Dear Miss Sippy Cup:
Juice: is it a healthful drink providing vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals? A sugar bomb threatening your child’s teeth and health? Depending on who you ask, you may get startlingly different opinions.
Let’s consider the facts.
To a registered dietitian, juice means a drink that is 100 percent from fruit. However, in practice that isn’t the same jargon used by everyone. Plenty of parents, and by proxy their children, use “juice” to mean anything from actual fruit juice, to any sort of sugary drink. While it is simple to affix the same name to both, Kool-Aid and orange juice don’t contain the same nutritional bounty.
Whole fruit is an important part of a healthy, balanced diet. When you squeeze fruit to make juice, it is almost as good, but you lose the fiber. Fiber helps us prevent heart disease, manage our appetite and weight and keeps our gastrointestinal tract moving smoothly. Without fiber, our brain doesn’t register the calories consumed as well.
The other important consideration with juice is the portion. At my house we have some glasses that we inherited from my grandmother and are quite tiny, they’re about 4 ounces. I used to scoff at their single-slurp portion and reach for something much larger. Turns out grandma was right: 4 ounces is all we should have at once, especially for children.
How much juice is in a single orange? Not a whole heck of a lot. When I squeezed one orange with all of my might, I only got one-third cup. Consider that the next time you slurp down 16 ounces of juice, it may be the same number of calories as eating six whole oranges. Better than six cokes or six cookies, absolutely, but still leaves room for balance.
Does it matter if the juice is from concentrate? Not really. Concentrating simply removes some of the water so that there is less product to package and ship. When you add the water according to the package directions, the amount of sugar doesn’t change.
What about that sugar? Most of us are consuming too much sugar. However, fruit is a package deal with lots of other vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals. We don’t want to rule out fruit as a nutritious food — just focus on whole fruit more than juice.
Take away note: enjoy juice that is 100 percent from fruit in small portions. Focus on whole fruit and water the rest of the day
For more information and to make an appointment to work on your health goals, visit Grass Roots Nutrition, LLC owned by Holly Larson, Registered Dietitian. Visit Holly online at www.hollylarsonrd.com and follow her on facebook at www.facebook.com/hollylarsonmsrd. Have a delicious, healthy day!
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