The fructose in natural fruit juice is unhealthy and will make you fat! Most diabetics are probably (or hopefully) aware of this but the rest us, not so much. Many of us are under the incorrect assumption that if a bottle of juice indicates “all natural ingredients” or “no added sugar” that the product must be healthy and certainly will not do us any harm. But that is a dangerous misconception. And even if not dangerous, this misconception will make it a heck of a lot harder to lose weight. Why? Simple. Because fructose is sugar!
Fructose will spike your blood sugar levels in the same way that white table sugar will. And just as sugar makes you fat, so does fructose, which is also known as fruit sugar.
The fruit juice industry implies that fructose in fruit juices (fructose) is a healthy alternative to regular white sugar… but it is not.
In your body, fructose works the same as white table sugar. Drinking a glass of orange juice is probably just as unhealthy as drinking a glass of soda.
A noted expert on this, Dr. Robert Lustig, a Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the University of California in San Francisco, who says too much fructose and too little fiber are at the heart of the obesity epidemic because of the effect of sugar (any kind of sugar including fructose) on your body’s insulin level.
Lustig says when you eat a piece of fruit you are consuming a good dose of fiber with the fructose which balances the bad with the good, but when drinking fruit juice you are consuming fructose without the fiber, which is problematic.
Watch Dr. Robert Lustig here:
Fruit juices are sweet because of the fructose, which is sugar. In juice there is no counter-balancing fiber, which you get when eating the whole fruit. So, while many folks think fructose must be healthy because it comes from fruit, it is just not true. And, looking at fruit juice labels and advertisements it becomes evident that the fruit juice companies encourage this misconception.
Remember, fructose is sugar. And in your body, fruit juices are not much different than soda, since they are both loaded with sugar.