Drinking one glass or more of 100% fruit juice each day is associated with weight gain in children and adults, according to a new analysis of 42 previous studies.
The research, published Tuesday in JAMA Pediatrics, found a positive association between drinking 100% fruit juice and BMI — a calculation that takes into account weight and height — among kids. It also found an association between daily consumption of 100% fruit juice with weight gain among adults.
100% fruit juice was defined as fruit juices with no added sugar.
This seems like it would be really obvious, no?
If you are simply buying fruit juices at the store you are getting zero to virtually zero fiber. So you are getting a bunch of calories but without feeling any sense of fullness that you would get if you instead just ate the fruit.
Fruit is healthy but you are much better off just eating the fruit and drinking water. If you really want to drink the fruit juice you should just blend the fruit so that you are also getting all the pulp. The fiber is excellent for you and will help prevent you from turning all that juice into “empty” calories.
It’s obvious to anyone who has thought about it, yes. Unfortunately there’s a larger than you expect percentage of people out there who just think “fruit healthy” and that’s where the thought ends
my dad, who is quite overweight, would order the sweet potato french fries at Culver’s, after I told him to eat healthier. My mom even supported him - “those are SWEET POTATO fries! that’s healthy!”. I told them that’s not how it works, and it just made them angry.
It doesn’t help that government recommendations have been based on either terrible research or straight up from lobbying groups for so many decades.
The old food pyramid was insane. Nuts, beans, and red meat all being lumped in the protein category, while all fats and sweets were considered the same. Sugar was just considered a carbohydrate, whether it came from fruits or from soda (high fructose corn syrup). The categories were displayed and expressed as hard lines and there was no nuance at all. Not to mention bread, cereal, rice, pasta all being the largest category… and an entire category for just milk-based items.
For many people the government recommendation is just taken at face value, often just because that is what they’re taught in school.
The update makes a bit more sense (though they are still telling you to drink milk at every meal) but I miss my 11 servings of pasta per day…
https://www.myplate.gov/myplate-plan
Check the Canadian guide, they finally did it without asking for input from the various food lobbies…
Interesting!
Surprisingly similar to the US one, just without the Milk Lobby influence. “Make water your drink of choice” would improve so many people’s lives.
Digging into the US guidelines it says that “93% of Americans are not getting enough dairy.” #ThatIsALie
US dairy lobby is bonkers. Not as bonkers as the corn people, but close.
Yep, the dairy lobby is still pissed about it, it’s been five years now and they still say that Health Canada is biased against them… After working with them to create the guide for decades? 🤔
this a png for ants? https://food-guide.canada.ca/artifacts/CFG-snapshot-EN.pdf
Milk is still pretty nutritious and a glass a day is probably very beneficial for most adults that can actually digest it.
I’m not arguing that, this is recommending a glass with every meal and giving it its own special food group requirements. The “93% are not getting enough dairy” figure is pretty absurd since in 2021 (the last time data was collected), Americans ate on average 667 pounds of dairy per year. That’s 1.8 pounds per day. It’s a weird measurement, since a pint of milk weighs about a pound, and a pound of cheese is 16 servings of cheese, but either way… I think we’re getting enough dairy.
https://www.foodbeverageinsider.com/dairy/dairy-consumption-hits-record-level-in-u-s-
I think it was kellogs or one of the other old school cereal brands that came up with the food pyramid just so they could sell cheap corn based shit. Greed from the very beginning.
Unfortunately there’s a larger than you expect percentage of people out there who just think “fruit healthy” and that’s where the thought ends
Totally fair point. As usual I tend to overestimate the general public.
I think children are generally taught “eat your fruits and vegetables”. It should not be permitted to target children with fruit-branded junk food and mis-marketing
One of my friends was staying with me for a few days. She bought 2 half gallons of apple juice (buy one, get one) and she was saying how much she loved it, how healthy it was, and she switched over from soda a while ago. I commented that it’s not really healthy per se because it still contains nearly as much sugar as soda, she didn’t disagree but still said that drinking apple juice just seems healthier since it’s from a fruit.
Yes you’d think that wouldn’t include researchers who do research and publish in pediatric journals though.
what does “healthy” even mean in this context exactly? like if i eat 3 apples tomorrow will i tangibly actually feel different? what about every day for a week? month? what exactly are people getting out of this other than the placebo effect from the word ‘healthy’
this is why, while i love fruit smoothies, i also make sure to also add some granola and/or flax seed for extra fiber.
helps me save on t-p, too!
WATER motherfuckers, water
I know personally this tragedy all to well. My father used to drink water. He passed away just a few years ago. Then I did my research and learned that over 80% of everyone who has ever died actually drank water at least the day before.
What does that tell you about water?
Big water has been taking us for fools all this time
What plant is a motherfucker, and how much water does it need?
Mother fucking can get really hot and keeping it wet needs much more work on your end
Ugh… It tasted like fish.
EDIT: /s or /j added because people doesn’t seem to get it’s a joke.
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Haven’t they known this for decades now?
