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If you really want to drink fruit juice, make it one your own with real fruit
Look closely at the label on that fruit drink you just handed your child. You Look closely at the label on that fruit drink you just handed your child. You think she's drinking a healthful dose of fruit juice, a vitamin cocktail to help her grow.
But chances are that you've really handed her a glorified soft drink - pumped up with vitamins, perhaps, but devoid of juice and full of sugar - that may do more harm than good.
Even nutrient-enriched fruit drinks offer little in the way of vitamins and minerals, and a lot less than a single multivitamin taken with a glass of tap water. The fruit-less (or nearly fruit-free) drinks also lack the fiber your child would get from a small apple, an orange or a handful of grapes.
Water and some form of sugar - sucrose, fructose, glucose or sorbitol - topped the ingredients list on every fruit drink we checked recently, including popular choices from Gatorade, V8, Minute Maid, CapriSun and Sunny Delight.
Many of these fruit-flavored, snazzed-up sugar-water drinks are labeled "No fruit juice" or "0 percent fruit juice," but you'd need to read the label carefully to learn that. One Minute Maid juice product, billed as an "all natural juice beverage," is only 25 percent fruit juice. And that turned out to be the highest concentration of juice in any of the fruit drinks we examined.
In truth, many fruit drinks are no more nutritious than soda.
Look closely at the label on that fruit drink you just handed your child. You Look closely at the label on that fruit drink you just handed your child. You think she's drinking a healthful dose of fruit juice, a vitamin cocktail to help her grow.
But chances are that you've really handed her a glorified soft drink - pumped up with vitamins, perhaps, but devoid of juice and full of sugar - that may do more harm than good.
Even nutrient-enriched fruit drinks offer little in the way of vitamins and minerals, and a lot less than a single multivitamin taken with a glass of tap water. The fruit-less (or nearly fruit-free) drinks also lack the fiber your child would get from a small apple, an orange or a handful of grapes.
Water and some form of sugar - sucrose, fructose, glucose or sorbitol - topped the ingredients list on every fruit drink we checked recently, including popular choices from Gatorade, V8, Minute Maid, CapriSun and Sunny Delight.
Many of these fruit-flavored, snazzed-up sugar-water drinks are labeled "No fruit juice" or "0 percent fruit juice," but you'd need to read the label carefully to learn that. One Minute Maid juice product, billed as an "all natural juice beverage," is only 25 percent fruit juice. And that turned out to be the highest concentration of juice in any of the fruit drinks we examined.
In truth, many fruit drinks are no more nutritious than soda.
