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The Secret Ingredient In Your Orange Juice
- blackboxxx 15y agoNot sure if this is an urban myth or not, but I've heard Cheese Wiz is actually grey. Orange food coloring is later added to the goo to give it that cheddar color.
- pg 15y agoThe orange color you associate with cheddar is artificial. Originally it was due to annatto, though they may use something else now.
- simonsarris 15y agoIs cheddar usually orange? I think all of the cheddar I have ever bought in NH and VT is a pale yellow. I'm crazy about cheeses, but the only orange cheeses I've ever seen were all very poor brands, unless I'm forgetting something.
- rdl 15y agoIt actually varies by state in the US, and by country. Cheddar cheese is always "cheddar colored", for local values of cheddar color. Varies from off-white to orange.
- smithian 15y agoNo. In my local supermarket, and in every supermarket I have ever been in (live in the Northeast, but have been plenty of other markets in the US and abroad) there is both natural white cheddar and colored cheddar, although sometimes the colored stuff is missing.
- Jach 15y agoPictures are helpful. http://www.pepperidgefarm.com/Images/Products/prdLarge_120538.jpg http://www.pepperidgefarm.com/Images/Products/prdLarge_12053... for Cheddar Goldfish, this is what's usually in stores: http://staticc.wisegeek.com/images/calories/calories-in-medium-cheddar-cheese-s.jpg http://staticc.wisegeek.com/images/calories/calories-in-medi... I (and I suspect most Americans) would never associate something like this with Cheddar Cheese: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Somerset-Cheddar.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Somerset-Cheddar.jpg (or any other pic on the page for that matter, except for "#19": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheddar_cheese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheddar_cheese ) I'll have to try some VT cheddar sometime. I stopped defending cheddar's taste (which is none, though I still eat it) ever since I was exposed to real cheeses in my junior high French class.
- simonsarris 15y agoThanks. I've definitely seen goldfish before but never really associated cheddar with that bright-orange color. I always called those "nuclear cheese" because of how eerily bright it is. I don't recall ever seeing that in normal block-of-cheese form though, but maybe I'm mistaken. In VT and NH if you buy any cheddar at all from a farm it is the color of the image you posted and must of it is very fragrant.
- ak217 15y agoReally? Everywhere I've been in the States the amount of white cheddar is roughly equal to colored cheddar, and in the gourmet cheese section there is rarely any colored cheddar.
- Jach 15y agoHere's another couple images I've found: http://blog.thenickstevens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/cheeseisle.jpg http://blog.thenickstevens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/ch... http://www.flickr.com/photos/claire_waverly/4686708528/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/claire_waverly/4686708528/ I guess I have seen white cheddar, but most often mixed with the yellow/orange coloring people are familiar with. e.g. "cheddar jack": http://www.osceolacheese.com/catalog/images/hickory%20smoked%20cheddar%20jack.gif http://www.osceolacheese.com/catalog/images/hickory%20smoked... In any case I'd bet people associate white cheese more with mozzarella (pizza cheese, cheese stick/string cheese) than cheddar. Another cheddar product I associate with is Mac&Cheese. The gourmet cheese section/island is different! And I agree there's rarely coloured cheese. I suspect few shoppers who go straight to the Cheese Aisle (which is dominated by yellow cheddar/cheddar varieties) even know of its existence, even if they walk by it, let alone dare sample anything new/different/highly priced.
- sliverstorm 15y agoOriginally it was (allegedly) due to beta carotene in cow's milk. The orange coloring was used to mask seasonal variation in cheese coloring (same as how every other food is now carefully color-controlled) and eventually "orange" became a defining cheddar characteristic.
- seandougall 15y agoIt's still annatto, which is also used to color butter (among countless other things).
- johno215 15y agoHmm, Although I don't put this below the food industry to do, it is peculiar that the sources listed are all other blogs. Looking through the blog links I found a NYT article sourced but it said nothing about chemically processed orange products being added to 100% orange juice. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/business/22pepsi.html?scp=1&sq=tropicana%20PepsiCo&st=cse http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/business/22pepsi.html?scp=... Any one have any better sources?
