Can somebody help me understand how sugar in orange juice is somehow magically healthier than sugar in soda? As far as I know, it's all just glucose and fructose.
What journalists often seem to confuse is that fruit sugars eaten as whole fruit tend to be fine because the amount of sugar you can reasonably eat is quite limited (you're not going to eat 10 apples or oranges), and the sugars are bound up with fiber so are slower to digest, so "fruit sugars" are generically considered to be "fine".
Unfortunately that falls on its face when you're talking about juice. Almost nobody is going to eat 8 medium oranges in one sitting, but you might easily drink the resulting 16 oz of juice they produce. In that case it's little different from a Snickers candy bar.
There's more to it than that. I was lucky enough in China to encounter a vending machine for fresh orange juice. The machine included a press; you could watch whole oranges roll into the press and juice flow into the cup which was ultimately dispensed.
This is great as a novelty, but the juice you got was only very slightly more flavorful than water. No one is going to drink the juice of 8 oranges. What we drink is heavily concentrated, with vastly less water than would have been present in the fruit.
Non-fresh-squeezed orange juice is, universally, artificially flavored: https://gizmodo.com/dirty-little-secret-orange-juice-is-arti...
I don't agree with your assessment that fresh squeezed orange juice is watery though - its usually not. The china vending machine must not have had good oranges.
That machine has some dud oranges. But I encourage you to test your theory yourself with some store-bought oranges.
My guess is the machine was adding water.
It's decidedly not slightly more flavorful than water (not to mention the pulp that comes out with it). A cynical man might say the machine must have watered it down for you surreptitiously :p
That being said, it is decidedly far from "pulp-free orange-flavored fruit-drinks" or whatever marketing term is used to sell things like sunnyd or other orange coloured drinks having almost no relation to fruit juice.
(Fruit juice is itself still generally unhealthy because of the sheer amount of sugar you can consume in any one go and the acidity wrt dental health, but those fruit juice imitators are in another category again)
The machine you describe is fairly common. I bought a quart of fresh squeezed organic Valencia orange juice from such a machine in a Idyllwild, CA grocer and it was unbelievably good.
China's about the same size as the US.. and a bit further south. So their climate is as varied as the US.
I have no idea if there’s any validity to this, but it sounded plausible. [edit: it would make some sense, since we evolved alongside fruit.] Would love to hear if anyone else knows more about it.
Reductionist reasoning in a complex system is extremely dangerous. Eg: fruits have sugar mixed in with a lot of fiber. Therefore, the rate at which glucose enters the bloodstream (and the resulting insulin profile) is very different compared to a orange juice or a soda.
Taking a step back, the simplest forms of cooking / food processing that humans have done throughout history is by applying physical transformation on food while leaving underlying chemicals mostly invariant. If that did not affect the biochemistry, then food processing would be basically pointless. That wasn’t all done for taste!
It is hopelessly naive to believe that biochemistry of a complex organism could be reduced to chemistry of simple constituents like glucose without any regard to context (conditions and other constituents).
Plus your body treats fructose like alcohol and most of it gets processed out by the liver in much the same way. Over too long, the liver will look like that of a heavy drinker.
High-fructose corn syrup has also been shown to be far worse for you than simple fructose and glucose.
HFCS contains slightly more fructose than glucose. It doesn’t follow that this would be any worse or better for you than if you were to ingest pure dextrose, fructose, or glucose. If you are ingesting these in high quantities you are damaging your liver and pancreas way worse than even drinking alcohol.