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…
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.
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
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.
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’
“Healthy” most of the time means it has a range of nutrients that help your body function, and prevents a lot of bad stuff, if you eat them consistently.
These bad things include dementia, certain eye diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, depression, pancreatic diseases, hip fractures, cancer, weight gain and diabetes.
https://www.eufic.org/en/healthy-living/article/the-benefits-of-fruits-and-vegetables
If you really want to drink the fruit juice you should just blend the fruit so that you are also getting all the pulp.
Thanks for reminding me I need to go to my local taqueria and get an agua fresca o7
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!
If you like banana smoothies, peanut butter is another great way to round it out a bit more. And yknow, make it taste all the better because peanut butter fucks.
Freeze the banana and then blend the frozen banana with peanut butter and a little almond/oat/other plant milk and it’s like a milkshake without the dairy. Amazingly good!
If you’re adding plant milk, surely it is a milkshake?
True 😆
Growing up we’d blend just frozen bananas and a little bit of peanut butter together. Keep it going long enough and you’ll get real close to ice cream consistency with just those two things. Add a little drizzle of chocolate syrup and you’ve got a reasonably not unhealthy treat that’s damn good.
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
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
Watermelon juice? Okay, I’ll give it a try.
Great, now I want a watermelon agua fresca.
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.
Try a water filter
It was a joke 🤣 but I already use one.
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I have a very vivid memory of working with this girl who had a neck so large that it hung down like a bullfrog’s sack. I had lost some weight myself and we were discussing nutrition and my high water consumption, and I remember she looks at me very seriously and a little exasperated and says, “I’m eating healthier too. I stopped drinking so much pop and switched entirely to juice.”
People really do believe that pure fruit juice is good for your body. I think it’s largely due to the average person’s inability to understand caloric intake and how to decipher a nutrional chart.
I mean it’s probably better than soda right?
In that it has more nutrients, yes. But once the fruit is blitzed, the sugars in it are just as available as any other highly processed sugar. It’s a lot worse than just eating the fruit it came from.
Still, going from pop to juice is a step in the right direction. It’s an early step on a long journey, but a step nonetheless.
One reason a lot of people fail to switch to a healthy diet is because they try to go straight from “whatever the hell I want to eat whenever I want to eat it” to “trendy diet full of food I hate only allowed 2 meals per day”.
Switching from pop to juice is far from the last step, but it’s a good conscious decision if they’re committed to continuing.
Unless they think it is healthier and have no intention of quitting it, of course.
It’s also expensive as hell buying healthier products to find a balance you like and is healthy. For example I’m trying to move away from white rice. (I added it to literally everything when I was poor because it was cheap and halfway nutritious.) Now I’m finding out I don’t like Quinoa. So I’m going to try brown rice and whole wheat pasta. That particular exchange isn’t horribly expensive but I never would have risked not liking something when I was hard up for money.
So people make this decision, check out blogs, try super expensive kale, find out they aren’t in the group that likes it, and give up because they don’t have the time or money to experiment properly.
Yeah, I tried brown rice as a similar step and it really doesn’t work. Maybe it’s my rice maker though, since brown rice from a restaurant is much better. At home, brown rice ends up too chewy, like it’s undercooked. I’ve tried other grains on and off but they tend to take much longer: I have a bag of Kamut I’ve never used because it’s 45-60 minutes instead of the 15-20 for rice
I really dislike a lot of the more fibrous alternatives to our diner carbohydrates. Some more expensive pasta brands can somehow ‘hide’ more fibre then others, but still. I do exclusively high-fibre bread now, for lunch and snack moments (i just make ham and cheese toasties whenever i feel like a snack, can’t really eat more than 2-4 slices of bread that way before I feel full). I can leave my other carbohydrates as is. (for reference: i use about 60g uncooked dry paste pp per dinner)
Yes but one reason we get studies like this is fruit juice is the harm reduction for soda addicts. So BMI correlation is a poor measure.
BMI is a shit measure and studies like this are impossible to do well. That does not mean fruit juice is magically sugar-free.
BMI is kind of the okay and strongly correlates with health outcomes.
It is not a one size fits all tool, but it is a useful tool in aggregate.
I agree. The message should be; use in moderation. The message in the article and what many people are taking away though is avoid like soda and cigarettes.
Not enough to make a difference when concerning weight gain.
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 have the time and money I highly recommend a nutrition class at your local community college.
Ha, I knew my Coke addiction would save me.
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.
2010 called, they said “duh”
This is why my kids don’t get juice or soda other than special occasions. They get full fat milk twice a day and water all day long.
The article doesn’t accurately represent the study. The harm isn’t in any amount of fruit juice like it is with corn syrup and fake sugars, it’s in multiple servings of fruit juice to children per day. The operative part from the study here -
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).
That said. As long as they’re getting actual fruit, it’s not like fruit juice is a requirement.
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
Yeah juice is pure fast acting carbs. It has the same effect on my blood sugar as eating sugar lol
Also sugar is a carb.
Not all carbs are the same. Fruit juice is simple sugars with little to no fiber.
Why specifically 100% fruit juice?
Edit: I learned to read. It’s because of the no added sugar.
Added sugar is a problem when it’s added to things that don’t need it. The best way to mitigate this isn’t with a sugar tax, but to tax per calorie in the finished food for any amount of added sugar.
That would be great, but king corn would never let that happen in the US.
No fucking shit, dude.
That shit is worse for you than diet soda.
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.”
This has been a pet peeve of mine for years, but I’ve never voiced it because I didn’t feel like taking on the “you’re an idiot” stares.
But seriously, I drink a diet soda and I’m supposed to feel shitty because “soda is bad” while someone chugs a sugary glass of juice and that’s supposed to be healthier? Can I compromise and drink a Fresca? Lol
a drink being nutritious is not the same as being healthy
100% juice is all natural stuff that you body is used to procesing for milions of years, but yeah you’re gonna get fat if you chug it like there no tomorrow
soda is some random shit thrown together, articifial sweetners, coloring etc.
Equating “natural” with “good” is called the naturalistic fallacy for a reason.
People who hate on diet soda aren’t worth taking seriously.
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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
Well, while it is a type of sugar that makes fruits sweet, it in fact does get processed differently in your body. Fructose, among other things, can’t be stored in muscles. Your body also doesn’t need to provide Insulin to process it.
When comparing something sweetened with Fructose and something sweetened with Saccharose, the sweet from Fructose has less negative health impacts.
Unless I misunderstood what you mean with “count against you” (I am not a native English speaker).
It’s not the sugar that’s the problem, it’s the calories.
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Why do you need sugar to take the blame so badly?
It’s a lot more nuanced than that.
Sure, if you’re otherwise healthy, but the point is don’t drink a glass of sugar water thinking it’s healthy because fruits or vitamins or some bullshit, because it’s not, and you probably don’t need the extra calories.
Unless you do, and then you probably already know your shit anyways.
Proof of different types of intelligence right there.
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.
Can you explain why that hotel continental breakfast dispenser apple juice always makes you shit your brains out then?
Contaminated maybe? Fruit products can carry things like E. coli or salmonella if exposed.
As a medical non-expert, I diagnose them with weak blood and poor humours.
Or the machines. Those things get gross and I doubt anyone cleans them on a regular basis.
Do you always have it in conjunction with coffee or eggs?
