On Juice

While this isn’t a popular perspective, fruit juice is a preposterous idea. How we’ve arrived to a place where fruit and vegetable juice as a viable option for human consumption is remarkable. Not only is a sugar bomb of fruit juice a completely novel idea in the history of human nutrition, it’s barely better than drinking Pepsi, at best. At worse, it’s the same thing in the blood.

For virtually all of human existence, water, wine, coffee, and tea made up the beverage section of our proverbial menu. Water is the obvious one. Without it, we’d die. Wine, while fruit based, is processed and aged to alter our mind. Let’s call a spade a spade, wine is an just ancient grape trip. Coffee and tea are similar drugs with a short list of benefits and a shorter list of down sides. Juice, however, is completely novel and illogical. It would never exist without a marketing effort. As a result, kids are starting their days with a bowl of cereal (sugar) and a glass of juice (sugar) that accounts for more sugar than most humans would ingest in more than a week though eating whole foods. Yet, we still give it this cache of health like it’s a necessary upgrade in vitamins and minerals. You know who isn’t short on vitamins and minerals? People who chew their fruits and vegetables like we have for millions of years.

The origins of juice vary. Whether you subscribe to the California orange growers theory, which illustrates a business proposition from a collective of orange growers with surplus fruit, or you subscribe to the World War II version of the story that pins orange juice as the answer to soldiers’ resistance to electrolyte pills out in the field, drinking juice isn’t natural human. It’s a marketing gimmick that is teaching more than a third of all Americans to be obese. According to best selling author, Gary Taubes, there isn’t a society in human history affected by mass obesity without an specific influx of sugar. Could it be that juice was our gateway to a nationwide obesity epidemic?

There are twenty-one grams of sugar in a serving of orange juice. Even, the classic candy bar, Snickers, has less sugar than that.

Want micronutritients? Eat the whole fruit. Juice seems much less normal when you considering squeezing the juice out of a perfectly good fruit yourself, throwing away the fruit, and drinking what’s left. Furthermore, we clearly aren’t designed to ingest massive amounts of sugar. Our influx of sugar consumption is making diabetes a household name. Hell, even fatty liver disease isn’t just for alcoholics, anymore. It’s for sugar feigns and it’s nickname is nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Sugar consumption on this level is so new and out of control, we’re inventing new illnesses, people.

Our own Venice Beach is a hot bed for $12 dollar sodas disguised as a green juice, so be careful out there. The marketing is fierce. If you’re looking for kale nutrition, I’d consider chewing it.

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach