How healthy a specific food is for you, is relative to what else you eat. If you consume mostly white wheat bread, pasta, meat, coffee, beer, and orange juice, then the juice is clearly the healthiest thing in your diet and stopping to drink juice would be a silly thing for you to do. In particular if juice is the only way you consume fruit. However, if you are a sugar-free, gluten-free vegan, who eats tons of fruit and vegetables and doesn't consume any psychoactive substances then juice might well be the most unhealthy thing in your diet.
The thing with juice and fresh whole fruit is not that juice is bad, but that eating fresh whole fruit is just so much BETTER. Why? Because pressing juice results in an end product that has lost not only most of its fiber, but many other good ingredients.
Let's take a glass of (raw) orange juice (250g). It has a caloric value of 112 and a calcium content of 27g and 0.5g of dietary fiber.
In comparison: 1 cup of orange (sections, 180g, from about 2 oranges) has a caloric value of 85 with 4g of dietary fiber and 72mg of calcium. If you calculate the nutritional value of the fruit with the same caloric value as a glass of juice, you get: 5.3g of fiber and 94mg of calcium, so that's more than 3 times as much calcium and more than 10 times as much fiber for the same caloric value. This holds for almost any other nutrient as well.
However, there is another factor to take into account. Orange juice is so much easier to consume: while people can easily drink a glass of orange juice a day, sadly, not many people are willing to eat 3 oranges a day. But there is an easy solution to that "problem": make an orange smoothie - you don't lose any nutritional value and you still have a refreshing drink. Just throw 3 oranges in the blender and add as much water as you want. Enjoy!
Michael
P.S. Also check out NutritionFacts' latest video on the topic.
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