Some of us like Fruit juices and believe they are safe. But
are they safe?
Dear
NIMS Doctor,
Fruits
and fruit juices are considered to be safe and good for the health by many of
us. Some of us take whole fruit while some prefer to take the readymade fruit
juices. Now there are alerts to avoid the fruit juices and recommendations are
in favour of whole fruit intake. If one would still like to take juices it is
better to dilute them adequately.
Fruit juice
should be removed from the recommended list of five-a-day portions of fruit or
vegetables in the U.K. as it contained as much sugar as many soft drinks, an
adviser to the government on obesity has said. Susan Jebb, head of diet and
obesity research at the Medical Research Council’s Human Nutrition Research
unit in Cambridge, said she did not see juice as a healthy option.
“I would support taking it out of the five-a-day
guidance,” she said. “Fruit juice isn’t the same as intact fruit and it has got
as much sugar as many classical sugar drinks. It is also absorbed very fast so
by the time it gets to your stomach your body doesn’t know whether it’s
Coca-Cola or orange juice, frankly,” she told Sunday Times.
“I have to say it is a relatively easy thing to give up.
Swap it and have a piece of real fruit. If you are going to drink it, you
should dilute it,” she said.
Ms. Jebb said she had herself stopped drinking orange
juice and advised others to do so, or at least drink it diluted.
The paper quoted her as saying she would support a wider
tax on sugar-heavy drinks.
Ms. Jebb works closely with the U.K. government on diet
and obesity issues, and leads the government’s so-called health responsibility
deal, which oversees voluntary pledges by the food and drink industry to
improve public health. Her comments follow a similar warning in September by
two U.S. scientists, Barry Popkin and George Bray, who exposed the health risks
of fructose corn syrup in soft drinks in 2004.
Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of
North Carolina, told the Guardian that fruit juices and fruit smoothies were
“the new danger”.
“Think of eating one orange or two and getting filled.
Now think of drinking a smoothie with six oranges and two hours later it does
not affect how much you eat. The entire literature shows that we feel full from
drinking beverages like smoothies but it does not affect our overall food
intake, whereas eating an orange does,” he said. “So pulped-up smoothies do
nothing good for us but do give us the same amount of sugar as four to six
oranges or a large coke. It is deceiving,” Mr. Popkin said.
