Some time ago there was no doubt that fruit juices are essential element of a healthy nutrition because they contain a lot of vitamins but now this topic is really controversial. I have heard that they also consist a lot of sugar and it’s better to eat a fruit itself than to make a juice. Please, help me to make up my mind about this question!
Are fruit juices healthy?: Some time ago... - Healthy Eating
Are fruit juices healthy?
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sweetpepper
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They definitely do contain a lot of sugar, but I don’t think it’s bad if your not drinking a lot of it all the time... they’re also good for you when you're sick as they help keep you hydrated/get minerals and vitamins you need.
You are right, they don't cause much harm if you know your limits, but can one drink them in the process of losing weight? I saw them in some diet plans that are based on calories counting.
Best to eat the whole fruit. Most fruits have fibre in them that can help prevent your body from absorbing a lot of the sugars. Plus the make up of a piece if fruit can also be good at boosting your metabolism if you want to lose some weight.
So go for the fruit and not the juice.
sweetpepper• in reply to
Thanks for the advice)) Do you prefer fruit over juices yourself?
• in reply tosweetpepper
Always fruit for me, never juices.
sweetpepper• in reply to
And what about vegetable juices?
• in reply tosweetpepper
I'd always go for the whole foods.
sweetpepper• in reply to
Do you consider them unhealthy as well?
• in reply tosweetpepper
Juices, I'd not say they are unhealthy but they don't beat the whole thing. Plus I'm not sure if the body would absorb enough stuff from the juice.
Sometimes, a person has to have the juice instead of the actual whole fruit when the blood sugars are running low. The juice gets in faster than the fruit itself, Hidden .
oh, really? do people often meet such problem as low sugar?
RignoldKeto
If you prefer to drink rather than eat, smoothies are a much better bet than juices. Liquidising a fruit means you are still consuming the whole thing, rather than just extracting the juice.
Oh, smoothy lover here)) It's a great choice)) actually It was my favourite drink before I've read that they are worse than cola((
what? In what way is a smoothie worse than cola? It entirly depends what ingredients your use. My go to morning smoothie contains kale, spinach, avocado, whey protein and almond milk. nothing too harmful in there.
Totally agree with you!) I was talking about fruit smoosies like banana, kiwi, orange, grape and so on. They contain a lot of sugar so if you mind your weight, you are in trouble)))
Yes, the one you drink sonds very tasty and healthy!) I see you understand a lot about healthy eating!) Pleasure to meet you here)
Hi sweetpepper. I've enjoyed your responses and interactions here in the group. In my opinion I think we have demonized the word sugar to the point that we can often overlook the positive benefits of natural sugar such as fructose found in fruits. I love juices and smoothies and whole pieces of fruit and I think they all have different benefits, and they all contain fructose. The sugar that we should be concerned about is the white, refined sugar that is extremely detrimental to our bodies. I say, if you make your smoothies at home you generally are fine. But if you go out for your smoothies, you may find much hidden in there that you don't want to eat. In fact PepsiCo's Naked Juices recently were sued because their ingredient list contained Formaledehyde. Crazy stuff. So be moderate. Be informed. Be healthy. All the best.
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James Brandon
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They can be healthy but understand they spike your insulin levels up which isn't good. That's why better to eat fruits whole than blended.
Yep, that's what I do now, thanks for answer)) but aren't you tempted sometimes to have a glass of fresh and tasty juice?
So, If you live with peptic ulcer, gastritis or pancreatitis, it is actually not admissible for your health to drink fresh sour juices. Lemon, orange, apple, currant, cranberry juices can become your pain triggers. They contain many organic compounds that increase the acidity of the gastric juice and can cause heartburn. look at that, you wake up having a decent idea to drink some juice because wanted to start a day in positive disposition and you suppose you do present a morning gift to your health but unfortunately, it could be just a juicy blow to stomach causing attack of pain. I avoid drinking juices on empty belly. also a very crucial fact, a grape juice is prohibited for people with diabetes.
oh, really? didn't know that they can be so much harmful!
