Imagine a glass cup filled with your favourite juice staring at you on a hot day. Everything about this is good except the fact that the iced fruit juice is not exactly what you think it is.

Let’s start with a simple question: what’s your favourite fruit juice? I go first. My favourite of all would have to be apple juice. I love its crispiness and the gentle sharpness on my tongue.

My concern has only been one thing and that plays across all the food I consume. What’s in my fruit juice?

What My Fruit Juice Really Contains

Most fruit juice manufacturers sell their products to us as ” pure”, “nutritious” or “one of your 5-a-Day”. Most of us bought the idea that shop-bought fruit juices are beneficial to our health.

If you pick up a whole orange fruit and squeeze out the juice; you got yourself a healthy drink packed with valuable nutrients including vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.

However, with fruit juices from shops, the stories are different. They seem to appear in different forms and names such as from concentrates, not from concentrates, nectar etc.

Let me explain, fruit juice from concentrates is a thick, sticky syrup which is left after the juice is squeezed from fruits and the water is dried out.

In Not from concentrate, the extracted juice is pasteurised, de-aerated (to prevent oxidation) and stored away for future use.

Nectars are made from fruit pulps or concentrate pulps with added sugar, colours, preservatives and acid agents; it contains less than five percent juice.

It is not surprising that many of our food labels tell lies. For a pack of juice to get to your fridge, it goes through many modifications and falls short of the Pure 100 percent fruit it preaches.

Industrial Juice: How It’s Made

For any industry, profit is the main focus. To start with, real fruits are squeezed to extract the juices. The juice is stored in an aseptic vat (for up to a year or more) where it is put through pasteurization.

Through pasteurisation, oxygen is removed to prevent the juice from spoiling. In this way, the juice is stripped of all nutrients and natural flavours. When the juice is ready for packaging, artificial flavours are added to reintroduce flavours, sugar and aroma.

Pasteurisation is the application of heat to prolong the shelf life of the juice and eliminate pathogens. Pathogens are microorganisms that cause diseases. However, this process reduces nutrient levels. In an orange fruit, for example, pasteurisation decreases Vitamin C and Carotenoids ( these are the little soldiers you get from orange fruits that support your immune system).

To get a clearer picture, imagine squeezing the juice out of your orange, boil it and then store in an airtight container for months on end before deciding what to do with it.

Additional Ingredients

One of the main addition to your juice is a flavour pack which is popularly described as NATURAL FLAVOUR. Take a quick look at the ingredients on the pack of your fruit juice. Can you see “Natural Flavour”?

Flavour packs are introduced to the stored juice. They are made from leftover pulp, zest and skin of fruits with batches of harmful chemical to ensure the juice tastes good and smell like real fruits.

The fact is that companies don’t reveal what’s in the cocktail of their so-called NATURAL FLAVOUR, they call it NATURAL. These flavours are complex and they entail a mixture of harmful chemicals to get the desired result.

Besides, lots of work goes into this, loads of trial and error until the smell and taste seem right. The flavour packs are secret formulas/ingredients that are vital for the success and growth of individual fruit juice companies.

What Else Come With The Pack?

Most of the NATURAL FLAVOURS the fruit juice industries use are a combination of substances that are genotoxic and carcinogenic. Another important point to note is the effect of fructose in the juice. Fructose is a naturally occurring simple sugar found in fruits and honey.

Simply put, when you eat whole fruit, you eat more than fructose because whole fruits contain fibre and the fibre slows down the absorption of fructose into your bloodstream, but with industrial fruit juice fibre has been taken out in the process of making the juice.

The fructose in shop-bought fruit juice is absorbed much quicker, hitting your bloodstream faster. Your liver does a great job converting fructose to usable energy and filtering out what is not needed. However, larger amounts of fructose are stored as fat by the liver.

Too Much Or Too Little?

Too much of anything is bad for you. The same applies to consuming too much fructose. Too much fructose is linked to weight gain/obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, metabolic syndrome and non-alcoholic fatty liver to mention a few.

Fruit juice manufacturers have succeeded in making people think that shop-bought juice is a healthier alternative to sugar-laden soft drinks. Without a doubt, drinking fruit juices only adds more sugar to people’s diets.

Any Alternatives?

Finally, the only way to get the nutritious juice that is beneficial to your health is to drink freshly squeezed juice made by you or someone you trust. Where possible, use organic fruits free from pesticide residues.

Along with the above, you might also want to consider vegetable juices or eat your fruit as a whole. Remember to drink in moderation, too much good stuff could also be detrimental to health.