Fruit juice is all the sugar in fruit but without any of the fiber.
Yeah, the US has an education problem. They kind of tell kids about this in school these days but for a bunch of years fruit was just plain sold as good for you. Kids parents were raised going oh don’t drink that Fanta here drink this apple juice. When they’re far too close to nutritional value for it to matter.
It’s another thing they could put a label on might help a few people, it’s really effing hard to put a health food label on everything that’s not shit though
I do wonder if there was some truth to that, though. When I was growing up, I do remember being told fruit juice is healthy, however there was also less weight problem and there was much less availability of fresh fruits
We’ve also been selectively breeding fruit for years to have more sugar.
Yes. Just got back from the pediatrician and the take home handout said (again) not to feed your kid juice as there’s little to no nutritional value and a butt load of sugar
For sure every doctor alwayd says BOOF it or Lose it
Most people have zero clue about how nutrition works. It makes sense, educators don’t really spend time teaching it. We had the 4 food groups and the food pyramid, both of which tend to favor eating a shitload of bread as your main caloric intake, which has obviously been debunked. We had the great sugar vs fat debate of the 90s. Now people are skeptical of nutrition as a concept and think “oh, fruit juice, that’s healthy”. Can’t really blame people for not knowing everything, but damn, food is important. Garbage in, garbage out.
Precisely. My whole life I was told to stay away from fat and eat my fruits and veggies. I loooove fruits and veggies, but was only recently told they were high in carbs in my 30s. I just assumed they were healthy since that’s what I was told my whole life. Kinda sucks since I’m repulsed by seafood and am not a big meat eater (I identify as flexitarian).
The closest thing to formal education about nutrition I received were the now-obsolete posters of the food pyramid randomly plastered around my middle school.
Nothing wrong with fruits and veggies at all. You need carbs to survive. It’s the juice not having fiber thing that will really load you up with calories and get your pancreas working overtime. It’s the complex carbs in the fruits and veg that your body really wants.
Idk it’s what my endo told me. My diet is primarily whole fruits and veggies, he warned me to eat less fruit because of carbs 🤷♀️
If you live a semi-active lifestyle and aren’t diabetic or pre-diabetic, IANAD, but I wouldn’t be super concerned about eating the odd apple or banana.
If you have the time and money I highly recommend a nutrition class at your local community college.
Everyone has been on this tangent for years, this isn’t exactly news. I think it’s worth noting that the problem isn’t really this simple. They concentrate the juice and pump it full of “juice” that is really just sugar. If you actually buy real pressed 100% blueberry juice, for example, instead of apple sugar flavored with blueberries, the sugar content is lower. And because you would never actually want to drink 100% blueberry juice because it wouldn’t taste how you are expecting, you would water it down. Suddenly you have a glass of juice with 5 grams of sugar instead of 30 grams and you are fine. Additionally, no matter the type of juice, it is nearly always over concentrated because they are trying to boost the sugar content. People should really be watering down any kind of store bought juice.
No one is actually drinking “100% juice”, they are drinking a product that resembles the fruit of juice. These companies are not squeezing juice into a bottle, they are concentrating fruit sugars and adding them back into water. The problem is just as much with false advertising as anything. I’m not saying freshly squeezed juice is healthy, but it as sure as shit healthier than the fraud they are selling on the shelves. As with everything, the problem is money. Companies know they will sell more if they say it’s juice and then pump it full of extra concentrated fruit sugar.
Edit: I wish more companies sold actual 100% real pressed fruit juice, I would buy it and water it down with soda water. I also wish they were more honest with their labeling about what they are actually doing. Not everything needs to be flawlessly healthy, but we could take steps in the right direction. You should only be able to label something as 100% juice if it actually is squeezed out of the fruit and put in the bottle with no interference and additional processing.
Some of the best drinks I’ve ever had are pure fresh-squeezed juice.
For example: pomegranate juice pressed by a street vendor? Amazing. Apples from the tree in my mom’s yard? Incredible when juiced. Freshly squeezed orange juice? Sign me up.
Relatively few fruits make a juice that’s not good straight. Cranberry comes to mind as being too bitter. Lemon is a bit too acidic for most.
Wyman’s 100% blueberry juice is 20g sugar per 250ml. Mott’s apple juice is 28g for 8 oz/240ml. So blueberry juice is about 2/3 the sugar of apple juice. It’s still plenty sweet.
You don’t water blueberry juice down because it’s not sweet enough. You water it down because 8oz of Mott’s apple juice is $1.30 at Walmart, and 8oz of wymans’ blueberry juice is $7.30. Blends use apple juice because it’s cheap and mild, so you can layer other flavors on top.
Juice isn’t bad for you because of the extra apple sugar. It’s bad because you removed all the fiber. Fiber promotes sateity.
Upvoted because they are all good points. But I would say, that even these pure juice blends are absolutely concentrating the sugar, and probably using the sweetest varieties they can find. I would put money on it. I’ve pressed juice myself and it is never as sweet as what they sell you in the store, not even remotely close. The store juice is magnitudes more sweet because they are liars and frauds, full stop. Either way, we should all be watering it down. Unless you’re desensitizing your taste of sugar by eating pixy stix every day, most juices are too sweet anyway.
and probably using the sweetest varieties they can find.