What about drinking juices after meal? Do you do it regulary?
I prefer eating apples, peaches and plums and drinking water instead of 100% juice.
Anyway, my morning begins with cup of caffé I guess it’s not the best solution, as well. It might be another topic to discuss.
Great choice!)
Well, if your morning cup is not followed by the 20 day and evevening cups, you are fine)) Harm of coffee is too exaggerated)) But I'm sure a lot of people can disagree with me on this matter))
Per day our body has to receive a pure water enough to maintain its existence. How do you think whether it’s better to get water from products containing water for example from coffee, tea or juices or better to find water directly in water? Because if you know all those listed beverages consist of many different components besides a water. My personal opinion is that you could face no problem to visit a nutritional consultant at least once a year to create an eating schedule for your own case according to the specifics of your health condition. It’d be the most proper step to make your body pleased.
Caronile, you are totally right, there is no better drink for our body than water! Water is essential for us, however, we can't survive only on water, so other drinks and food are also needed) I agree that consoltation with nutrition adviser is the best way to deal with it! Have you tried it out by yourself?
I prefer juice. I have depression and M.E and get bad fatigue. So yes I will reach for juice. It is not always in the house. I guess it doesn't take long to eat a banana etc but maybe I also don't fancy it! And I should drink more water so juice is still liquid; I know it's more sugar. I would think one glass a day might be ok.
The best way is to follow your feelings, if glass of juice is so important for you and helps you to deal with depression and fatigue - drink it!! A lot of people use alcohol for this purpose, so if fruit juice can cheer you up, that's great!
I have been known to have a glass of wine though
Do you drink it each day to deal with stress or you just enjoy its taste?
No just at weekends
It's fine as long as you control it)))
I would go for the fruit every time. I enjoy the fruit far more and it can also fill you up.
sweetpepper• in reply to
Yes, it's a perfect snack))
Almost every cancer protocol I have studied said that when your body is sick, to use fruit and vegetable juices along with water until you get well. I have used made my own juice for a while in the past. When I tried to do just juices and water, I would last for about 2 weeks. During this time, I would drink fruit juice in the morning and evening. I would have a mixture of grape, apple, berries, and kiwi. I would have vegetable juice at lunch and mid- afternoon. I would use celery, leafy greens, cucumber, and carrot. I did not have any ill effects during the time I was juicing. I lost about 15 pounds during each time. I continued to juice, and have a juice for breakfast, and lunch, but eat a normal dinner. By doing this, I was able to maintain my weight loss. I was working in a different town than my husband. When I moved back into our house, I did not juice anymore. With the new buzz about smoothies, I started making smoothies for breakfast. They have not harmed me, but it has been very difficult to lose weight. I switched to a mostly raw fruit and vegetable diet and lost about 15 pounds, but it has leveled off. I have added back starches, but I am still plateaued. If I don't start losing soon, I will pull out my juices and go back to juices as it was the most successful for me. When I was on juices, my blood pressure went down so much I did not need my blood pressure medicine.
Wow, this diet really worked well for you! Happy to hear))) Please, keep to inform us about your health))
I have not been very good at staying with my diet. My husband is not very supportive. He will eat what I fix for me and then want something else or go fix something else. After a few days, I get bored with my food and start eating with him although I have tried to watch how much protein I consume. My church had a chili cook-off last week and I ate chili which didn't help. My bloodwork showed that my GFR increased to 13 but my phosphorus went up. I hadn't been eating as strict as I need to. I was using Formula #2 and #1 from Dr. Shultz (herbdoc.com) for two or three days before my bloodwork. I think that is why the gfr was up. I will continue to use these formulas and try to eat better and see how I do in a couple of weeks. I tried juicing for a day, but I can't afford the quantity of produce that it would require to juice right now so I will just try to make sure I get a smoothy every day and eat fresh fruit.....
