Fruit is good for you; fruit-juice is mostly sugar and water, and what’s more, getting your calories from liquids does not invoke your satiety response meaning that you stay hungry even after consuming crazy amounts of calories.
Even fresh juice. Even “cold pressed” juice.
Don’t believe me, believe U Virginia endocrinology professor Heather Ferris, Joslin Diabetes Center pediatrics investigator Elvira Isganaitis, and Joslin Diabetes in Pregnancy Center director Florence Brown, writing in the Washington Post.
At first glance, it is reasonable to think that juice has health benefits. Whole fruit is healthy, and juice comes from fruit, so it must be healthy, too. But when you make juice, you leave some of the most wholesome parts of the fruit behind. The skin on an apple, the seeds in raspberries and the membranes that hold orange segments together — they are all good for you. That is where most of the fiber, as well as many of the antioxidants, phytonutrients, vitamins and minerals are hiding. Fiber is good for your gut; it fills you up and slows the absorption of the sugars you eat, resulting in smaller spikes in insulin. When your body can no longer keep up with your need for insulin, Type 2 diabetes can develop.
Finally, when you drink your calories instead of eating them, your brain doesn’t get the same “I’m full” signal that it does from solid food, even though you wind up consuming far more calories in the process. Whereas an orange may contain 45 calories, an eight-ounce glass of orange juice contains 110 calories, and a large kale, banana and orange juice blend at a leading juice chain contains 380 calories. We always counsel patients to chew their food; people tend to overconsume liquid calories. In addition, you might feel full immediately after drinking a glass of juice or a fresh smoothie, but that sensation goes away quickly as the liquid quickly empties out of your stomach, and many of those calories you just drank don’t get counted in your body’s internal calorie counter contributing to that bulging waistline the gym was supposed to help fix. When researchers gave adults an apple to eat — either as a whole fruit, fresh applesauce, apple juice or apple juice with the fiber added back — followed 15 minutes later by a meal, on the day they ate the apple, they ate fewer calories at the meal than if they consumed the same number of calories from applesauce or apple juice. The chewing really counts.
People think juice is good for them. They’re wrong.
[Heather Ferris, Elvira Isganaitis and Florence Brown/Washington Post]
(via Skepchick)