It’s probably a mix of using sweet varieties, picking at peak ripeness and quickly juicing them without much transportation.
Think of the difference in if you made tomato juice with a standard supermarket tomato vs a local in-season farmstand tomato.
Either way, we should all be watering it down.
Honestly, juice just isn’t anywhere near as healthy as whole fruit.
You can water it down if you want, but either way it should be a fairly rare treat.
I believe I have bought those same brands. If I remember, they come in 32 Oz bottles and are extremely tart. I would water them down heavily and give them to my daughter and she was able to tolerate it.
Y’all, the study clearly says it’s the calories. People see it as free calories. The article straight up lies about adults too. The study did not find the same link in adults.
Relevant bit from the study-
Among cohort studies in children, each additional serving per day of 100% fruit juice was associated with a 0.03 (95% CI, 0.01-0.05) higher BMI change. Among cohort studies in adults, studies that did not adjust for energy showed greater body weight gain (0.21 kg; 95% CI, 0.15-0.27 kg) than studies that did adjust for energy intake (−0.08 kg; 95% CI, −0.11 to −0.05 kg; P for meta-regression <.001). RCTs in adults found no significant association of assignment to 100% fruit juice with body weight but the CI was wide (MD, −0.53 kg; 95% CI, −1.55 to 0.48 kg).
Give your kids one child serving a day and fiber from elsewhere. Also make sure they get physical activity in. Done. This isn’t Fruit Juice=Soda. Adults probably don’t get rated as hard because a pint glass of fruit juice is a lot less of their daily intake percentage wise.
Just give them fruit.
I agree, but I’m also tired of sensationalism in nutrition news and then people asking why there’s so many fat Americans.
Carbs are carbs, sugar is sugar, high glycemic sugars need somewhere to go quickly
I have a relative, a PhD no less (albeit in English), who “only eat natural organic GMO-free” and will absolutely not accept that fruits are sweet because of sugar and count against you like any other sugar
Proof of different types of intelligence right there.
Our entire food industry is dedicated to high carb foods that generate more profits. Many, many people cannot handle a high carb diet and wind up fat, or sick. A much lower carb diet, including healthy fats and lots of fiber, lessens obesity, heart problem and diabetes. Been there, done that.
My GF is type 1 diabetic so I have to be aware all the time of how much carbs are in things. It’s actually insane. A glass of OJ has as much carbs and a can of soda for instance. A glass of wine has ~100-120 calories. Breakfast cereal is essential just carbs and sugar.
Breakfast cereal has evolved into a “new” market for candy makers… Reese’s cereal?? Just brand it as breakfast and people somehow think they’re not feeding their kids candy for breakfast… I used to buy that kind of stuff for a dessert snack lol
Carbs are not bad for you, obscene amounts of sugar is. Yes you shouldn’t just eat nothing but carbohydrates, but your body needs carbohydrates to fuel the muscles. Around 100 grams a day is considered the minimum you need to eat typically.
Not all carbs are the same. Fruit juice is simple sugars with little to no fiber.
Ha, I knew my Coke addiction would save me.
I saw Hank Green talk about this not so long ago. He says he hates how juice is marketed as a ‘healthy’ option, when in reality, it’s just like flat soda.
Like in an average fruit, there is probably less than a glass of juice. We evolved to eat fruit but not to constantly consume copious amounts of the juice. It’s too much sugar and your body Will be worse off for it if you subject it to that amount of sugar for too long.
People should just drink water ffs.
A small glass of juice occasionally maybe if you need it for the anti oxidents or vitamins etc. But not daily and certainly not a huge amount of it.
My wife and I occasionally make fresh squeezed orange juice at home… It takes us at least a dozen large oranges to get THREE - 10 to 12 ounce glasses of juice.
It probably takes more oranges than that really but it’s been a while since we did it so I can’t remember for sure.
No shit, have you seen the US regulations on that label? You can just squeeze concentrate into sugar water and call it 100% real fruit juice.
Hasn’t this been well known for a couple decades now? Or is this just confirmation of that?
Replace fruit juice with soda in the title and no doubt it’s a slam dunk, but I personally didn’t realize how much sugar’s in fruit drinks until I entered it into a calorie tracker. I’m guessing fruit juice is slightly less bad compared to soda, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn most people are oblivious to how “not good” fruit juice is for them. Probably some, “Well, fruit is good for me, so fruit juice must be okay, too.”
No fucking shit, dude.
That shit is worse for you than diet soda.
Funny that they didn’t go with the constipation angle in addition to the calories angle. You can eat all the fruit you want and pass it well, but if you do just the juice, you get no fiber and you will get blocked up.
A glass of fruit juice still has calories in it. I would imagine that if you control for everything else that it’s still a couple of hundred extra calories that one kid is taking in that some other kid isn’t.
Not only that, it’s also almost pure carbohydrates
