Louisville Mojo: Does juice equal abuse?

If you're looking for evidence of our twisted relationship with food, look no further than yesterday's LA Times story about what sometimes seems to be the official drink of modern childhood: fruit juice.

The simple fact is: juice isn't that good for you. It has more calories than the same amount of soda and concentrates the worst part of fruit -- the sugar -- into a highly potent cocktail.

A glass of, say, apple juice, the story reports, contains all the sugar of several apples. (But doesn't have the bulk and fiber that makes you feel full.) No one could eat three or four apples for lunch. But tiny little kids wmight use the sugar from three or four apples to wash down their chicken nuggets and fries.

The story gives you lots of stats and studies to indicate why that's problematic. But come on, it's pretty obvious.

None of this is news. For years, pediatricians have been urging parents to push milk or water and to use juice, if at all, only in diluted forms. It should also be limited, they say, to less than a glass a day. (A tiny little juice glass, not a Big Gulp.) Dentists? They like juice even less.

So the interesting thing about the LA Times story isn't the news that juice isn't good for you -- it's the explanation of how and why it became so commonplace.

The story notes that juice was not widely consumed until the 1900s, when fruit growers seized on it as way to sell more fruit. (Again, it takes several pieces of fruit to make one glass of juice.) Technical advances in food science made it easier to store and ship juice and trade associations like the Juice Products Association have made efforts to promote it. Parents grab it because it comes in convenient juice boxes and juice bags and schools make money selling it in cafeterias and vending machines.

In other words, it's pretty much all about business and laziness.

The story ends by quoting a doctor who seems hesitant to label juice as being as bad as soda, saying "a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice for breakfast, my goodness!"

Are we so unsophisticated as a human society that this is the level we converse at? Who cares, really, if juice is as bad as soda? The thing is our kids shouldn't be drinking soda at all and should be drinking precious little juice. A glass of fresh-squeezed juice for breakfast? Does he think that's what is really going on?

Squeezing your own juice takes an investment in money (buying a lot of oranges), time and energy (peeling, squeezing and/or cleaning the juicer). By its very nature, it treats juice as special nectar to be savored and consumed in small quantities. If people only consumed juice they squeezed themselves, we would not have a problem.

The problem is the constant happy meals with juice as a drink, and the two-gallon jugs and the parents who are too lazy to fill a canteen with water when it's so much easier to grab a box of juice bags from the grocery shelf. (And yes, I plead guilty to doing that on occasion.)

But for how long are we going to let matters of laziness and marketing keep us from doing the right things for our children?

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frogbert mon nov 09 2009 at 12:06 pm ·


	My kids don't drink juice or sodas. They empty Kool Aid packets directly into their mouths with a water chaser.

ColeB mon nov 09 2009 at 3:49 pm ·


	I think that the crap that we are putting into our bodies everyday is a testament to who the average American is becoming: OVERWEIGHT and LAZY. It is so hard to be otherwise when your diet consists mostly of foods loaded with corn syrup, artificial ingredients and empty carbs. These artificial ingredients provide little-to-no nutritional value to your body, leaving you feeling tired and needing more and more. People need to realize that what you choose to ingest literally becomes a part of you as your body digests it.

VeggieMomster mon nov 09 2009 at 8:57 pm ·


	Unfortunately, I know some parents who actually count a serving of apple juice as a fruit for the day for their kids. Um, not even close. What no one seems to talk about, or maybe what no one seems to know, is the FIBER in the whole food slows the absorption of sugar so the body doesn't have to dump insulin like it does with sugar so easily absorbed from juice. So, there's no hyper, and no crash. And, likely, no diabetes later on. So, I'd then argue that it's not orange juice that's the problem, but KID orange juice. Orange juice with pulp is orange juice with fiber. But, you hit the nail on the head. The juice craze did start with growers needing to sell more, and juice became a way of preserving those foods so less product was lost to rotting. Juice is food product, not a food.

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