Why is fruit seen as being so much healthier than soda, for example Coca-Cola?
Is it that fruit has vitamins and minerals in it? If so, would a Coke and a vitamin pill be so much worse than an orange?
Fruit has vitamins, minerals, and fiber. Yeah it can have a lot of sugar. Looking specifically at an orange, it has 17g of sugar and 85 calories total. A 12 oz can of coke has 39 g of sugar and 140 calories total, and bugger all nutritional value otherwise.
You might eat an orange. But you won’t usually eat the two or four oranges at a time, which is equivalent to 16 or 32 oz servings you get with your fast food. And when you eat an orange, your hunger will be better satisfied than when you drink the equivalent amount of soda.
Basically, soda is entirely “extra” calories. If you have an 800 calorie meal in front of you, you’ll eat it and drink whatever is at hand. If it’s water, your total intake is 800 calories. If it’s a large soda, your total intake is 1000+ calories, with equivalent nutrition otherwise.
soda is also bad for your teeth because of its acidic nature according to many dentists.
soda is refreshing and tasty. it seems many people then consume lots of it because of that. it is not something people register with calorie intake and so is linked to over eating in many people.
What he said, with the added notation that if you juice the fruit, you might as well be drinking soda. When you take out the fiber, you have no hunger satiation material left. Sure it might have some vitamins, but essentially fruit juice is sugar water.
Drinking calories does not give you the sense of fullness that eating them does. This is why I’m not a smoothie drinker. A lot of people drink smoothies under the guise of them being healthy, but while they may have some nutritious ingredients, most people make them with several servings of fruit, plus milk or yogurt, plus protein powder, etc. and the calories mount up fast. Most folks would not eat a banana, a cup of strawberries, a cup a pineapple, a cup of yogurt and a cup of milk plus a heaping tablespoon of protein powder all at one time if they were eating them straight up. But blend them all together and drinking all that is no problem.
Sorry I got a bit off track there, but to answer your question, fruit is seen as healthier than soda because it is. Fruit contains vitamins, minerals, fiber(cellulose) and fructose. Fructose is an isomer of glucose and is readily absorbed and used, but when we eat fruit, we are getting it with the fiber and vitamins. Table sugar is sucrose - 2 glucose molecules. All you body needs to do with that is break one bond and BAM! it’s in your blood and fueling cellular activity. High fructose corn syrup is fructose and glucose. When you drink it in soda it pretty much goes right to your blood stream too. When cells have more glucose than they can use, they convert it to fat to store for later. Fat isn’t as easily used by the cells as glucose, so when they have glucose available they will use it first.
sucrose is a glucose-fructose disaccharide, not a double glucose molecule.
^ Which means that it takes longer for the sugar to get into your bloodstream, creating less of a sugar spike. Sugar spikes are bad for you in the long term.
Thank you for the responses - I had no idea how much difference there is in calories between a bottle of Coke and an orange.
A 24 ounce bottle of Coke seems to be about as caloric as 4 oranges. But the oranges are far more filling.
Recent studies, as listed in this table, suggest that your body doesn’t respond differently to HFCS (“No significant difference in blood glucose, GLP-1, insulin, or ghrelin”); your body also don’t really need to work to split sucrose, unless you are one of the rare individuals with sucrose intolerance. As the full article concludes:
Besides the fiber (which is important) and the vitamins (which may or may not be) there’s also the micro-nutrients.
But you are right about the being more filling part. Some studies have shown that HFCS has a extremely low satiety rating, thus you tend to drink more as you dont feel “full”.
The basic principle that emerges in the research is that it really does matter that the componants are embedded in real foods. Sure some of that may be the fiber (both soluble and insoluble), some may be the resistant starch that gets past the small intestine and gets fermented into all kinds of good stuff, some may be a host of phytochemicals both identified and as of yet unknown … but beyond the individual items there is the apparent fact that the whole food is greater than the sum of its parts. The food matrix, the physical form, the exact combination, matters, in ways not yet completely understood other than being able to observe that it does.
Whoops! I should know that :smack: I’m studying this stuff right now. Obviously I need more book time. :o
Interestingly, the studies show that there is a correlation between high fruit intake (four or more servings daily) and lower incidence of cancer. (Just remember, correlation necessarily mean causation.) The suspicion is that there are a lot of things in the phytochemicals that we don’t yet know about that could be helping.