SINGAPORE: Watching the fruit juice vendor put together that tumbler of apple juice leaves many in no doubt that it is full of nutritious goodness. Indeed, many in Singapore are turning to drink fruit juices as a healthier opportunity to smooth liquids.
But tests CNA performed with the assistance of professionals at Temasek Polytechnic confirmed that juices aren’t necessarily the healthier choice. Whether sparkling, bloodless-pressed, or pre-packaged, they could include as plenty if now not greater sugar than a can of gentle drink. The assessments confirmed that there’s greater sugar in a 300 ml cup of freshly organized red apple juice than a 320 ml can of soft drink.
A lecturer from the School of Applied Science at Temasek Polytechnic, Guo Ren, designed and supervised the test executed via Year 2 college students from the Applied Food Science and Nutrition route to quantify the number of sugars found freshly made fruit juices.
The juices of red apple, watermelon, and orange, in addition to popular combos of apple, beetroot, and carrot, famous known as ABC; tomato, watermelon, and lemon to orange and ginger, were extracted right into a 300ml cup with no ice introduced.
The amount of sugar, which incorporates obviously going on ones, has been measured with a refractometer for the test. These had been the effects.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EATING FRUIT AND DRINKING FRUIT JUICE
Dr. Kalpana Bhaskaran, who heads the Centre for Applied Nutrition Services, stated that nutritionally it is higher to consume the real fruit than consuming its juice, even though freshly organized. This for motives of amount and high-quality.
She stated the juicing process would strip away dietary fibers. Some of the vitamins and minerals found in the whole culmination would also be lost.
And considering multiple fruits might commonly be needed to make a pitcher of juice, the quantity of sugar within the juice will also be better than consuming an unmarried fruit.
Dr. Kalpana, who’s also the vice-president of Diabetes Singapore, advised that people understand the number of carbohydrates and sugar they are consuming.
“We need to no longer neglect that fruit juices are a concentrated source of sugar. People are higher off consuming the fruit,” she said. That way, people won’t lose the fiber; they could manage the calorie consumption and may feel more complete from chewing at the fruit.
Using a medium-sized pink apple weighing 130g as an instance, Dr. Kalpana said ingesting it provides 15g of carbohydrates, in general, from naturally going on sugars together with fructose, sucrose, and glucose. But based totally on the experiment, forty.2g of sugar might be eating up while drinking a 300ml cup of apple juice.
In fact, stripping the fiber off the fruits via the juicing procedure isn’t simply bad for the bowels. The Health Promotion Board (HPB) stated that fiber in fruits facilitates sluggish absorption of sugars into the bloodstream.
“Without the fiber, the large quantity of sugar from fruit juices enters the bloodstream speedy and reasons a sugar spike, much like what takes place whilst we drink sweetened liquids like sodas,” a spokesperson stated.
Over time, this wears out the pancreas, which produces insulin, and can lead to weight benefit and diabetes, she brought.
“Many human beings might imagine that clearly, occurring sugar is more healthy than introduced sugar. However, there may be no chemical difference among the 2, and they have the same effect on blood sugar level when ingested,” the HPB spokesperson said.
For this cause, HPB stated that ingesting fresh fruit juices is not specific to consuming pre-packaged juices.
Making it worse, a few shops add sugar to their freshly-organized fruit juices, Dr. Kalpana stated. Sugar ought to pass overlooked, as it is dissolved inside the water that is brought. In truth, one of the shops CNA visited admitted to including sugar in their fruit juices, as the drink could be “tasteless” in any other case.
