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Comment by nineplay | Hacker News Reader

The 'no fruit juice' thing really got on my nerves when my kids were little since people just throw it out with no qualifications. So really, if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid because fruit = sugar = bad? It's such a reductionist way to look at food and nutrition.

I also recently had a PT tell me that blending fruit into smoothies removes all the nutritional value, which is why no one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are not nutritionists.

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The real issue with fruit juice is that you can easily consume the juice of several pieces of fruit all at once and in a form that makes the sugar rapidly available so you get insulin spikes. The serving size for children of juice is 4-6oz which isn't very much volume, so its super easy to over do it.

If you eat the whole fruit that sugar s bound up with fiber so you don't consume as much as easily and you digest it more slowly. Fiber plays a key role in satiety (feeling full) and stripped of fiber its easy to consume too many calories. A whole orange contains 3-6x the fiber of the equivalent volume of orange juice with pulp.

It is that and that the acidity of the fruit juice is pretty bad for the enamel of your teeth.

> the acidity of the fruit juice is pretty bad for the enamel of your teeth

Not an issue for kids with milk teeth. Not an issue for adults who brush. Restricting diet for dental hygiene always struck me as convoluted.

> So really, if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid because fruit = sugar = bad? It's such a reductionist way to look at food and nutrition.

Sorta? It's not bad, right? But it has not much nutritional value, and spikes their glycemic index, which is probably fine but... why? I guess it does taste good...

Because no one wants to drink water all day every day and nothing else.

It probably has to do with not being American, but at least here in italy it's completely fine to drink water and only that on a regular day. I do give that there's probably more variety, I know some people having preferences for certain bottled waters over others

(I'll gladly drink whatever water I find, but I'm not a fan of the plastic taste of some bottled waters and definitely a hater of refrigerator-cold water)

From my holidays in the US I recall shops, even small ones, having lots of drinks. Like, shelves and shelves of any alcohol free drink (and some abv ones) one could imagine. Here I go to my neighborhood small supermarket and there's coke, lemonade, Fanta, tonic water, a few local products such as spuma and that's it

I drink water in the US every day just fine, I don't think there's anything cultural going on here.

No one drinks coffee or tea or beer or wine in Italy? Pop culture has deceived me.

Oh well coffee is definitely a given for a lot of Italians lol. Tea as well although less spread than coffee. I was talking more about drinks taken in cans or bigger quantities than a coffee/cup of tea.

Wine is definitely more prevalent in the older gens, young people drink albeit less. Up until a few years ago - and in some older people is valid for today as well - there was the belief that a small glass of wine a day wouldn't do harm, or that it had a positive effect on your health...

So yeah, alcohol is often on the table, but there's much less choice about the variety of drinks compared in the us. Then, if you have to work in the afternoon you might choose to not drink alcohol, so you're stuck with water or the other more common soft drinks such as coke (...)

I'm specifically sympathetic to kids who are not ( in the US ) given coffee or tea or alcohol and still get scolded about having anything but water. I've been there, it gets dull.

Well, even small kids here are allowed by their parents to drink caffe latte, which is milk with varying amounts of coffee. Then of course, some juices are OK although it's so easy to drink much more than the rda (and I'm quite sure I drank a shitton more of the recommend dose of juice, the few times I drank juice)

I don’t see anything wrong with drinking only water.

Nothing is wrong with drinking only water. Nothing is wrong with drinking something besides water.

I basically only drink water...

With just enough whiskey so that I don’t have the smell of water on my breath.

Same reason I cut my OJ with vodka.

no one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are not nutritionists.

Nobody should take advice from nutritionists. It's not a regulated title. Anyone can call themselves a nutritionist. Take your nutritional advice from dieticians (and licensed medical professionals with relevant training and experience).

As Dara Ó Briain put it, dietician is to nutritionist as dentist is to tootheologist.

>I also recently had a PT tell me that blending fruit into smoothies removes all the nutritional value, which is why no one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are not nutritionists.

I'd just suggest nobody get nutritional advice. Really so much of it is just nonsense and there's no good advice in my opinion outside "eat a variety of food in moderation" unless you have specific health problems. If a health professional told me that blending fruit into smoothies removes nutritional value I'd make it a point to try to get them fired. (I have gotten healthcare professionals fired, but for more serious stupid statements)

I don't entirely disagree but my kid was with me and I feel like I need someone now to reassure her that blending doesn't magically remove vitamins from food.

