Is Fruit Juice good?

Researchers at Tulane University showed that eating fruit helps to prevent diabetes, while drinking fruit juices increases risk (Diabetes Care, July 2008). They analyzed diets of 71,346 women enrolled in the Nurses Study. Increasing intake of whole fruit by three servings a day lowered risk for diabetes by 18%, while a serving of fruit juice each day increased risk by 18%.

The food that we eat passes into our stomach and must remain there until it is turned into a liquid soup. No solid food is allowed to pass into our intestines. This delay prevents blood sugar levels from rising too high. However, sugar in drinks can pass directly into our intestines to cause an immediate rise in blood sugar. This can cause sugar to stick to the surface of cell membranes and damage them to cause the side effects of diabetes which include blindness, deafness, heart attacks, strokes, and so forth. It makes no difference whether the sugared drink is "junk food" such as a soft drink, or a supposedly healthful fruit juice.

If drinking fruit juice alone is bad to health, what about if we drink fruit juice while eating other foods?

Fruit juice taken with cereal or other foods will be absorbed slower than fruit juice by itself, but will still cause higher blood sugar levels than if we did not drink the fruit juice. Smoothies are halfway between juice and whole fruit. The more the fruit is liquified, the faster its sugar is absorbed.

Scientists are frantically trying to explain the marked increase in diabetes, severity of diabetes, deaths from diabetes, increase in heart attacks, increase in obesity and so forth over the last 50 years in the United States. While the questions have not been answered yet, refined carbohydrates, particularly in liquid form, are suspect. Sugar-water does not suppress hunger the way that sugar in solid food does, and sugar-water causes the highest rises in blood sugar.

In a nutshell:
Consume fruit in whole and its original form to get its nutrients.

End of posting~

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