Freshly Squeezed: The Truth About Orange Juice in Boxes
civileats.com
civileats.com
IMO, the real treat is fresh squeezed grapefruit juice, not orange. Fresh grapefruit juice tastes nothing whatsoever like the stuff they sell in markets, and has a sublime flavor that's both refreshing and delicious.
As a kid, I was a fruit maniac, my favourites were Granny Smith green apples, grapefruit, and really strong, sour oranges (we knew someone who sold them in huge bags from their house, I've never tasted anything like them since, my mother made incredible juice from them too). I never realized they're all on the not-so-sweet side until reading the "Fruit is evil"-type comments here. Also I loved grapes from the vine outside my window, passionfruit, mangoes, strawberries, (all home-grown), and peaches, pears, rockmelon, honeydew, nectarines...gee I'm making myself hungry.
Could you elaborate more on this, or link me to a place where I can read more about it?
The most recent outbreak of citrus canker was discovered in Miami, Dade County, Florida, on Sept. 28, 1995, by Louis Willio Francillon, a Florida Department of Agriculture agronomist. Despite eradication attempts, by late 2005, the disease had been detected in many places distant from the original discovery, for example, in Orange Park, 315 miles (500 km) away. In January 2000, the Florida Department of Agriculture adopted a policy of removing all infected trees and all citrus trees within a 1900-ft radius of an infected tree in both residential areas and commercial groves. Previous to this eradication policy, the department eradicated all citrus trees within 125 ft of an infected one. The program ended in January 2006 following a statement from the USDA that eradication was not feasible"
https://www.businessinsider.com/blackcurrant-america-vs-euro...
The juice had barely any orange flavor at all. I concluded that fresh-squeezed orange juice is overwhelmingly just water.
This suggests that it is in fact distinguishable from Coca Cola.
California oranges are for eating and have a clear, less sweet juice. And they don't produce much juice at all per orange. Florida oranges are completely different and are very fibrous and essentially inedible as a whole. But if you put them through a squeezer, they will make delicious, orange colored, sweet orange juice in huge quantities. Very much like the "fresh squeezed Florida orange juice" you get at the grocery store. Although, of course, much better. They aren't adding or concentrating that juice at all. It really comes out rich and sweet like that.
There are proper names for the different California and Florida variants, but they are generally colloquially distinguished that way.
It's strange, but I have never seen juicing oranges for sale outside of Florida. They are not as pretty and will appear splotchy and less bright, glossy orange. They don't look appealing on their own.
Coca Cola contains caffeine, which oranges decidedly do not.
Personally I hate pure caffeine. I find cocoa powder way smoother / less jittery, and generally less fatiguing.
Edit: sorry, I see, now, you wrote whole. Just swallow the No-Doz. But, again, while cocoa beans or powder for me.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4045306/ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100330151949.h... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3519311/
If you drink a big glass of apple juice, you get the sugar load of eating multiple apples and get none of the fiber. It's basically like drinking soda.
I get what you're saying, and I'm not claiming juice is healthy. But it's certainly heathier than soda. Whole fruit is, of course, far healthier than juice
Then do we have any studies to suggest soda contains "bad" stuff that juice doesn't.. I feel like we often associated natural things with being healthy, without necessary justification :)
What are you basing that on?
> Then do we have any studies to suggest soda contains "bad" stuff that juice doesn't
Probably.
Look at a few labels of various sodas. You'll often find things like phosphoric acid, artificial colours, artificial preservatives, caffeine, artificial sweeteners etc.
Are these the worse things in the world? Probably not.
Are many of these things good for you? Probably not.
Do they do more harm than good? Possibly.
> I feel like we often associated natural things with being healthy
I feel like we often look at nutritional labels and draw conclusions based off of macronutrients/calories - without much contemplation of the ingredients
This is still just the Natural = Good, Artificial = Bad fallacy. You can't just list some stuff with chemically sounding names and say "look - scary bad chemicals!". What specifically are you claiming is bad?
You went from "soda has other bad things in it" to "probably, possibly, maybe" as soon as you had to be more specific.
I didn't say "look - scary bad chemicals!", you did.
> What specifically are you claiming is bad?
I provided a non-exhaustive list of things previously. You seem aware of that, so I'm not quite sure what you're asking here. If the list isn't specific enough, what were you looking for?
> You went from "soda has other bad things in it" to "probably, possibly, maybe" as soon as you had to be more specific.
