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"Nutrition scientists link a diet high in added sugar – like those multisyllabic sweeteners in soda – to diabetes, heart disease and possibly even some cancers.

• doitLP 7y ago
  As others have said, it’s not really when pulled out/concentrated as in OJ, date sugar, coconut sugar, or other processed fructose. Plus your body treats fructose like alcohol and most of it gets processed out by the liver in much the same way. Over too long, the liver will look like that of a heavy drinker.
• kcmastrpc 7y ago
  I doubt it's worse, but I keep my carb intake extremely low in general unless I know I'm going to be very active throughout the day.
• rectangletangle 7y ago
  Orange juice isn't actually all that healthy. Many "natural" sugars are bound up with fiber, diluting them lowering their glycemic index. Also IIRC there was some research a few years back that asserted the ratio of different sugar types actually had a significant impact on the metabolism.
• crazygringo 7y ago
  It's not -- or there isn't any clear evidence that there is. What journalists often seem to confuse is that fruit sugars eaten as whole fruit tend to be fine because the amount of sugar you can reasonably eat is quite limited (you're not going to eat 10 apples or oranges), and the sugars are bound up with fiber so are slower to digest, so "fruit sugars" are generically considered to be "fine". Unfortunately that falls on its face when you're talking about juice. Almost nobody is going to eat 8 medium oranges in one sitting, but you might easily drink the resulting 16 oz of juice they produce. In that case it's little different from a Snickers candy bar.
  • thaumasiotes 7y ago
    > Almost nobody is going to eat 8 medium oranges in one sitting, but you might easily drink the resulting 16 oz of juice they produce. There's more to it than that. I was lucky enough in China to encounter a vending machine for fresh orange juice. The machine included a press; you could watch whole oranges roll into the press and juice flow into the cup which was ultimately dispensed. This is great as a novelty, but the juice you got was only very slightly more flavorful than water. No one is going to drink the juice of 8 oranges. What we drink is heavily concentrated, with vastly less water than would have been present in the fruit.
    • aaronblohowiak 7y ago
      Whole Foods has these. Sometimes, the juice is more potent and nuanced than anything pre-packaged. Depends on the oranges that go in!
    • FreeFull 7y ago
      I've had freshly made orange juice and it was very flavourful. I suspect the oranges used in the machine just were particularly watery in the first place.
      • CapitalistCartr 7y ago
        In the United States, "100% pure Orange Juice, not-from-concentrate" can, and does, include adding concentrated juice which intensifies the flavor. It's distilled down a bit, but not reconstituted.
    • leetcrew 7y ago
      honestly I find this a bit hard to believe. when I juice an orange in my kitchen I find the resulting juice to be way more flavorful than anything I can buy in the store (other than fresh-squeezed on premises). I almost want to dilute it with water because the flavor is so bright and tangy. maybe it depends what kind/quality of orange you start with?
    • brookside 7y ago
• zZorgz 7y ago
  Keep in mind it's likely easy to buy orange juice high in added sugar and sweeteners, which yes, isn't that healthy.
• dmix 7y ago
  Fructose from fruit is pretty much the same as glucose sugar as far as your body is concerned. That sentence is incorrect. High-fructose corn syrup has also been shown to be far worse for you than simple fructose and glucose.
  • amluto 7y ago
    I believe that they are processed very differently right after eating.
  • 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
    There is a case to be made to ingest pure dextrose for glycogen replenishment, after a heavy weightlifting session. HFCS contains slightly more fructose than glucose. It doesn’t follow that this would be any worse or better for you than if you were to ingest pure dextrose, fructose, or glucose. If you are ingesting these in high quantities you are damaging your liver and pancreas way worse than even drinking alcohol.
  • ant6n 7y ago
    Fruit != Juice
• gdubs 7y ago
  I had heard somewhere (sorry, too lazy to try and find a source right now — maybe someone else can) that some researchers suspect that fruit carries phytochemicals which signal to the body that sugar is on the way. Idea being that these signals might have an anti diabetic effect — e.g., change the insulin response to the sugar. I have no idea if there’s any validity to this, but it sounded plausible. [edit: it would make some sense, since we evolved alongside fruit.] Would love to hear if anyone else knows more about it.
• ssivark 7y ago
  > Can somebody help me understand how sugar in orange juice is somehow magically healthier than sugar in soda? As far as I know, it's all just glucose and fructose. Reductionist reasoning in a complex system is extremely dangerous. Eg: fruits have sugar mixed in with a lot of fiber. Therefore, the rate at which glucose enters the bloodstream (and the resulting insulin profile) is very different compared to a orange juice or a soda. Taking a step back, the simplest forms of cooking / food processing that humans have done throughout history is by applying physical transformation on food while leaving underlying chemicals mostly invariant. If that did not affect the biochemistry, then food processing would be basically pointless. That wasn’t all done for taste! It is hopelessly naive to believe that biochemistry of a complex organism could be reduced to chemistry of simple constituents like glucose without any regard to context (conditions and other constituents).