( I asked her if blending tomatoes for sauce removed the nutritional value but that's different for reasons that no one understands. )

I'm with you. Eat a variety of food and as close to the natural source as possible. If you think that orange juice and mountain dew are the same because of sugar content than you've lost the plot.

> if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid

Nobody was seriously arguing against fresh-squeezed juices (especially when served with the pulp).

With pulp we're getting somewhere, but without pulp?

there is still the folate and magnesium citrate. and of course vitamin c. It's not completely useless without pulp.

>Nobody was seriously arguing against fresh-squeezed juices (especially when served with the pulp).

Yes they are.

And when it comes down to it a little bit of fiber especially when something has been aggressively mashed up, doesn't make your orange juice all that different from a Mtn Dew. Fructose is fructose and no amount of magical extras is going to make that big of a difference on its metabolic effects.

I say that but I'm not advocating you to not drink juice. Just balance your inputs.

People below you in this thread are saying that fresh squeezed orange juice is little better than Mountain Dew. Something about nutrition makes people lose their minds.

They are correct in terms of nutrition and sugar, but most kids can process a lot of sugar fine.

Fruit has also been bred to be much sweeter and less nutritious than it was 50 years ago, so there's that too.

Moderation is the key to everything.

I agree but no one makes headlines or sells books by talking about nuance and moderation so we get terrible advice from magazines and 'professionals' and all get steadily less healthy.

> fresh squeezed orange juice is little better than Mountain Dew

A reasonable way to look at it is as a flat, fortified Mountain Dew. Great as a treat. Bad as a habit, at least with modern oranges.

That is an impossibly stupid way to look at it. Food is not just a bunch of numbers on a label.

So what is it? And what's a smart way to look at it?

> Food is not just a bunch of numbers on a label

Of course not. But a kid raised on a high-sugar diet, particularly if reïnforced repetitively through habit, is going to have a tougher time eating healthy than someone who learned to see sugary drinks as a treat.

By squeezing juice out of an orange you’re separating the unhealthy stuff from the healthy stuff. Healthy stuff then gets thrown away. Some juice every now and then won’t hurt anyone but it’s not healthy to drink it every day.

> By squeezing juice out of an orange you’re separating the unhealthy stuff from the healthy stuff

You’re separating liquids from solids. They each have their merits. The problem is industrial fruit produces a juice that is unlike anything in nature vis-à-vis sugar content.

Pray tell, how is a pasteurized orange juice that removes 99% of the juice from a orange, different from a squeezed oranged juice that removes 75% of the juice from an orange.

Please explain how the two sugar waters are different.

> how is a pasteurized orange juice that removes 99% of the juice from a orange, different from a squeezed oranged juice that removes 75% of the juice from an orange

I said industrialised fruit to refer to the orange. They’re much sweeter now than even in the 60s. There isn’t a practical difference between store-bought and fresh-squeezed juice (that I know of) other than, in some cases, preservatives, and the fact that with fresh-squeezed juice you have a tactile measure of the fruit going into the squeeze and so don’t tend to have e.g. a kid pouring themselves a tall glass of orange juice representing the juice of ten oranges.

Many years ago, during my lunch at work, I peeled an orange and was eating it. My office mate, who was from Puerto Rico, said I was eating my orange the way his grandmother did. People his age would cut off the end of an orange and just squeeze the juice into their mouth.

I am. That's a processed food. The sugar is concentrated via a mechanical extraction

> if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid because fruit = sugar = bad?

Yeah, that's fine, but a 16 ounce glass of orange juice has way more than one orange in it, and it's got a hell of a lot of sugar.

Or just do like me and switch to grapefruit juice. Awesome without drinking pure liquid sugar.

Consuming whole fruit is kinda okay because the fiber in the fruit helps buffer sugar absorption.

With juice you're getting lots of sugar but no fiber.

Commercially bottled juices (e.g., Tropicana) are worse but fresh squeezed is still bad.

If it's sweet, spit it out!

> if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup

generally, processed foods are bad. You just created a processed food - you extracted the sugar and left the fiber and other good stuff behind.

"generally, processed foods are bad"

So ... you are on a raw food diet then?

I met some people who managed this for some years, but it sounds not really practical (or healthy) to me. And they were in no better shape in my perception. Rather the contrary.

Humans use fire to process food since a long time.

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