Sure. I usually don't speak in definite terms - especially when I haven't looked up things of this nature and studies of these particular ingredients for years - probably over a decade. So I'm going off memory.
Feel free to research various ingredients in soda that fall under the categories I've listed (and beyond) and refute them being bad with data. Otherwise, you just aren't being very specific
Edit:
> This is still just the Natural = Good, Artificial = Bad fallacy
To be clear, I am not making that argument. I do not believe this, and this is a miscategorization of my point.
Soda is not equally as healthy/the same as juice. Whether marginally, or not, my point is that juice is healthier than soda
> Soda is not equally as healthy/the same as juice. Whether marginally, or not, my point is that juice is healthier than soda
I said almost, there is of course some tiny amount of dietary fiber in orange juice, and vitamin C (which would only have an effect if you were deficient). The downsides due to the large amount of sugar, and acid on your teeth would be roughly the same for both.
> what were you looking for? "artificial colours, artificial preservatives, artificial sweeteners"
Which ones? Your repeated use of the word artificial is why I believe you are succumbing to the "artificial = bad" fallacy.
> "phosphoric acid" From Wikipedia: "Products such as soft drinks that contain phosphoric acid pose no threat to human health in general."
I'm not going to do any more research than this, I only have so much energy for internet comment arguments, but feel free to provide justification for your claims.
I'm very tempted to invoke Hitchens Razor here.
I opted to generalize in those instances. As there are a multitude of artificial colours/preservatives/sweeteners used in the soda industry.
Sure I could have said E150d/E102 instead of artificial colours. Or sodium benzoate/etda instead of artificial preservatives. Or acesulfame potassium/sucralose instead of artificial sweeteners.
However, someone could then point out "well X mainstream soda I drink doesn't have all those". Which could be accurate, as the formulas and ingredients of sodas vary.
However, the vast majority of mainstream sodas use at least one of those _types_ of ingredients.
Listing them all out felt unnecessary, I assumed the reader would have heard of or seen an example(s) of each/some and understand my point.
There are a few others per category that are widely used in the soda industry, so it would be a decently long list - to the point where such a list would likely detract from the point (or not, from your perspective)
Edit:
> "phosphoric acid" From Wikipedia: "Products such as soft drinks that contain phosphoric acid pose no threat to human health in general."
Phosphoric acid has been linked to kidney stones and osteoporosis. Does that mean everyone who drinks a coke will get a kidney stone and break their limbs? No.
If you could avoid drinking a coke/mountain dew every morning and have fruit juice instead, would you live a radically healthier life? Probably not, but it's healthier.
As I have mentioned earlier, it could just be marginally, but I think it's quite strange to suggest they are equally as heathy/bad as each other - which you appear to support
Be specific.
How many apples' worth of sugar is in a 8/12/20 ounce serving of juice?
- apple juice has ~10g of sugar per 100ml; that's ~35g per 12 US fluid ounces.
- Google tells me that apples (variety is unspecified) have 10g of sugar per 100g. 100g is a plausible weight for a single apple, so that's ~10g per apple.
Juice is pretty much instant.. Where as an apple takes time to break down, even if you chew well :)
FWIW, citrus peel is a fairly valuable commodity since it's the raw material for production of limonene, which is a really good and biodegradable degreaser. IIRC it was discovered by NASA searching for a solvent for cleaning the space shuttle.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261757046_Effect_of... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/29844096/
I’ve seen multiple studies suggesting otherwise, sugar being in general responsible for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
That assertion will also be difficult to swallow for anybody that ever attempted a Keto diet. I can talk from my own experience with Keto, when I binge ate butter on cheese (aka fat bombs). I did not lose any weight and yet my fatty liver was gone after the 3 months I was on it. Also all my liver’s ALT and AST levels are perfect. And I must insist on this point: no weight loss was involved.
Also note that the study you’re linking, with 38 subjects observed for 3 weeks, is statistically insignificant and probably flawed, as small studies tend to be. When changing somebody’s macros, there’s an adaptation period involved and 3 weeks is not enough.
The funny thing about all claims regarding the negative effects of saturated fats is that:
(1) saturated fat was a major caloric source throughout all of human history and yes, we know what humans ate in the Paleolithic
(2) human fat itself is saturated, you know, the one the body starts consuming when hungry
Humans are equipped to efficiently digest saturated fats and starchy plants rich in glucose. Well actually humans only need about 600 calories from carbs, any excess is converted to fat.
