You gotta get off the Juice!
Many people are shocked to find out that fruit juice actually contains the SAME amount of sugar as soda.
Just like any other substance we ingest, fruit juices can make you store fat, not only under our skin, but in our liver.
The other day when I visited the super market, I took these pictures to show the similarities between the two beverages.
Below you will see the nutritional info from a popular soda manufacturer. The total sugar per 100mls is 10.6g. Only 0.5g more than the juice!
Fruit juices and soda, when consumed alone, catapult their sugars into our blood stream within minutes after consumption. As a result, this makes our blood sugar levels spike, triggering a large insulin release to bring our sugar levels back into line. Insulin is a hormone which is responsible for storing body fat and needs to be avoided. Both Soda and fruit juices main source of sugar is fructose. In soda, it is in the form of HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup). When we consume sugar or sucrose, it is stored in the blood, ready to be used as a fuel source. Sadly we rarely burn it all off and prevents us from using fat as a fuel source.
When we consume fructose, the fructose travels through your blood to the liver where excess amounts is stored as fatty deposits which meses with your insulin receptors and causes weight gain and insulin resistance.
Another reason why juices can make us gain weight is because calorie conscious people often make the mistake of only taking into consideration calories consumed from food. We have always been told that soda is bad (which it is) and fruit juice is healthy, so who would have thought that downing a few glasses of juice a day could actually make you fat!? Three glasses of juice a day is approximately 500 calories! Consuming 500 calories more than your daily calorie expenditure, if not burned off can add 26kg per year!
Instead of consuming fruit juices, try squeezing half a citrus fruit in a glass of sparkling water and dropping some Stevia in to sweeten things up. Stevia is a completely natural sweetener made from the leaves of the Stevia plant.
Give it a go and lay off the juice!
