The Sunday News
Stanford Chiwanga
MOST of us don’t drink fruit juice to quench our thirst; we take it down our throats because we see it as a vitamin shot, a tiny dose of goodness for our health. It is a great immune system booster — so we were told.
We should not have listened. New studies are compelling health experts to discard the notion that fruit juice results in good health and vitality as they have discovered that fruit juice, just like fizzy drinks, is a major contributor to heart diseases, high blood pressure, obesity, cancer, diabetes and tooth decay.
This is because fruit juice contains just as much sugar and calories as a sugary soft drink and sometimes even more.
The small amounts of vitamins and antioxidants in the juice do not make up for the large amount of sugar.
Unfortunately, food and beverage manufacturers are not always honest about what is in their products. The fruit juice you find at the supermarket may not be what you think it is, even if it is labelled as “100 percent pure fruit juice.”
This is because after being squeezed from the fruit, the juice is usually stored in massive oxygen-depleted holding tanks for up to a year before it is packaged. The main problem with this method is that it tends to remove most of the flavour, so the manufacturers need to add flavour packs (sugar) to the juice, to bring back the flavour that was lost during processing.
So even if you are buying the highest quality juices at the supermarket, they are still far from their original state.
Some of the lowest quality ones don’t even resemble fresh-squeezed fruit juice at all — they are in essence just fruit-flavoured sugar water.
This news is galling for righteous types, who in the past have given their children lectures on the evils of fizzy drinks while smugly feeding them fruit juice.
Galling to the extent that this newly discovered harm will most likely to be ignored and not taken seriously enough even though there is now well documented evidence showing that fruit juices are directly fuelling an obesity epidemic throughout the world.
Zimbabwe is no exception.
Maddening as it might be, the harms of fruit juice will not go away and we are advised to heed the warnings of experts who are telling us that fruit juice, seen by many as a healthy option, should be taken no more than once a day.
The alarming part about these findings is that the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe (CCZ) is not aware that fruit juice is not good as advertised. CCZ executive director Ms Rose Siyachitema said while her organisation is concerned about the findings of the studies, they will be guided by the Ministry of Health and Child Care.
“If it is so then it will soon be well known and we have an opportunity to look at it, the Ministry of Health will lead us in making the necessary legislative changes to put warnings on the bottles of the drinks. Only they have the power, the clout to make those legislative decisions. We wait on the Government and if the Ministry of Health looks at it, we will support it. There will obviously be others involved, the manufacturers of the drinks, the Government and us. An Act of Parliament will be necessary. As I said, if the studies are accepted worldwide, we will need to sit down and discuss about it obviously,” said Ms Siyachitema.
While Zimbabwe is slow to act on these findings, others are already preparing a cocktail of laws to regulate fruit juice consumption. In California the state is considering making it compulsory by law for fruit juice makers to ensure that their products carry warnings, just like on cigarettes, to consumers about the contribution of fruit drinks to obesity, diabetes and tooth decay.
“Sugary drinks represent a particular health hazard. What is especially concerning is that recent scientific studies have confirmed sugar intake is associated with an increased risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and Type 2 diabetes independent of body weight, revealing that we are all vulnerable. These chronic diseases contribute to considerable suffering and unsustainable health care costs. Its high time health warnings were placed on these ‘mini health time bombs,” Dr Aseem Malhotra, an award winning cardiologist said.
Calling fruit juices “mini health time bombs” is not an exaggeration as there are growing concerns that these juices could be more dangerous for health than previously thought.
Professor Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina said: “If there is any item in our food supply that acts like tobacco, it is sugared drinks.”
You may think Professor Popkin is overreaching by comparing fruit juice to tobacco until you read the book Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth about Sugar by American obesity expert Robert Lustig. Lustig has for long been calling for sweetened drinks to be regulated in the same way as tobacco.
He wrote: “This is a war and you didn’t even know you were fighting it. Fruit juice is poison. Calorie for calorie, 100 percent orange juice is worse for you than sugary sodas.”