Hi jobeth. I also agree that juices can be used in an incredible way for healing. I first learned this when I saw The Gerson Therapy (Incredible documentary I think you can find on youtube). Congrats on your weight loss and continued healing. Have you been able to add moderate excercise to you change in diet for those last pounds you are looking to lose?
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James Brandon
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Its true fruit juices are a mine-field. Ha ha ha and who would've thought. The first problem is supermarket juices and labelling. Read those labels very carefully. Don't believe the big letters splashed across the front of the packaging like "100%" because for starters it's mostly not 100% pear, guava, or cranberry etc but a blend of fruit (fillers) even if the only thing on the packaging is a pear for example. Secondly the juice can still be 100% fruit juice but from concentrate which has anything upward from triple the amount of fructose (sugar) as fresh fruit.
Fruit juice if we are talking about freshly squeezed or liquidised is mostly very high in carbohydrate in the form fructose but can be even higher in processed packaged fruit juices because they often add even more sugar. So either way not terribly good for dieting even when talking about total carbs. However freshly squeezed in moderation is better than processed flour products like white bread....so instead of that one slice of white toast a small sherry glass of fresh fruit juice along with all its fibres and vitamins could be both better for you and more slimming.
Generally for convenience I buy pure chilled fruit juice not from concentrate and without any additives. However even this I dilute one to two parts water when I drink it because although I'm not dieting I don't wish to have to start dieting. Eating an orange or other measured amount of fresh fruit is better simply because you are just having one helping, whereas an average glass of lets say orange juice can be up to five whole oranges and that's way too many for our dietary requirements. Way too much sugar in the form of fructose. However if you dilute your juice with water it's more or less the same thing however minus the vitamins processing removes.
Processed juices even if truly 100% don't have the same vitamins content as fresh fruit as things like vitamin C are rapidly destroyed. Even if vitamins C is added to processed juices the fresh thing is still better for you as Vitamin C is incredibly unstable and you could be either not getting enough or overdosing. Eating a single orange or cup of fresh fruit a day is very much a lot easier and better on every level. Fruits vary of course in the amount of sugars they contain, so you could safely eat more berries than lets say grapes........and on and on.
I just came back from Sri Lanka where I lived on fresh fruit, it's so delicious there. However I wasn't eating all the other fattening, junk foods from back home like french fries, cheese cake, bread and red meat, just fish and getting a lot of exercise too, so it was a healthy thing to do.
Hi, Anton! Thank you very much for such open and informative reply, it was very interesting to read! For how long you have been interesting in healthy eating?
Morning Sweetpepper.
Forever, I've always tried to eat healthily. I came from a family who basically by default ate healthily. We never got fed junk food but more importantly it was also not accessible in our environment. Fruit was though.
I was just thinking about this a few days ago in Sri Lanka. A lot of fruit consumed in places like India and Sri Lanka are wild fruits, collected by children and often sold along the road side. It was "Madan" season and plastic bags full of dark, glistening, purple slightly squashed little berries appeared along all the roadsides. You could hardly travel along the coast for more than a hundred meters before you saw children busily and ingeniously managing to pluck the fruits from the huge Syzygium cumini trees. There always seems to be any number of wild fruits in season as they have an incredible botanical bounty in the form of wild tree species, specially Sri Lanka. So kids grow up supplementing their diet with this fruit much as we did as kids. I think its perfectly healthy too as children are very high energy and these fruits are almost all very high in goodness and vitamins but still lowish in fructose. Despite various wild fruits finding their way onto our breakfast buffet tourists like us get to fatten up on pineapple, watermelon and papaya instead and this includes their juices ha ha. Juice bars have also popped up in mainly tourist hotspots. Madan is incredibly rich in antioxidants, is sweetest in the overripe fruit but generally rather sour and astringent, something the children it seems cant get enough off. Fruit juice as such is rarely consumed and that sold in stores is a toxic blend of chemicals in the form of cordials.
Hi, Anton)) It's great that you got used to healthy lifestyle since your childhood, you are lucky person!) Your parents did a good job!
