Should we drink less juice?

The USDA recommends getting about 2 cups of fruit per day, and one cup of 100% fruit juice “counts” as a serving of fruit. On top of this, some juice is also fortified with extra vitamins and minerals. 100% fruit juice is good for us.

How much juice to drink, however, starts to get tricky when you consider one cup is only 8 ounces. (About the size of a small coffee mug). 8 ounces of orange juice, for example, contains roughly 120 calories. This can start to add up if you are drinking multiple glasses throughout the day. This is especially important to keep in mind for those limiting their calorie intake to maintain or lose weight.

Another point to keep in mind is how that juice is digested. Juice has a lot of naturally occurring sugar, glucose, and that sugar gets digested quickly. It enters the blood stream quickly and as a result a spike in insulin occurs. Insulin is a hormone that tells cells to take the sugar out of the blood stream and use it for energy or store it as fat.

If your body has quick spikes in insulin multiple times per day, day after day, month after month, year after year; the cells that produce that insulin and the receptors in cells that trigger an uptake in sugar start to ware out. This is when diabetes starts to occur. Your body cannot regulate insulin and sugar uptake like it used to. More sugar stays in the blood, which can cause problems.

Fiber is important. Eating an orange rather than drinking a glass of orange juice incorporates more fiber in the digestion process and slows it down. You will not have the spike in sugar and insulin, but rather a more gradual controlled increase. Another benefit to eating your fruit rather than drinking it, is that you feel fuller longer.

I believe adding up all these points, it is OK to drink juice, especially 100% fruit juice. But limit the intake per day to 1 cup, maybe 2 (also depending on your calorie limit/day).