Is fruit juice a healthy choice?

When I was younger, I used to drink a big bottle of pure orange juice and several cans of diet soda every day. Why? I mistakenly believed that fruit juice was natural and diet soda didn’t have any sugar…

Today, with more knowledge and a deeper understanding of the ingredients of these supposedly healthy drinks; I realise that this isn’t the case at all.

Diet drinks contain artificial sweeteners like aspartame, sucrolose and saccharine which are chemicals and there just isn’t enough knowledge of the long-term effect of these chemicals on the human body. Indeed, some studies have linked aspartame, the most controversial, to cancer. For more information on aspartame watch Sweet Misery

So what about fruit juices?

Fresh fruit does contain sugar, so when you eat fruit you are eating sugar, but tiny amounts in some cases. However, the difference between whole fruit and fruit juice is that the former contains fibre and a whole load of other nutrients. However, fruit juice usually loses the fibre which leaves the sugar behind. What’s particualry alarming and often unknown, is that in many cases, fruit juice contains as much sugar as fizzy drinks:

So, while drinking fruit juice is healthier than drinking a diet soda, 100% real fruit juice is not nearly as nutritionally dense as real fruit