Good grief! I never realised that about smoothies! (The F Word, C4 now)

[MaureenMLove]

Janet S-P has just done a peice on smoothies. Did you know that there is more sugar in one portion of smoothie, than in a can of Tango? Also, if you drank one a day for a year, you would put on 13lbs!!

I don't buy them or make them as a rule, but I will think twice, when I do fancy a pick-me-up after a heavy night out!

My diabetic dietician said that fructose does have a lower GI than regular sugar, but it is still sugar and is without the fibre and vitamins etc from the whole fruit. Sugar IS sugar!

but too much of anything is bad.

There are people who will tell you that if you're dieting you can eat as much fruit as you want and that's rubbish. Because fruit still contains calories. Yes fruit is much more healthy than chocolate, but if you eat too many you will still gain weight.

A litre of orange juice contains over 1000 calories for instance..

Innocent smoothies seem to have about 1g of fibre per 100ml on average. Tango has 0.1g per 100ml.

It only takes one biscuit over the value of your calorie burning to put on a stone in a year. (Please dont ask me where I hear/read that!) So I agree, if you were drinking a smoothie a day above the amount of calories you were using, you could put on weight.

I'm sure about a year ago there was something in the papers about how bad smoothies were for you, not because they contain sugar but because you are drinking them, and that your body is not working to digest it in the same way it would do if you had eaten that amount if fruit iyswim

oooh, wannaBE, out of interest, do you know how much is in cranberry juice? I can never work out how many points it is for a glass of gorgeous cranberry juice!

JacobsPrincess, that would be the case if you compared a bag of fructose with a bag of sucrose. A Smoothie is fruit. It does have the fibre. Unlike a mnufactured drink containing something like diluted OJ, added refined sucrose and aspartamine.

are people really surprised by sugar having calories???

when I say a smoothie is fruit, I don't mean it's fruit like an orange, I mean it is made from 100% fruit, nothing added or taken away.

As Wannabe says - too much of anything is bad for you but I'd wager that too much Tango is worse for you than too much smoothie.

but you wouldn't nec eat a couple of tins of soup as well as normal food, whereas people do drink smoothies without reducing their food (thinking if people had originally been drinking just water)

Yes, bundle, just as they are surprised at fruit having shed loads of sugar in it.

but no matter how many smoothies you have they only count for 1 of 5 a day

So where does the fibre go? A smoothy is made using the whole of the fruit chopped and placed in a liquidizer with ice cubes - how does the fibre get away, escape?

He he! What a to-do! I wish I'd never mentioned it now!

I would just like to mention, that although I was shocked/deluded by the F-word, it won't stop me from having smoothies and we don't drink fizzy drinks in this house. Unless there's brandy in the glass as well!

is that the same way that you can only count potatoes one in your fruit and veg portions ie mash and boiled only count for one serving even if you eat two?

It doesn't go anywhere!! It's there but has been broken down by blending and thus is less good for you than a piece of fruit.

But also a smoothie is smooth - the fibre in it has started to break up, the fruit cells require less digestion and so the sugars are more easily absorbed into your bloodstream. Gives you a sugar high much quicker than eating the whole fruit.

lol @ where fibre goes

There was another report that said that smoothies should count as 2 a day.

But also, this sort of reporting is rubbish - saying you would put on 13 pounds if you drank 1 day over the course of a year - well, that is surely dependent on what ELSE you eat/drink. 1 smoothie a day isn't going to pile the weight on. And if you had it INSTEAD of something else, than you might lose weight.

And quite honestly, if a smoothie a day means my ds1 gets some fruit, and some vitamins inside him, then I honestly don't give a toss about the sugar.

8 fl oz (284 ml) of cranberry juice contains 136.62 calories.

isnt it one OVER the amount of calories you are burning off?

IE eat x amt of cals, burn off x amt of cals, v good, eat x amt of cals, burn off x amt of cals but also drink 1 smoothie, not burn off, turn to fat.

Ahh I see - so if you were excersising you would get the sugar quicker from drinking a smoothy? and better for you than say a sugary drink as an energy booast?