- greenyoda 15y agoHere's a page at the USDA that talks about the deoxygenation of citrus juices for increased shelf life, so at least that part of the article is accurate: http://www.reeis.usda.gov/web/crisprojectpages/207232.html http://www.reeis.usda.gov/web/crisprojectpages/207232.html
- martey 15y agoI don't think that the health conclusions of this piece (don't drink orange juice from the supermarket!) are warranted. All the sources listed in it lead back to Alissa Hamilton's book "Squeezed." While not having read it, all of the information I can find suggest that Hamilton is not trying to suggest that orange juice is unhealthy. For example, this interview in the Boston Globe - http://articles.boston.com/2009-02-22/bostonglobe/29257797_1_orange-juice-vitamin-minute-maid http://articles.boston.com/2009-02-22/bostonglobe/29257797_1... : You'd be better off with a whole orange than a glass of orange juice. It has more fiber and more vitamin C. But I'm not a dietitian. The book is not about whether you should drink orange juice and whether it's healthy. It's about how little consumers know about how popular and - in the case of orange juice - seemingly straightforward foods are produced and the repercussions for agriculture.
- Pointsly 15y agoRegardless of the health conclusions - you can't deny the amount of sugar in single cup - absolutely contributes to the obesity we are all facing.
- palish 15y agoI deny that it contributes to obesity for all people. I believe no one can actually claim people understand nutrition --- in the same way we understand Newtonian physics, for example. I've never cared about what I eat. If I want something, I eat it. When I'm full, I stop. Over the last two years, my weight has stayed between 210lbs and 220lbs. I'm lucky. But I'm also a datapoint. Since some people can simply not care about what they eat, and they don't get fat, then I'd bet money other people can watch what they eat and still get fat. And of course, for other people, watching what they eat will make them skinnier. The point is, everyone is different, and no one can say with a straight face that we understand nutrition well enough to make broad claims like "the amount of sugar in a single cup of orange juice contributes to the obesity we're all facing".
- hollerith 15y agoYeah, "you cannot deny" is drastically overconfident even though a well-to-do, first-world person picked at random is probably better off ingesting less fructose than they currently ingest.
- chopsueyar 15y ago...and natural flavors too! I used an exclamation mark so I must be female. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2010-title21-vol2/xml/CFR-2010-title21-vol2-sec101-22.xml http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2010-title21-vol2/xml/CFR-2...
- rmason 15y agoHate to be cynical but I suspect the whole point of the article is to sell you on buying a juicer. The domain is owned by a copy writing firm called http://www.wonderworkingwords.com/ http://www.wonderworkingwords.com/ . I can't prove it but I am willing to wager that a juicer firm commissioned the article. The firms motto after all is 'words that sell'.
- crikli 15y agoFollow the money for all of this food-related propaganda and you'll find an industry funding it that stands to benefit somehow.
- scotch_drinker 15y agoSeriously? The author says you're better off eating only food you grow yourself or that you can verify the origins of. I don't think that's an industry lobby's viewpoint.
- sorbus 15y agoDoes the fertilizer industry have a lobby?
- Jach 15y agoAs others have pointed out, there are a bunch of food processing companies around like the Magic Bullet. They don't really care where you get your food from, but if they can convince you to buy/grow more whole food instead of juice or apple sauce or whatever it is you normally buy from the store, they stand to profit because people still want their juice. There are also knife companies, garden care, etc. Edit: The author has posted here and claims only selling ad space, so it may not necessarily be this author, but it's still aimed at getting viewers and ad revenue. Follow the money trail is indeed good advice, of course just because money's involved doesn't mean there's a problem.
- crikli 15y agoWith respect, it is an industry lobby's viewpoint, and it belongs to the organic food industry. Organic farming is not financially sustainable at scale because the costs of production are far too high. There is a very low ceiling, relatively speaking, to the amount of crops that can be produced. Therefore in order to stay profitable organic food has to be sold at very significant premium. Buyers will not pay this premium unless they're convinced that the cheaper, non-organic alternative is an inferior product regardless of whether it actually is or not. Technically speaking, the author is right: we're better off only eating foods for which we can establish provenance. But for most folks that idea is completely unrealistic...unless you subscribe to the organic concept, where food has a pedigree of sorts, or is at least marketed as such. Full disclosure: I live in Nebraska and grew up surrounded by agriculture. I worked farming corn/soybeans/milo from the age of thirteen through college. My wife's family is a fifth-generation farm family.
- sudonim 15y agoTldr; 100% juice like tropicana is deoxygenated to remove all the flavor and make it last a long time and then natural flavor is added to make the taste consistent. They shouldn't be able to say its 100% juice. WTF.
- sliverstorm 15y agoWhy not? When your blood delivers oxygen to your cells, it becomes deoxygenated. Is it no longer blood? If the natural flavor they add is made of juice (orange or not), and they add it to juice, is the result no longer juice?
