full of sugar :D

I don't think that it is the orange juice in itself that is unhealthy, more the quantity that people drink it in nowadays.

as another poster said juice used to be served in small glasses, usually with breakfast.

now a lot of people seem to drink juice instead of water. having had a quick google it seems it takes around 10 oranges to make a pint of juice - I don't think many people could eat 10 oranges yet it is easy to glug down a pint of orange juice. same amount of sugar but much more easily consumed in juice form.

Blimey, we have oj in the fridge. If people want juice they open the fridge and pour a glass. Is there anything that MNers actually allow anymore? No fillings in our house, including me. We have US dental though so get bi annual check ups etc.

Has op been told off for saying crazy yet?

There's a lot of nonsense being talked on this thread.

Firstly, processed sugar - sucrose - is made of one molecule of glucose and one of fructose. Sucrose occurs naturally, in fruit amongst other things, it's not some synthetic compound.

Fructose is not in itself bad for you. It doesn't "mess with" your blood sugar levels. The reason it doesn't provoke an insulin response is that it is absorbed by the liver after digestion, which then turns it either into glucose (which your cells use as fuel) and stored as glycogen/released into the blood, or into fatty acids, where again it is stored or released to be used as fuel by cells or stored in fat cells.

Neither are BAD AND WRONG. It's just that orange juice contains a lot of sugar without any of the associated fibre, so you can easily drink the equivalent of 3 or 4 oranges in one sitting, thus exceeding your energy needs, whereas you'd feel very full if you attempted to eat that number of actual oranges all in one go.

Great explanation, thank you.

Findo, I'm not sure that's completely true.

We don't even have the glucose transport receptors in our gut for fructose in a fructose-naive state, not in any sort of quantity. That's why fruit can give you an osmotic diarrhea if you're not used to eating sugar/fructose. It's not just the fibre as most people think.

The body can cope with about the amount of fructose as found in 2 pieces of fruit a day. If you're drinking more juice than this (a couple of mouthfuls) and having fructose from any other source (and it's very hard to avoid it!) then you're getting too much, from an evolutionary perspective.

Fructose is awful stuff in large quantities. I suspect america's heavy reliance on high fructose corn syrup is behind its massive obesity problem.

I'll stay be drinking as much OJ as I like

*stay = still. [peeved smiley]

Yawn. It's been obviosus for yonks that drinking vast quantities of anything other than water is stupid.

'vast quantities' of anything - even water - is stupid. Everything in moderation.

I like freshly squeezed orange juice (not the vile stuff in a carton) as it is good for the digestion.

"We don't even have the glucose transport receptors in our gut for fructose in a fructose-naive state"

I'm just talking about what fructose and glucose are, and how they're metabolised when they're absorbed. I had thought they were both absorbed via glucose transporters in gut epithelial cell membranes, but I could be wrong about that.

I hadn't heard of a "fructose-naive state" before so I had to look it up. It's an interesting idea but surely we'd find that in an anything-naive state there would be decreased transcription of the genes coding for the relevant proteins to absorb that thing, simply because they wouldn't be needed. For example in some bacteria, you only find transcription of genes for proteins involved in lactose absorption and metabolism when they're in a lactose-heavy medium.

Many nutrients have undesirable effects when they are consumed to excess but that doesn't mean they're inherently bad. That's really my main point.

(I'm a molecular biology student, but not a brilliant one, so some of this stuff may be a bit rusty!)

When i had gestational diabetes i was told to drink a glass if i had a hypo... Enough said

Small glass of juice = reasonable amt of sugar and a bit of vit c etc.
Large glass of juice = shedloads of sugar and a lot more vit c.

Unless you are eating a really unbalanced diet you don''t need to get all that much vit c from a processed source and you certainly don't need that much sugar.

An orange contains a limited amount of sugar because it contains a limited amt of juice - try squeezing even a large orange and you won't get more than a small glass full. Eat the entire orange and you get roughage to go with the sugar. And it takes longer to eat than a glass of juice takes to drink.

I work for a juice manufacturer and I often get offered free juice - I rarely take it because I prefer my kids to drink water and eat fresh juice. Having said that I guess I would prefer them to drink juice to coke but it's a bit like choosing the lesser of two evils when it comes to sugar.

it should be a treat not a staple.

Any other old gimmers who remember juice glasses from the 60s - tiny little things like large shot glasses that you had your juice in at breakfast time - or wierdly as a starter!

I cannot get worried about my children drinking a glass of fresh juice a day.

They eat sliced bread and sometimes they have burgers.

None of these things are bad.

They would only be bad if they only ever drunk OJ and had burger sarnies every day.

It is important to listen to balanced advice. It it even more important to put that advice in context.

OJ is not 'bad for you'.

That is just silly.

The quality of the sugar in an orange doesn't change when you squeeze.

It does from a tooth point of view. Sugars in fruit are bound up within the fruit and broken down in the stomach so although acidic, whole fruit is not highly cariogenic. The pulping process makes those intrinsic sugars into extrinsic ones which are broken down in the mouth and therefore fruit juice is highly cariogenic as well as acidic.

No, the quality of the sugar doesn't change, but by juicing it you are removing the inbuilt mechanisms that stop you consuming too much. A glass of orange has about 10 oranges in it. When was the last time anyone sat down and ate 10 oranges in about 2 minutes as you would with a glass of juice?

The insoluble fibre helps the body to process the fructose. Without it, it's hard for the body to 'see' the fructose and the fructose calories as it bypasses insulin release (as findo said above). It basically turns straight to fatty acids but doesn't get crossed off the calorie allowance that the body gives itself. Therefore you consume all the needed calories from everything else you eat and the fructose just sneaks in as extra.

Much harder to 'fill up' on fructose/sucrose based things than it is on protein, fat or glucose based things. It just doesn't cause the same release of satiety hormones to tell us to stop eating. The only stop sugnal comes from stomach distension

(That wasn't at you, NANP)

Diet Fanta is far better for you than orange juice.