The Story

I have a friend who drinks fruit juice everyday. When I say everyday, I mean every single waking day. She loves it.

And she has long believed that it is a healthy alternative to drinking Coke and Varun battery acids (Pepsi, Mirinda).

And I don’t blame her at all. 2020 when I started being interested in health and the science and data around it, I was led to believe that I can dump fizzy drinks and gouge fruit juices with no problem. A quick search on Google will easily recommend fruit juices as a healthy alternative which it is not.

Why is fruit juice bad?

It’s all because of the marketing.

Fruit juice is presented as a healthy alternative to fizzy drinks when in actuality, they both pack in the same amount of sugar. Hence it is easy for someone to believe that they are doing well by drinking fruit juice but they are doing just as much harm to themselves as drinking an equal amount of battery acid, oops, I meant to say Mirinda.

Fruit vs Fruit Juice

Fruits naturally have a lot of sugar in them. A lot of it.

But they also have a lot of fibre. Humans cannot digest fibre naturally so it forms a mesh or a net that lines the small intestines, stopping absorption of a lot of sugar from the fruit.

Hence fruits pack in a lot of sugar but you don’t absorb all of it because of the fibre they contain.

Contrast that with fruit juice which is totally devoid of fibre but packs in the sugar. That mean your body will absorb the sugar, more than you would have had you eaten a fruit of the same juice, and spike your blood glucose levels.

Leaving insulin to do its good but also nasty work which I will explain in a future post.

So what to do?

Too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

Even for water which I recommend drinking loads of, drink too much of it, you get Water Toxicity.

I say this focusing on my friend who was drinking fruit juice everyday. Eating anything everyday, especially in large amounts as many fruit juices come in 1 litre bottles, is simply a red flag.

Hence drinking fruit juice is not bad in moderation but it’s something you have to treat as you treat fizzy drinks. I don’t suppose anyone reading this is drinking Coke everyday (and if you are, bless you).

Conclusion

So no. Fruit juice is not a healthy alternative to Coke and battery acid. Drink fruit juice in the same way you’d want to drink a fizzy drink that you know is spiked with sugars and fructose to make you addicted to it and drink more and more.

Bonus point: Aspartame

A key component of fizzy drinks and fruit juices. It is an artificial sweetener that is 200 times sweeter than sucrose. Sucrose is what we find in table, white sugar.

During one of my clinical rounds, I heard a doctor say that aspartame has been linked with causing cancer. So naturally I gasped and promised myself to not drink them ever again.

But when I did my own research, I found that there haven’t been any conclusive links of aspartame as a carcinogen. So according to current data, this is false but the world of science isn’t perfect anyway.

This is just another point for drinking more water than anything else.😂