HAMILTON: It's a heavily processed product. It's heavily engineered as well. In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn't oxidize. Then it's put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it's ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time.

Reading what Crid said about orange juice a long time ago I realized it's just like drinking soda. Store juices are too sweet anyways.

What I do drink though is lots of berries. I buy them fronzen and just pop them in the blender. Yeah I like the unsweetened tarte taste.

Also love love all the awesome drinks my mom makes from fruit.

Yeah, but I still like the song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXnTbmPxv5g

Very good graphic.

The one that I choke on is the call for more regulation. I would agree to a change for more truth, but that change in food labels from about two years ago didn't really make much difference.

After you've done a thing the same way for two years, look it over carefully. After five years, look at it with suspicion. And after ten years, throw it away and start all over. --Alfred Edward Perlman

Flynne- I really can't tell- were they trying to be funny or were they really trying to be cool?

It's the same thing with other products, too. Most yogurt--you might as well eat pudding.

It makes no difference to me. While I still drink soda, I don't as often as I used to. I've grown tired of the carbonation and don't like the false sense of satiation I feel in my stomach afterward. When I'm particularly not in the mood for the carbonation I get juice.

The site claimed that humans have maintained hydration without sugary drinks throughout history.

We have??? Perhaps they're unaware that the use of apple cider saved the early northern colonitsts from the effects of poor quality water.

> What I do drink though is lots of berries. I
> buy them fronzen and just pop them in the
> blender.

I do that with all kind of veggies and fruit when I don't care enough to make a salad, or when there's not enough time. Or when they're a little too old: When they're in a smoothy, they taste great.

It's been about four years since my dietician friend told me not to bother drinking juice. (This was a few years BEFORE we talked about deaeration on this blog... And hey, that's was a good metaphor, even if it's disgusting. Deaerated juice is disgusting, too.)

So anyway, when you're in your late forties and a man you love and trust says to give up fruit juice, it's like saying you have to give up part of your childhood. You have to forget all those wonderful mornings and grandmas when everyone was cheerful and she made those breakfasts and dropped that huge, gorgeous glass of sweet prettiness right in front of you and kissed you on the forehead before she returned to the frying bacon and crisp toast.

But then I remembered how all the commercial juice in the last twenty years has tasted nothing like that memory. So I haven't had any fruit juice, and haven't missed it at all. Thanks, waitress, but a glass of a water with a slice of citrus will be fine. When I'm at the restaurant, it's just as much fun to imagine coming home to have a whole orange.

Like Ppen says, you can eat all the fruit you want, as long as it's fresh and unprocessed. Fructose in its natural package is not a threat.

I know he was old school, but Jack LaLane had it figured out: "If man made it, don't eat it".

After watching "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead" I started making fresh homemade V8 juice. Fresh vegetable juice, loaded with active enzymes and micronutrients, is incredible.

The only time I ever really want juice is when I'm hungover. Then it's the only thing in the world I want.

> when I'm hungover. Then it's the only thing

I don't get carried away much anymore, but they say alcohol is a dehydrating depressant. For the last 15 years, my best insurance against a hangover was a large glass of vegetable juice / smoothie with two glasses of water BEFORE bed.

Alcohol is poisonous to all human tissues, so I'm not saying whole-vegetable juice makes all the bad stuff go away... But it's the best start. Even if you haven't had a drink in three weeks.