Stop Drinking 100% Fruit Juice!
Back when my adult children were young kids, I used to juice them up! Primarily orange juice with breakfast and then good ol’ apple juice was on tap for the rest of the day. Occasionally I would treat them to a V-8® 100% fruit juice blend or some dark purple grape juice in their sippy cups.
Do you know the saying, “You did what you knew to do, but when you knew better, you did better.”? That would be a good statement to describe how I went about feeding my family in the early years of being a mom.
Thankfully, when my children were still young enough to break bad food habits, I learned the truth about all those sugar-packed, 100% natural fruit juices I was freely supplying them with. Shockingly, four, six, or even eight teaspoons of sugar were hidden in each serving, depending upon the type of juice I served and the size of their glass! The irony was, at the same time I was “juicing up” my kids, I was saying “NO” to sugared cereals.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking: Aren’t there also plenty of vitamins and antioxidants in fruit juice? Yes, there are. But you can get these same vitamins and such from other food items without them messing with your physical health.
So, what exactly are the ramifications of drinking 100% natural fruit juice? Well, a new study published this May in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Network Open found that drinking just 4 oz. of juice daily increased one’s rate of developing all cancers by 18% and breast cancer, specifically by 22%! And that rate escalated to a 42% overall increased risk the more juice one consumed on a daily basis.
This study confirmed what I have been saying for nearly a decade now: 100% fruit = soda in the way the body adversely reacts to it. Just because a sugar is naturally occurring, doesn’t make it naturally healthy. For instance, 15 oz. of apple juice, drank by yourself or your child over the course of a day, contains as much sugar as 10 Oreo® cookies!
If you MUST drink juice with breakfast, stick with a mini-sized, 5.5 oz. can of V-8® tomato-based juice, which contains just a smidge over 1 tsp of sugar. When you’re looking for a cold beverage to enjoy throughout the rest of the day, my suggestion is for you to stick with water or sparkling water with a fresh citrus squeeze, or brew up and chill some naturally flavored green tea.