Fructose on the other hand is completely unnecessary, when digested it is converted to fat or glucose and it’s toxic in high doses. You can live your whole life without eating another gram of sugar. You can’t say that about saturated fat ;-)
Funny enough you can make the same argument about the other public enemy, salt. You will literally die without enough sodium in your diet and yet the healthcare industry is fixated on vilifying salt, but not sugar. A huge double standard that has no basis in actual science.
I'm actually not against saturated fat, I'm just not against sugar, or any other macronutrient. The food matters more than the macronutrient composition. If your argument against sugar is that it's converted to fat, I don't really follow, especially given you're a proponent of a high fat diet.
Would like to see those studies om sugar and fatty liver (compared to other macronutrients).
Also, why do you believe saturated fat is necessary? Okinawas eat a very low saturated fat diet (traditionally) and have great longevity.
I have a problem with binge eating and I think it is emotional.
But I bet you didn’t lose weight on the keto diet because you were eating too much cheese or something like that; perhaps not enough exercise to keep a decent weekly calorie deficit. That’s where you went wrong.
I agree on binge eating yeah but so is anorexia or bulemia.
It's the nutrients to volume to "how easy to gulp a gallon" ration that matters, not merely having nutrients.
For health benefits. For the propensity to make you fat, the "easy to gulp tons of calories quickly" is also interesting regardless of the nutritional value of what you gulp on. Water for example has no nutrients and no calories, but even so it's better than an orange juice diet wise.
You need to point your gaze downward. There are a great many children in the US who are given a sippy full of apple juice every waking minute of their lives - and they have the body mass to go with it. I'm sure they all graduate to soda or "sports drinks" by the time they're in your field of view.
However, insulin response is not just about total calories. Fruit juice is at the extreme edge becase of how rapidly you can consume and absorb sugar.
You have whether you realized it or not. Fruit juice has just as much sugar as soda and none of the fiber from fruit that decreases your absorption. There are millions of people going to the gym and trying not to eat onion rings when the orange juice (or cranberry, or coconut water, etc.) they drink is what is actually keeping them fat.
I don't want to stop the anti-carb echo chamber, though, because it's helped a lot of people.
The Wikipedia entry for fructose[1] has this to say:
Excessive consumption of fructose may contribute to insulin resistance, obesity, elevated LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, leading to metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
So it would appear fructose does cause an insulin response.
However, it then goes on to say:
Uptake of fructose by the liver is not regulated by insulin. However, insulin is capable of increasing the abundance and functional activity of GLUT5 in skeletal muscle cells. (emphasis mine)
GLUT5 is also expressed in skeletal muscle,testis, kidney, fat tissue (adipocytes), and brain.[2]
A raw orange is 31-40.
Orange juice is 46-54.
Coca-cola is 63.
I think juice may be a _LITTLE_ better than soda. I still choose to drink neither, and think I am better off for it.
You're making a very good choice. I would encourage you and others to consider the raw oranges 31-40 GI as, itself, very high and akin to something like dessert or a special treat.
Or, to expand on what a child of your post expressed:
soda < juice < fruit < ... < ... < vegetables/nuts
hn voting isn't working. pretty typical
If you really want to treat yourself, go find some Ojai pixies. So delish.
I too grew up in SoCal and remember eating backyard grown oranges as a kid - nothing is better than a fresh orange, I dont bother with boxed juice most of the time, I'd rather eat the fruit.
I disagree with that. Valencia was a good old variety from the 'blancas' group of oranges, but is not the best variety. There are even better Valencia oranges (the newer "Valencia seedless " delta and midnight varieties for example). And many navels score higher for taste also than Valencia.
The economics of Oranges and juice are fascinating. In Florida, we had a major outbreak of citrus canker that made most of the oranges grown here unsuitable for sale by USDA standards (still safe for consumption). So, off to the juice factory to be stored in those massive vats.
When not on season, I buy oranges from South Africa or wherever, but I can't stomach the bottled juice. I don't know what flavor pack they use here but it doesn't taste even remotely like the real thing, I'd rather make juice from the worst oranges in the supermarket than drink bottled.
When you talk about a Valencia orange in Florida now is often the clone SPB-1-14-19, sligtly hardier than the original tree from California and different also than the Hughes clone if I'm not wrong.
Producer on the other hand is not the same as hybridizer. The original tree was developed in California but is cultured in all suitable areas of the planet. Their patent has expired long time ago
> William Wolfskill .. migrating to California .. hybridized the Valencia orange, a sweet orange, naming it for Valencia, Spain, which had a reputation for its sweet orange trees. .. The success of this crop in Southern California led to the naming of Valencia, California.
> ... In the mid 20th century, Florida botanist Lena B. Smithers Hughes introduced major improvements to the Valencia orange .. the Hughes Valencia bud line [make] up some 60 percent of all Valencia oranges propagated for cultivation in Florida
Your comment would have been much more pleasant and no less informative to read without that first sentence. The only "one-upmanship" I detected was yours.
I live two thousand miles away from the nearest orange tree, so I'm not sure how I'm competing with them.
... which leads to my question: what happened with all the citrus greening disease in Florida? i heard it had destroyed a lot of trees. have they found a good way to combat that?
Citrus needs a lot of fertilizer. I finally did the calculations one year and I was astounded at how much nitrogen I needed to apply. Once I did, I got amazing yields. Micronutrients are important too, but man, that nitrogen. In socal, stick to an acidifying source like ammonium sulfate or cottonseed hulls.
Grapefruits suffer even more with cold than oranges
Oranges are a type of fruit created twice, so can be split in two big groups: Sweet oranges, the fruit that we eat normally, and sour oranges, often used in landscaping and bitter (being bitter they do not attract vandalism). Sweet oranges include several subgroups also. Some are more tart than other.
People picking oranges carelessly lead easily to crashed stems, ugly patches of dry foliage and damaged trunks. Fruit in the streets works great for some locations, not so for other ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Globalisation happened. People basically does not care about it, but new plant diseases are a big problem for the economy of a country.
I used to drink a lot of OJ when I was still under the illusion it was healthy to do so. Simply stopping that I lost about 15 pounds without changing anything else. It was tough at first, I really craved it and it was a daily habit. It's turned out to be the biggest health improvement I've made in recent years.
Whole fruits are healthy because of the fibers and nutrients in the pulp+skin. The fiber slows absorption and helps with insulin spikes.
Even "fresh juicing", which is crazy popular, isn't the same as just eating the fruit.
In that case, shouldn't we distinguish between juice stripped of those vs. unfiltered juice?
Fruit juice is evil.
Fruit is evil.
The fruits we buy in the supermarket (or hipster organic farmers market) bare little resemblance to the less sweet and less palatable fruits that humans would have eaten prior to cultivation. Through an ongoing process (over multiple millennia) of artificially selecting for higher sugar content, we have turned nature’s fruits into the equivalent of candy bars.
If you want nutrients, eat vegetables.
There are sometimes better choices than an apple, but an apple is definitely better than a candy bar (or most breakfast cereals, granola bars, etc).
Vegetables are great, too.
Without nuance and education, "fruit is healthy" translates to "fruit juice is healthy."
Without nuance and education, "two serves of fruit per day" translates to "I'll eat a fruit salad and a glass of orange juice for lunch at my sedentary desk job."
Protip: chop up a large broccoli and sauté in a wok with olive oil, salt, pine nuts and chili flakes for a few minutes. Finish by squeezing half a lemon on top. Serve alongside a modest serving of protein. That shit is a meal, and damn tasty.
I guarantee you that you can eat tons of apples, oranges and other fruits every day and not get fat.
Also, you can't live off vegetables only. They just don't have enough calories to keep you going whole day. And you do need some amount of calories to perform and survive.
I don't know how you got from "fruit is bad" to "you can only eat vegetables" but that must have been a sweet trip. You do know there's other foods, right? Like plant oils, meat, dairy, and chocolate cake.
And if that wasn't hurting my brain enough, you think vegetables don't have calories? So you've never heard of the potato, have you? Or carrots, sweet potato, beetroot...
You cant sustain on carrots and beetroot. You just cant, caloric density is too low. You would have to eat too much volume of it. But, go ahead and try that. Eat only them and no nuts, no oil, etc. Observe how much active and performing you are after few days. Vegetarians don't live off vegetables only either.
Vegetables are very low on calories. That is literally why they are recommended for diet - but eat a lot of vegetables advice is not nearly the same as as "everything else is bad, eat vegetables".
And without the huge quantities of citric acid, the table sugar is less hyper-palatable. The associated acids make fruit juices almost perfectly engineered to maximize consumption. (The recipe is so perfect that Coca-cola uses surprisingly similar ratios.)
