Let me reveal a prejudice here: I don’t get juice drinking. I like the occasional V-8 juice and some homemade juices, but from my perspective, juice has lots of calories, little or no fibre and a reduced amount of vitamins. If you ate the fruit itself rather than drinking the juice, you would get fewer calories, more fibre and more vitamins.
Plus you would feel fuller. Can you have a glass of juice every now and then because you like it? Sure, but don’t drink it because you think it’s really good for you. Yes there are some good packaged juices out there but watch out for those with added sugar. And always remember that they add a lot of calories without filling you up. Bottom line: drink juices sparingly; if you love the taste, use a touch of them to flavor your water.
How about Soft Drinks?
Obviously, soft drinks contain lots and lots of sugar. And lately they come in 500ml bottles and cups that you can practically bathe in, so it’s very easy to over consume them. Here’s something else about soft drinks: they can make you fat and not just because they’re loaded with calories. There is something else going on here. Over the past 20 years, soft drink manufacturers (and manufacturers of other sweet products as well) have stopped using cane sugar you know, the white stuff that comes in a bag at the supermarket. They have replaced cane sugar with a sweetener made from corn. Corn sweeteners contain a type of sugar called fructose.
In your body, fructose acts differently than glucose the sugar most commonly found in your system. For example, glucose requires insulin in order to be taken up into cells. Fructose doesn’t. Fructose also reduces circulating leptin levels. Both insulin and leptin play important roles in getting us to quit eating at the end of a meal or snack, so there is some concern that fructose is helping us get fat by allowing us to take in calories without feeling their filling effect. (It just goes to show you how complicated our bodies are too much insulin can make you fat; it turns out that too little may also.)
Fructose consumption in test animals induces insulin resistance, impaired glucose tolerance, high blood pressure and high triglyceride levels. The data in humans are less clear, although there is some evidence that it can affect us the same way it does mice. From my perspective, this is yet another reason to avoid soft drinks. Bottom line: if you like soft drinks, you can drink them on occasion. If you can tolerate the switch to diet, drink that. If not, then think of a soft drink as a treat, like dessert, to be indulged in rarely and savored fully.
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