Readymade Fruit Juices: To Drink Or Not To Drink?

Do you think that packaged juices are healthy? Well, this debate has been picking up heat for quite some time now.

Most brands selling packaged juices want you to think of their products as healthy options, often using words like ‘pure’, ‘fresh-squeezed’ and ‘all-natural’ on their cartons.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise though. It’s great for business.

Ever wondered how readymade juice is made?

First, the water from the fruit is drained to make a frozen concentrate.

Then, these concentrates are stripped of oxygen so that they can stay fresh in storage tanks for up to a year. Both these procedures result in the loss of most of the natural enzymes that give the fruit its flavor (and a good chunk of its nutritional value as well).

But clearly, you won’t drink flavorless juice.

So the big brands began adding some ‘fresh-squeezed’ juice to the concentrate. The problem? It was simply too expensive to keep adding fresh juice.

Artificial becomes the in thing

Around the 1960s, ‘flavour packs’ were invented. These things essentially compensate for all the oils and essences lost during the concentration process and are made primarily of, you guessed it, preservatives.

What do you get from fresh fruits? Vitamins, fiber (controls cholesterol, weight gain and insulin production) and micro nutrients.

Packaged juice, even when it’s cold-pressed—made from squashing sterilized whole fruit in a hydraulic press—does away with most of these essential ingredients.

What packaged juice does have, in heaps, is sugar.

A 300ml carton of juice contains roughly 35gm of sugar. That’s more sugar than in 5 or 6 of those fruits. A veritable meal made entirely of sugar. Same as that pet bottle of your favorite fizzy drink.

So what do you do? Avoid packaged fruit juices? Stop drinking juice altogether? There’s a much simpler solution. Well, solutions to be specific.

Start juicing your own fruits at home. Better yet, enjoy some whole fruits, peel and all. That way, you don’t lose out on the fiber and your insulin levels needn’t spike to compensate for the sugar rush.

And if you must drink juice, actively practice portion control. 150ml of juice is acceptable as a part of your daily sugar intake as long as your diet is otherwise nutritionally balanced.

The takeaway? Whole fruits are always preferable to juice, packaged or otherwise.