Fruit Juice is CANDY!

We all know that we should consume 2-3 servings of fruit per day. This lowers our risk of cancer, heart disease, and otherwise keeps us healthy. Unfortunately, it's still being touted that fruit juice can be interchanged for fresh fruit by experts. This is just plain wrong! Look at the numbers.

If you eat one apple, orange, and a grapefruit half you get 183 calories, 37g of sugar, and you are almost half way to that fiber intake for your day! If you drank the juice, you'd have twice as much sugar (76g!) and no fiber. As well, you consumed 157 calories you did not need. To compare, a cup of coke has 26g of sugar and zero fiber. If you're on a diet, fruit juice should be the last thing on your menu.

Fiber directly helps regulate blood sugar. If you consume sugars with fiber, it will be released slower into your blood stream. Eating the actual fruit brings fiber into the stomach at the same time as the sugar - very beneficial! Fruit juice has no fiber, so you've wasted over 300 of your daily calories with zero fiber benefits.

Fruit juice is given to children. I just read an article saying you should drink it during a fatty meal. This is all absurd. Fruit juice is candy dressed up as health food with about as much health benefits as the candy. Add to that the fact that the pasteurization process does destroy some (of not most) of the nutrients and it's really questionable why anyone would drink it.

Oh yeah, it tastes like CANDY!