In an effort to get healthy, many people increase their intake of fruits and vegetables. Sometimes, they buy 100% fruit juice thinking that it is a healthy addition to their diet. It’s not! Fruit juice is unhealthy to drink and here’s why.
Fruit is much more than just its juice. The other parts of the fruit, including the fiber, are also important for you to consume. When a test was conducted between eating and whole orange and drinking 100% pure orange juice, the conclusion was that the whole orange was an excellent source of nutrition while the orange juice was considered to be nutritionally poor!
To be labeled nutritionally poor, a food item has to have a high caloric intake when compared to the nutrients provided. 100% pure orange juice had 145 calories per serving with only a relatively small amount of Vitamin C and antioxidants! For apple juice, each serving was 165 calories with even less nutrients!
For comparison, a serving of soda is about 140 calories. The conclusion: drinking fruit juice isn’t much better for you than drinking a soda!
If you are scratching your head right now, you might be assuming that 100% pure orange juice is just an orange that has been squeezed into a glass. It’s not. Manufacturers get real liberal in their interpretation 100% juice to the point that they are lying to you.
The problem is, when you juice an orange or an apple, you lose a lot of the flavor. To compensate for this, manufacturers add what they call “flavor packs.” These flavor packs are basically the same fruit juice but with the sugar concentrated to make the juice sweeter. This concentrated sugar increases the calories without increasing the nutritional value!
There’s another reason why it’s important to eat the whole fruit. The sugar in a whole fruit is bound by fibrous structures that break down slowly during digestion. This means that only a small amount of sugar is sent to your liver, which it can handle. But when you drink a glass of fruit juice, a large amount of sugar is sent to your liver at the same time. This overwhelms your liver and that sugar gets turned into fat. If you’re already overweight, drinking fruit juice can be an absolute disaster for your diet.
Some of that fat created from drinking fruit juice gets lodged in your liver and it can build up insulin resistance, which can lead to diabetes! Also drinking two glasses of juice a day was also linked to an increase in gout in women.
When you are thirsty, the best thing to drink is alkaline ionized water. We get ourselves addicted to the sugars and caffeine in flavored coffees and fruit juices and they are very unhealthy for us.
Ionized water, on the other hand, is the perfect thing to drink. It is alkaline so it helps to neutralize acid waste in your body. It is full of antioxidants, which helps is to detoxify. Plus it’s three times more hydrating than regular water because it is micro-clustered.
If you are trying to lose weight, or if you’re just committed to a healthy lifestyle, cut out the fruit juice and replace it with alkaline ionized water. It’ll make a huge difference in your overall health and it’s a commitment worth making!
