samedi 3 août 2013

Fruit Drinks Bad For Your Health?

Ok, so I've seen criticisms of fruit drinks before - ie that they contain a lot of sugar - so this is a question based on the following guardian article:




Quote:








But our sugar consumption peaked in 1982 and the soft drinks manufacturers say that now 40% of carbonated drinks contain "no added sugar". Why, then, have obesity rates not plunged?



I found at least a piece of the answer to that at breakfast in my house, when a family with two young, and I think we'll say "sturdy", children came to stay. Just a touch self-righteous, they spurned the low-sugar cereals – Weetabix, porridge – that our children eat. Instead they got busy with the blender, making vast watery smoothies with fruit juice, apples and bananas. But the supermarket apple juice, I pointed out, contained 35% sugar – more than a can of Coke. And a ripe banana has four teaspoonfuls of sugar. "That's natural sugar. It's fructose. That means it's from fruit," I was told.



The truth is that, though consuming sugar along with the fibres of fruit is better than without, these middle-class healthy drinks may be higher in sugar than the Ribena my mother was fooled into giving us children for our health. And that, too, had more sugar in it than Coke.



Sugar is sugar – a simple chemical, and it makes little difference whether it's crushed from an organic, hand-picked fruit or fracked in a factory out of corn and beet. And fructose is just another of the monosaccharides that make sugar, though it's the one with a friendly Latin-derived name. In fact fructose is the key to all sugar – it makes it taste sweet. Table sugar is half glucose, half fructose. The high-fructose syrups the drinks manufacturers use are probably – they won't say – made of 55% fructose: more sweetness for the sugar load.



Many scientists have marked fructose as the ring leader in the team of monosaccharides. Lustig, who likes to turn a phrase, calls it the Voldemort of sugars – and it is biggest in the sugar load of soft drinks.



A 240ml glass of orange juice might contain 120 calories of sugar, or sucrose; half of that will be fructose. The fructose will all end up in the liver, which may not be able to metabolise (process) it fully, depleting vital chemicals in the organ and turning into fat. "It's not about the calories," says Dr Lustig. "It has nothing to do with the calories. It's a poison by itself."



What is undeniable is that problems in the liver in turn contaminate and disable other systems, including the insulin production of the pancreas. The effects are felt ultimately in the heart, the immune system and by producing cancers. Insulin resistance may also be a player in dementia.



"Fructose can fry your liver and cause all the same diseases as alcohol," Dr Lustig continues. Key to the obesity debate is the charge that high insulin levels interfere with the hormone leptin, which is a signalling device that tells the brain when we've consumed enough. So you drink or eat fructose, and then you want more food. Sugary soft drinks deliver the fructose fastest to the organs that can't handle it. And, of course, they are largely consumed by those most vulnerable to diseases: the poor and the young. For children, every extra daily serving above the average increases the chances of obesity by 60% .



http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...k-war-on-sugar



so, are fruit drinks bad for your health? I suppose you could split this into:



1) fruit drinks with no added sugar

2) fruit drinks with added sugar



and then ask if the health benefits of having vitamins from these drinks outweighs the health harms of extra sugar? And to what extent is it accurate to see fructose as a similar health problem to (processed) sugar?



In essence, should I buy fruit drinks or not? :)





via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=263260&goto=newpost

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