- athst 15y agoWhen the package says "100% juice," I think most people assume that means that the juice is squeezed from the orange and it goes into the carton without any processing or additives. I'm sure that's the impression that they're trying to give by putting that on the label. The fact that this isn't the case, and that the juice is actually highly processed in a very unnatural manner, is pretty alarming.
- jff 15y agoWithout any processing or additives? I'm for the most part quite glad the juice and milk I buy at the store has been processed--without pasteurization and homogenization, for example, milk would be significantly riskier AND less convenient.
- grannyg00se 15y agoYou may be glad that your 100% pure orange juice is in fact highly processed orange juice product, but most people would be rather shocked to find out what is happening. And you may not be correct about the pasteurization of milk. There are many who feel that natural unpasteurized milk is healthier. Pasteurization is perhaps more necessary in a mass production environment, but it is not necessarily better for our bodies. This story adds more proof for me that we should consume nothing that "comes in a box", so to speak.
- jsdalton 15y agoLately I've started drinking OJ from a brand called Evolution. They claim to just squeeze it and bottle it, more or less. They use cold pasteurization, a.k.a. irradiation, which doesn't bother me and helps preserve the taste. I've also found all I really need is a small glass in the morning. It's quite expensive, however.
- Cushman 15y agoSecret ingredient? It's sugar water. This is like talking about the chemicals they put into Coke... Yeah, they're in there, and maybe they shouldn't be, but that's not why you drink it and that's not why it's bad for you. Edit: Downvote why? Sugars in 10oz Coca-Cola classic: 33g. Sugars in 10oz Tropicana Pure Premium original orange juice: 28.1g. [1] http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-coca-cola-classic-i98047 http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-coca-cola-classic-i98... [2] http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-tropicana-orange-juice-original-i115273 http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-tropicana-orange-juic...
- darklajid 15y agoThe articles was about 100% juice. Unless your system of labeling works a lot different in your part of the world you cannot add things to juice and still call it 100% juice. The blog mentions a ~trick~ to recreate a well-known and stable flavor by adding orange-derived chemicals - but you still cannot add 'sugar water'. Yes, that stuff contains a lot of sugar. But so does an orange from your own garden (still healthier if you eat the whole fruit, not just the 'sugar water' aka fruit juice).
- Cushman 15y agoI understood the article fine. But who cares if it's 100% juice or not? 100% juice is bad. Coca-Cola wouldn't be better for you if it were 100% sugar and carbonated water. You make a great point about raw fruit— Sugars in a whole orange: 12g. That is to say, a glass of orange juice has the sugar water from two oranges, without the fiber that blocks absorption and sends satiety signals after an orange and a half. Clearly these are comparable things.
- darklajid 15y agoLook, we agree on the 'usefulness' of juice. And I didn't down-vote your original comment, merely tried to explain what might seem weird about your post. Now you're asking 'Who cares if it's 100% juice or not': Well - that's what this article was about. It wasn't about how healthy fruit juice is (as I said before, we agree that it's not a good idea), it was about labeling something 100% (which is interpreted as 'natural' and 'pure' by customers) fruit juice while doing weird and counter intuitive things to the substance in question. So - this article is exactly for all the people that care about whether it's 100% juice they are consuming.
- socksy 15y agoIf this is the case, wouldn't it be cheaper to take sweetened water, add food colouring and flavouring? I assume someone's probably doing it already.
- jerf 15y agoIt would be. But then they have to call it something other than "100% Florida Orange Juice".
- Jach 15y agoOr, like they have done with the word "Natural" and its qualifiers, lobby for being able to advertise what normal people would call falsehoods.
- maukdaddy 15y agoIt's called Sunny Delight. And you would be shocked to learn how many people think Sunny D is real orange juice.
- alanfalcon 15y agoI remember watching a Sunny Delight commercial as a kid. Someone is digging through the fridge listing the drink options... "We got OJ, Purple Stuff, Soda... And Sunny D!" Before that commercial, I was one of those people who thought Sunny D was OJ. Call it bad advertising: I looked at Sunny D as "Orange Stuff" after that ad and no longer wanted it. EDIT: I guess I'm not the only one who remembers the commercials, there's a spoof on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiOaBTpKqnk&NR=1&feature=fvwp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiOaBTpKqnk&NR=1&feat... (and of course the real thing is on YouTube if you care to find it)
- socksy 15y agoI remember Sunny Delight as a kid (shows how young I am, I guess), but that didn't taste anything like orange juice, or the flavourings they put in to orange juice. More like squash? It's so sweet that you would be unlikely to confuse with actual orange juice, surely?
- yew 15y agoI can't say I really care about whether or not orange juice is "natural" - it's all made of chemicals at the end of the day, so the only thing that really matters to me is which ones, and how much - but the degree to which truth-in-advertising has essentially ceased to exist does bother me. Exactly how much do I have to modify something before I can't advertise it as "100% Natural!" anyway? Speaking of which, can anyone provide a good (comprehensive) source for information on the subject from a legal perspective?
- sliverstorm 15y agoWhy do I drink juice? Because in the morning on my way out the door, I am unlikely to spend the time eating an orange. Because fresh cranberries are nasty. My own practice to try and avoid extremely fabricated foods: buy the in-house brand. While it will never be 100% pure orange juice squeezed yesterday, they don't have a brand identity to defend, so they seem to engage in fewer food-processing antics.
- bfe 15y agoI stopped drinking juice a few years ago, but had the same annoyance at spending any extra time on complicated foods like oranges in the morning. My solution is I usually eat a handful of fresh strawberries as part of my breakfast - they are denser in vitamin c than oranges, and don't require unwrapping and getting juice all over your hands.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- robchez 15y agoFavourite Home-Made 'Juice' Water Kefir[1]. Why? Can Make massive batches at home. Add any fruit. The bacteria eats majority of the sugar. It's Fizzy. Slightly Alcholic. [1] http://nourishedkitchen.com/water-kefir/ http://nourishedkitchen.com/water-kefir/
- seandougall 15y agoSigh... I for one am getting extremely tired of people freaking out because they see organic chemical names among the ingredients that go into food. Lots and lots of perfectly ordinary and harmless chemical compounds (e.g. ethyl butyrate, valencine) have scary-sounding names, and lots of toxic ones don't. If you want to educate yourself, pick up a copy of _On Food and Cooking_ by Harold McGee, and learn about what those compounds actually are. Or you can run around screaming about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide. I for one would not be the slightest bit bothered if somebody added orange juice to my orange juice.
- alexmat 15y agoI actually found the article interesting. I've always wondered why fresh squeezed juice tastes so much better, but always assumed it was because it was so fresh. I didn't realize the manufacturers mess around with the flavor. Now I'm curious what packaged OJ in Brazil tastes like.
- Tichy 15y agoI don't think this is about freaking out over chemical compounds, it is freaking out over mislabeling and artificial food, and trusting the food industry.
- praptak 15y ago"I for one would not be the slightest bit bothered if somebody added orange juice to my orange juice." Me neither but the deoxygenated-reflavored juice just tastes crappy, so I'm all for a law obligating the producers to disclose this practice and stop misleading people with the "100% natural juice not from concentrate" bullshit.
- lurker14 15y agoI find that a "100% natural orange" tastes pretty crappy if it sits on a shelf for 2 weeks before I eat it. Plenty of 100% natural stuff tastes bad. You might further be shocked to learn that all-natural organic farm fresh-squeezed juice might have actually been pressed out of the fruit by a mechanical juicer that ruins the test, and not squeezed out by loving hands. What's wrong with a product label that calls things what they actually are, instead redefining all nice sounding words to be "stuff that tastes good to praptak"?
- chememit 15y agoChemical engineer's perspective: This is interesting. I'd learned about the chemical additives required for flavor in from-concentrate orange juice, since the dehydration ("concentration") by nature removes a lot of the more volatile chemicals that give OJ it's flavor. Without looking into it, I'd guess the deoxygenation process works by heating and pulling vacuum to lower oxygen solubility, which would also have the same consequence of removing the flavor compounds. That said, the addition of chemical flavoring agents is completely irrelevant to health. Again I know more about process design than health science, but I do know that the flavoring chemicals that get removed and added are in such trace amounts that they likely have no health consequence, whether present or absent. In fact, many of the compounds are actually toxic at high concentrations. And towards the "don't drink juice at all" argument, I feel like the world would be in a far better place health-wise if everyone drank juice instead of soda. At least juice is a fair representation of fruit, while soda is basically fructose dissolved in phosphoric acid. (The article mentions pectin and fiber as missing fruit components in juice - this is true as both are solids likely removed by juicing, but pectin is just a sugar polymer like starch, and fiber is just indigestible solids...nothing special health-wise). The argument reminds me of the people telling everyone not to go to college, just because in their specific case they didn't need it. Potentially decent advice for a small, already advantaged subset of the population, but horrible advice for everyone else.
