I 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... :
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.
Hate 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/ . 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'.
Good news! I'm not an industry shill. I'm a stay at home mom who homeschools my three kids and earns money blogging. If you read the disclosure statements on my site, you'll see that I never write paid posts or content. I do sell advertising, though, (from which I make a pretty penny, thank you) and the link is a link to a page full of text ads. I used to be a copywriter, but haven't done that since my blog took off about three years ago. It is true that I operate this blog under the business name I created for my copywriting business, but that's mostly so that I don't have to create a new company or tax ID.
Did we read the same article? The one I read promoted eating fruit over drinking juice:
"Juice removed from the fruit is just concentrated fructose without any of the naturally-occurring fiber, pectin, and other goodies that make eating a whole fruit good for you [...] So, my first piece of advice is to get out of the juice habit altogether. It’s expensive, and it’s not worth it."
Chemical 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.
My 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, 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?
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.
The 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).
Sigh... 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.
I 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.
"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.
I 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.
Lately 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.
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.
Here'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:
Tldr; 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.
I 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?
"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.
Not 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.
Oh, 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?
I'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.
Article 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?
Why 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.
I 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.
I'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.
There is a fascinating documentary - Botany of Desire 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.
[+] [-] martey|14 years ago|reply
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|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmason|14 years ago|reply
The domain is owned by a copy writing firm called 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'.
[+] [-] KristenM|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pizzaburger|14 years ago|reply
"Juice removed from the fruit is just concentrated fructose without any of the naturally-occurring fiber, pectin, and other goodies that make eating a whole fruit good for you [...] So, my first piece of advice is to get out of the juice habit altogether. It’s expensive, and it’s not worth it."
[+] [-] Tichy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crikli|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chememit|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] briggsbio|14 years ago|reply
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, 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?
[+] [-] philwelch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjwright|14 years ago|reply
That's possibly the most wrong statement in this entire discussion. Fibre is a critical part of your diet; without enough of the stuff, pooping sucks.
[+] [-] Cushman|14 years ago|reply
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-i98...
[2] http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-tropicana-orange-juic...
[+] [-] darklajid|14 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] seandougall|14 years ago|reply
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|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praptak|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Tichy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsdalton|14 years ago|reply
It's quite expensive, however.
[+] [-] johno215|14 years ago|reply
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=...
Any one have any better sources?
[+] [-] greenyoda|14 years ago|reply
http://www.reeis.usda.gov/web/crisprojectpages/207232.html
[+] [-] sudonim|14 years ago|reply
They shouldn't be able to say its 100% juice. WTF.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] yew|14 years ago|reply
Speaking of which, can anyone provide a good (comprehensive) source for information on the subject from a legal perspective?
[+] [-] ZoFreX|14 years ago|reply
Does anyone know if this applies within the EU, and more specifically, the UK? I believe our labelling laws are stricter than this.
[+] [-] blackboxxx|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mannicken|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] socksy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maukdaddy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smithian|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yhager|14 years ago|reply
There is also a response from the Florida dept. of Citrus there.
[+] [-] haridsv|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|14 years ago|reply
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|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zwieback|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shaggyfrog|14 years ago|reply
I stopped buying orange juice entirely because of it. "Perfume packs"... gross.
[+] [-] hsuresh|14 years ago|reply