I occasionally buy smoothies from Supermarkets. You know the type: 100% fruit, with labels covered in claims about healthy lifestyles. The one I have here is a 750ml “super smoothie” which I will drink a portion of at some point over three days.
Here’re the ingredients: 3.5 pressed apples, 1 mashed banana, 1 crushed kiwi, 18 white grapes, half a crushed mango, a squeeze of cucumber, milled flax seeds, dash of lime juice, a dash of pumpkin and spirulina extract, some milled wheatgrass (0.02%), and vitamins and minerals (vit E, C and selenium).
All great so far - looks massively healthy. But of course the producer wants to keep a lengthy shelf life. So the whole drink is “gently” pasteurised. I don’t know in this case what gently can possibly mean. They heat it to a high temperature.
Does this process spoil much of the health benefit? Are these drinks actually that healthy? How much less healthy are they compared to doing it at home with fresh ingredients?
Not all pasteurization is done at the same temperature, there’s a whole range of temperatures - but if done at a lower temperature, it needs to be done for a longer time. And hotter/longer pasteurization is needed for “shelf-stable” products sold unrefrigerated.
Anyway, 100% fruit doesn’t necessarily mean healthy. Grape juice is 100% fruit, but it’s got almost everything removed from it except sugar. It’s no more healthy than sugar water.
If you want maximum health EAT the 3.5 apples, 1 banana, 1 kiwi, 18 white grapes (I always get a kick out of this sort of precise number - who gets to count out the grapes at the factory?), half mango, and bit of cucumber as fruit and vegetables.
Check the calories - you might be surprised how many are in a serving. Also, this has less fiber than the actual fruit and vegetables.
That said, it’s arguably healthier than sucking down HFCS sodas all day.
Pasteurization is necessary to prevent spoilage. No, it doesn’t destroy the nutrition. It very slightly reduces some vitamin content, but not enough to worry about.
Well the Innocent Invigorate Super Smoothie contains only the fruit mentioned but that works out at 80 odd gms of sugar. About the same as 4 or 5 apples or maybe 9 Penguin Milk Chocolate Wafer Bars or 22 McVities HobNobs.
Probably would be better to eat the whole fruit but if you don’t treat it like a glass of water and eat along with drinking it, it won’t kill you.
If the ingredients are those whole fruits (pureed—not just the juice) wouldn’t you get the same amount of fiber (and, yes, sugar and calories) from drinking the smoothie as you would from eating the fruit?
Obviously yes, but some argue that there’s something else to consider. Robert Lustig points out that when the fiber is pulverized, the sugar in the fruit gets into your digestive system and hits your liver differently, and that it makes an important difference.
To come back to this, it’s insane to me some of those drinks contain more than a total daily allowance of sugar - at that point you exceed your storage level and your liver converts any more sugar into fat.
The real point is that regardless of your total calorie intake for one day, if your daily sugar intake surpasses its limit, any more sugar (which is in almost everything) will convert into pure fat:
To repeat: this has noting to do with your calorie intake.
If you exceed your daily sugar allowance your liver will create fat regardless of what else you do.
Back in my 20’s, when I was a poor college student, I stopped drinking colas and switched to tea. Granted I do slightly sweeten my tea, but it’s MUCH less than commercially sweetened teas and I have complete control over it.
These days, I pretty just drink just tea or just plain water. Oddly enough, I don’t seem to have a weight problem.
Eat your calories, don’t drink them. That’s why I said to check the calories. A beverage made from unsweetened juices is one thing (although some juices contain high levels of sugar naturally) but most people have been so conditioned to sweet drinks they don’t particularly like the unsweetened versions.
Of course, an occasional fancy beverage is fine. Not every day, though.
OK, all of those ingredients will have basically the same density as water, so their mass in grams will be about equal to their volume in mL. Using the smallest numbers for each, an apple is about 70 g, or 245 for 3.5 of them. The banana (peeled) is about 110 g. The kiwi is about 75 g. The grapes are about 5 g each, or 90 g total. The mango is about 500 g, or 250 g for half of one. I’m ignoring the other ingredients, as they seem to be in very small amounts. All told, those fruits would total about 770 g, or (within rounding error) about the actual volume of the drink. So assuming that there aren’t any other significant ingredients (most likely water and/or sugar), it looks like they really are using the whole fruits, or very close to it.
OP asks about how “healthy” the drink is, but that term doesn’t mean much. You could compare it to some other drink or food, but that will still depend on your nutritional needs that day.
A favorite trick of manufacturers is to use “condensed apple juice” (which is basically sugar) instead of one of the usual sources of sugar (cane or beets). They do this because the average consumer thinks that “condensed apple juice” sounds healthy as opposed to sugar; but sugar is sugar regardless.
I wonder if “pressed apples” is just a variation of the same trick. Notice that it’s the first ingredient listed, so there’s more of it than any one other ingredient.
So you may be buying expensive flavored sugar water.
I don’t see your claim being made in that article.
Alan Aragon refutes that claim very well in a debate he had with Alarmist Robert Lustig. It was 6 years ago, and it still might be online. Below is info on it from Alan.
Cribs: We eat to much in general. Sugar intake isn’t the sole blame.
Not directly in response to the OP, but my guiding philosophy is that foods that utilize labels to advertise how healthy they are, are usually not that healthy.
^ See post 14. Generally speaking, individual foods are neither healthy nor unhealthy - overall diets are. Just about any food choice can fit into a healthy diet or an unhealthy one.
I was just reading that the issue with sugar is while glucose gets stored as glycogen, fructose gets stored as fat and so while we think of “fruit sugar” as healthy it is actually the worst kind.