And your writing is very poetic, it'a a pleasure to read you. I felt like I just had a short trip to Sri Lanka. I was there last year for my summer vacation and I enjoyed it a lot. I had a coconut milk each morning and papaya is really delicious there. It's not a fancy place but you feel yourself as a part of the nature.
Thank-you sweet pepper!
Yes I think I am lucky in that respect. So much of our dietary habits are formed growing up, it's true.
I would like to say there was less junk around when I was a kid but it's not true, we just didn't have access to it.
I agree that any store purchased fruit juice is not going to be as good as eating a piece of whole fruit. When I go on a juice program, I make my own juice with my juicer from whole fruits and vegetables. I make the juice each day. The purpose of using the juice is to get the concentrated nutrition to the cells without having to go through much digestion. It is easy for me to do pure juices. It is harder for me to try to follow the McDouggall protocol and try to stay low fat while not putting too much salt in my system. I was able to keep my GFR at 12 this time, but some of my other values got worse such as sodium as I am using a lot of canned foods. I need to start making more stuff from scratch so I don't get the hidden salt and other preservatives that are in canned foods. I will probably start juicing this week.
No, it's not healthy. But it can be a good, harmless snack in place of something else like a chocolate bar or pancakes. It can also be useful for juice fasts. Otherwise you should only eat fruit in their whole form. They really are amazing foods. Nature's way of giving us something that is generally bad (sugar) in such a way that it can actually be good for us. The fibre in fruit slows down the release of sugar in your body and makes you feel fuller while absorbing all those valuable nutrients. You get none of that from fruit juice though. It goes in, blood sugar spikes, and it comes out fairly quickly. Big difference.
I agree that the whole food is best in a way, because thats how it was "designed", however you can use fruit in many ways to get different results. For example in a kale, apple, and lemon juice that I make, there is a whole bunch of kale in there. Way more than I would consume in 1 day, or even two. To be able to drink this and flood my bloodstream and nourish my cells with the juice is a huge benefit. Most of us are deficient in nutrients, and I think juicing can help us to make up for lost time. What are your thoughts?
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James
Follow my journey as I create a newsletter about using plant foods for instant energy and lifelong health. Just reply with “I’m in” and I’ll add you
Im going to agree and disagree on this James. If you are talking about the West when you say "most of us are deficient in nutrients" I don't think I agree. I don't believe "we" in the West need an excess of anything in our diet. Too much of a good thing and all that no matter what it is, is already a problem in the West which causes all sorts of problems, yes even malnutrition. However certainly the latter is not the majority which seems to follow socio economic patterns rather in the West where some diets are skewed towards one group of foods. In the case of malnutrition it's probably carbohydrates and fats.
If I ate that much kale a day I would explode, adding to green house gases in a way not even a cow could match! Unlike a cow my system is just not able to deal with so much raw fibre.
It's the same thing with the sugars and fructose in fruit juices, overkill. If you want to drink your fruit instead slash the amount and dilute with water.
I think whole fruit is an important part of a balanced diet we just need to go easy on convenience fruit juices, even when making them ourselves......I forget but it's something in the order of eight teaspoons of sugar should be our daily limit and that's total sugars. You would be incredibly surprised how much sugar is already lurking in our diets.
Water is my favorite drink. Non fluoridated reverse osmosis water
Reverse osmosis water.....yes perhaps for another post but indeed water is also a mine-field these days ha ha ha! Increasingly it's also been discovered that water in plastic bottles and containers is not at all good for us.
I think for this thread though we can safely say fruit juice can be very healthy but that all depends on the quality and quantity consumed on a daily basis.
Certainly for me Im not too fussed if its a slice of fresh papaya or a small glass of freshly liquidised and chilled papaya juice with breakfast for example, no real difference what so ever.
Indeed… Plastic is very bad for you I have not gotten water from plastic bottles when I can help it for about 13 years now. Bisphenol a is not something I care to consume
Indeed… Plastic is very bad for you I have not gotten water from plastic bottles when I can help it for about 13 years now. Bisphenol a is not something I care to consume
Eat the fruit
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