They were testing the effects of calories as liquid or solid. The subjects could eat whatever they wanted in the study, the calories of which were carefully recorded. Then they added 1750 calories/day of either liquid as soda or juice, or solid, as jellybeans. They then measured how much the subjects adjusted their other calorie intake (the groups all rotated through solid, liquid, control).
When each group was on added solids reduced their intake of other foods by an average 1500 calories/day, negating all but 250 kcal/day of the extra intake (still a non-trivial addition, but...).
When each group was on liquids, their change in intake of other foods was negligible -- essentially all 1750 extra calories per day was added to their 'bottom line'.
The milkshakes & juices are missed a bit at the beginning, but it's definitely much easier to maintain weight than it used to be, and I've seen friends get even more spectacular results by merely cutting caloric beverages (one who used to have a case of Gatorade in his truck all the time lost so much so fast his wife thought something must be wrong and made him go to the doctor to get checked).
I thought it was quite interesting, and hope some others do too...
I wonder where this meme started and why? I cant imagine ‘big fruit’ is that big or sinister.
Are you familiar with the phrase “banana republic” and it's origin?
Big fruit is, historically, not any less sinister than big oil, and, while less influential, powerful enough to be a major international force, and drive wars and major power policy.
Is probably because we, humans, had seen before what scurvy can do to the body when you stop eating oranges, fruits and vegetables for just one or two months.
Significant amounts of vitamin C are in potatoes. People in general don't even know that, so I don't buy the idea that people are generally seeking out foods for their vitamin C value to prevent scurvy.
The drive to eat a special kind of food sometimes is common to many mammals. Not much different to being thirsty when you are dehydrated. Everybody experience sometimes a "thirst" for salt (in hot areas), sugar, or (in very cold areas) fat. Is a survival mechanism wired in our brain and not uncommon at all.
I bet that we would intuitively seek for foods rich in vitamin C if getting short of it.
This isn't a case where your body is craving a vitamin, and urging you to eat an orange. Your mind is saying "this is the right thing to do!", when in actuality, it's spiking your glucose.
Maybe me having grown up on American sugary substance, my palate has gotten worse. But my wife, inlaws definitely prefer the fresh one when I do a blind taste test. Me...I'm just like meh, no difference, just get me the box one (which is like 1/3rd the cost). My 2 year old...that's the only one she'd drink. She did not touch the box juice before, and I was surprised she liked the fresh one, and asked for more.
I'm an American and I can definitely taste the difference between box juice and fresh-squeezed juice. I think the former still had the "base" flavors; but the latter definitely has a more complicated and pleasant taste, with more "nasal" flavors are totally absent from box juice.
Serious question: how is your sense of smell?
Example: Things that my wife feel is salty, like can soup, I don't give a second thought to.
If your sense of smell is still good, it is very likely that you do taste all of these things, and the problem is more one of attention. The simple thing to do is to train that. Simply eating more slowly and trying to focus on what you smell when chewing should already make the flavours noticeable to the brain. It is easier if your nose does not have to "compete for attention" with the other senses, so closing your eyes will help, as will being in a noise-free environment.
As for the taste, if you don't notice salty soup your taste buds are indeed likely t obe desensitized. But even if you "grew up" on food too rich in salt and sugar, that not a permanent thing. You could try a kind of "taste detoxing" month - reducing salt/sugar intake to essentials for a while by setting strict rules to what kinds of sugars are allowed. It's hard for various reasons, but it works - WheezyWaiter made a very entertaining and IMO "neutral" video showing his experience trying it[0].
So you should be able to address both if you want. I recommend it! In general, getting in touch with one's senses is an enriching and fun experience (not just for tasting food).
>try something new for breakfast: a whole Florida Valencia orange ...
Usual way to do this is to slice into wedges and bite against the inside of the peel, leaving much of the pulp attached.
An easier, less wasteful way: Using a sharp, heavy knife, slice patches off both stem and blossom ends, down to the pulp. Halve along the equator and lay equator-side down on a cutting board. Now "shave" off patches of the peel with short downward strokes, rotating the orange half frequently to maintain an easy cutting angle.
Finish by cutting into bite-size pieces, and grab yourself a fork. Squeeze a fresh Key lime over the top, for extra flavor complexity.
I got myself this cheap machine for that purpose:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mean+juice+machine&t=chromeos&iax=...