This sounds alarmist, until you read some of the case studies from Lustig’s childhood obesity clinic in San Francisco.
One eight-year-old already has high blood pressure, thanks to a three-glasses-a-day juice habit. A six-year-old Latino boy is overweight due to juice.
His mother, a poor farm worker, has been letting him drink a gallon of juice a day because a government welfare programme gives them the juice for free.
The evidence presented above clearly shows that it is about time labels on sugar-sweetened drinks be explicit about how much sugar they contain. They should also warn consumers to limit consumption as part of a healthy diet.
In the UK, Professor Tom Sanders, of King’s College London, called for all sugary drinks to be removed from children’s diets.
He said: “Kids should be getting their fluid from drinking water. We need to reintroduce the habit of people putting a jug of water on the table and drinking water with their food instead of some sort of fruity beverage.”
Rupert Allen, lead Dietitian at Lister Hospital in London, disclosed that the current recommendation for added sugar in fruit juices is over the limit, which works out to be approximately 70g sugar per day for men and 50g sugar per day for women.
A new report suggests this should be reduced to five percent.
The biggest problem with juice, as far as Dr Lustig is concerned, is the lack of fibre. When you eat a whole apple, the sugar is “nicely balanced” by the fibre, giving “the liver a chance to fully metabolise what’s coming in”. When you down half a pint of apple juice it “brings a huge dose of energy straight to the liver”. Smoothies are not much better, no matter how pretty the packaging, because when fruit is blended the insoluble fibre is “torn to smithereens”.
However, it is only fair to note that not everyone is racing to demonise fruit juice just yet.
Azmina Govindji, a dietitian and spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association said: “It’s about portion size. 150ml of fruit juice is perfectly acceptable as one of your five-a-day. But we would suggest you have it with a meal so it doesn’t make your blood sugar go up too quickly. I think the difficulty comes when people think of fruit juice as being a really healthy drink and having half a pint, or having it throughout the day, or where children are being brought up on large amounts.
“The key message is that small amounts – a 150ml glass is quite small – as part of a healthy varied diet is fine. You get fluid and vitamin C, but you need to be aware that it does contain sugar. If you can, always choose fresh fruit and vegetable [over juice]. You are going to get fibre, more nutrients and you are likely to have fewer calories.”
So should people stop taking fruit juice everyday? Health experts are agreed that what needs to change is the amount that people drink.
But what about fizzy drinks – it is well known that they are bad for health – but how bad are they? And are they as bad as fruit juice? Soft drinks have previously been linked with weight gain and obesity – a well-known trigger for type 2 diabetes – but researchers say the effect goes beyond body weight and may be caused by an increase in insulin resistance.
Other research has shown that fizzy drinks can damage the liver and kidneys and are linked to the risk of developing cancer or dementia. Professor Wareham, of the Medical Research Council’s epidemiology unit, said it was now more evident that people should be cautious about the amount of soft drink they consumed.
He said: “This finding adds to growing global literature suggesting that there is a link between consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, obesity and risk of development of type 2 diabetes. This observation suggests that consumption of these beverages should be limited as part of an overall healthy diet.”
Researchers found that the risk of type 2 diabetes rose 22 percent for people having one 336ml serving of sugar- sweetened soft drink a day compared with those not having any.
For those having two soft drinks, it rose a further 22 percent over those having one drink.
A local doctor, Dr Charles Moyo said: “Fizzy drinks are not good for health. The danger is that fizzy drinks are filled with things we simply do not need in a beverage and their over-consumption results in some real health problems.
“The more carbonated beverages you drink per day, the higher your risk for health issues that relate directly to the amount you are consuming. Carbonated beverages contain more sugar, salt, caffeine, artificial colors, citric acid and phosphoric acid than you need and none of the nutrients that you do need.”
You probably knew this already, the most galling thing is that now you also have to cut down on the number of fruit juice you gulp.