- philwelch 15y agoThe problem is that without the solids and the eating involved in eating a fruit, it's way easier to overdo it and take in too many calories.
- briggsbio 15y agoMy point exactly. How do you get juice? You pulverize and squeeze it out! So going the extra mile to extract oils for slight flavoring is bad, how? Juice is not as good for you as whole fruit. Fine. 20 ounces of any fruit has too much sugar (and would make you shit sideways) anyway. Everything in moderation. If you're going to drink a glass of Oj, which would you rather have, one they deoxygenate or dehydrate? Wholly or partially? I'll personally take deoxygenation over dehydrations. And the fruit juice industry's method for deoxygenation is not, to my knowledge, done via a full nitrogen sparge (bubbling nitrogen or other inert gas through the liquid to lower dissolved oxygen) or via a membrane contactor deaeration system (used in my field, drug dev, and semiconductor applications - check out http://liqui-cel.com http://liqui-cel.com, I've built these systems in a cGMP facility, they're awesome). It's simply vacuuming down the head space in a vat, and maybe replacing it with an inert gas (or just leaving it at negative pressure to reduce soluble oxygen as stated above. I'll take that over an OJ that has more in common with Tang than the fruit that bears it's name, anyway. So what if they tweak the flavor with a bit of ground orange to keep flavor consistent?
- ZoFreX 15y ago"You see, these “flavor packs are made from orange by-products — even though these ‘by-products’ are so chemically manipulated that they hardly qualify as ‘by-products’ any more.” (source) Since they’re made from by-products that originated in oranges, they can be added to the orange juice without being considered an “ingredient,” despite the fact that they are chemically altered." Does anyone know if this applies within the EU, and more specifically, the UK? I believe our labelling laws are stricter than this.
- shaggyfrog 15y agoI read all this almost a year ago on CBC's website: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2010/09/08/f-whats-in-it-orange-juice.html http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2010/09/08/f-whats-in-it... I stopped buying orange juice entirely because of it. "Perfume packs"... gross.
- smithian 15y agoI'm surprised that most of the reaction and commentary on this seems to be about either 1. the vague health claims that fresh-squeezed is better than old OJ enhanced with flavoring or 2. the sugar debate What I want to know is, why should I pay $4.29 for a carton of old flavorless juice enhanced with a flavoring cocktail, rather than $5.99 for fresh squeezed? I personally don't see the value proposition in the Tropicana any more, and while I have been buying the fresh squeezed kind (that they make from the oranges in the store) I definitely won't be buying the Tropicana/Florida's Natural again. I think if this was more well known there would be a lot fewer people willing to plonk down premium money for a fake premium product in the future.
- zwieback 15y agoI'm not a juice-drinker myself but I'd like a little more detail on what is actually done to the by-products. I think one thing people forget is that for most of us the choice isn't between natural/industrial, it's the choice between industrial and nothing, at least most of the year. Can you grow oranges in your backyard? In Oregon I can't and I hate grass juice.
- hsuresh 15y agoThere is a fascinating documentary - Botany of Desire http://video.pbs.org/video/1283872815/ http://video.pbs.org/video/1283872815/. The video shows that even fruits are grown in ways so as to make them taste better, and therefore more consumption.
- yhager 15y agoThis was covered in a few blogs before, Here's an example from fooducate: http://www.fooducate.com/blog/2009/05/31/on-orange-juice/ http://www.fooducate.com/blog/2009/05/31/on-orange-juice/ There is also a response from the Florida dept. of Citrus there.
- haridsv 15y agoArticle says deoxidation causes the orange juice to become bland, so what happens to the original sugars? I can understand adding flavors, but that would not bring back the sweetness, if the deoxidation destroyed them, so do they add extra sugars as well?
- mannicken 15y agoOh, hey, bad news: even if you don't drink juice, never have any sugar, and spend all your time counting calories -- you're still going to die at some point. Sorry, had to ruin the whole health obsession parade here. This is coming from a guy who counted his calories, and still logs his weight every morning, and freaks out if he's not unhealthily skinny. I just ate an apple and now I'm obese (in my mind anyway) and I weigh 79 kg. I used to feel skinny when I weighed 95kg but ran 6.5 miles. Funny, isn't it?
- unicornporn 15y agoi drink brämhults ( http://www.bramhults.se/ http://www.bramhults.se/ ). at least they taste different every time.