Is fruit that is juiced or blended better than no fruit at all? Or, is it better to avoid any juiced fruit?
I like the flavour of fruit but not the texture, because of this I avoid all fruit and am pretty close minded on trying anything new due to price and waste.
I recently debated buying baby blended fruit pouches to add vitamins into my diet; is this something that will be better than avoiding fruit all together?
Thank you for any comments in advance!
Edit: Thank you all so much for your replies, and as well for the suggestions and advice!
In: 10
Throwing some fruit in a blender yourself is fine. There’s no difference health wise.
Juice companies will sometimes throw in some extra sugar though.
The healthy thing in fruits is fiber. Fiber usually gets discarded when making juice, since it mostly stays in the pulp. Wholly blended fruit retains all of the fiber though, so it’s not much different. I don’t know whether baby fruit pouches you have in mind contain much fiber, but you can maybe look it up. Also see that they don’t have sugar added. Or buy smoothies. Or just blend fruit at home.
Juice will have a higher proportion of sugar as most of the fruit body is strained out, but the sugar from both juiced and blended fruit will absorb faster than unprocessed fruit. This can lead to a spike in blood sugar, which will in turn result in a release in insulin. While it is unlikely that you will get diabetes from blended/juiced fruit consumption alone, it can be a concern if you already have to watch your blood sugar levels.
Overall, besides processed store bought stuff, there blended/juiced fruit wouldnt have less or different nutrients then chewed. There is a negligible difference in “healthiness” between these options.
if you chew the fruit, it is still a bit chunky when it ends in your stomach. It will take some time for your body to extract the sugar from the center of the chunks, thus spreading out the sugar intake over a longer period.
Blended or juiced fruits offer their sugar to the body all at once, making you blood sugar spike, which will lead to more hunger later on.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9657402/
I’m citing a source here, because it contradicts some of what others are saying in this thread.
Juice is “bad” because it removes all the fiber while leaving the sugar. Fiber helps give a feeling of fullness and helps regulate the entire digestive process, including blood sugar.
Smoothies are “bad” because of added sugar. Sugar is not inherently bad, it’s just super easy to have too much. In general, any foods with added sugar will put you over the “too much” line.
Blended fruit is NOT bad at all. It can in fact be better than whole fruit if you include the seeds from some fruits like strawberries, because those seeds get cracked open and digested whereas in whole fruit they normally pass undigested.
Whole fruit is “good” because of the fiber and vitamins. Too much fruit is bad because of the sugar. https://www.myplate.gov/eat-healthy/fruits recommends about 2 cups of fruit per day. That’s about one large apple, or two bananas, for example.
MyPlate has it’s controversies, but 2 cups whole or blended is a pretty good recommendation. Just don’t add any sugar.
Consider adding vegetables to your blended, juiced or chewed diet for more vitamins and nutrition. Very flavorful mixtures can be made.
In addition to what people are saying about that fruit juice has fiber removed. The act of chewing itself makes you feel more full. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031938415300317 has some research on this topic. But a blended fruit will let you overeat by doing all the chewing work. And this overeating is of something that is fairly high in sugar. This is also the reason that liquid calories are considered very bad.
It’s pretty obvious with juicing. A glass of orange juice is roughly six oranges. You’d consider 6 oranges to be almost a meal but a glass of orange juice can be drunk in a minute. But even with blending you can drink several cups of fruit in a minute.
“better” for you ( or “healthy”) can be interpreted a few ways,
Weight gain / loss – fruit that is unprocessed has large chunks of fibrous matter that takes a long time to break down inside you, leaving you feeling fuller for longer.
Nutrition wise – home blended fruit is pretty much identical provided you do no straining, separating or sugaring etc. Home cooked fruit is less nutritious as the good stuff gets broken down into sugary carbohydrates (where the caramelized flavour comes from).
Store-bought processed foods usually combine the worst of all worlds to give you a sugared, cooked and strained product that has little nutritional value, littered with unnatural chemicals to prevent spoilage, digests instantly leaving you hungry for more, and will last longer on your shelf / fridge.
Juice is not as good for you as whole fruit because the juice discards the pulp, and therefore most of the fiber in the fruit (and fiber is good for your digestion). Fruit juice also contains a lot of sugar. All that sugar was already in the fruit of course, but in fruit juice you’re getting it in a more concentrated form that is easy to consume quickly. You can down a glass of OJ a lot faster than you can eat a whole orange, and you digest the juice faster as well.
Blended fruit is broadly as good for you as whole fruit, as it still has all of the same stuff in it. However, it is still easier to consume a lot of blended fruit, for instance in the form of a smoothie, in a short timespan, compared to eating whole fruit. And it is important not to be fooled into thinking that smoothies are *always* healthy (and that more = better). Sometimes they will contain added sugar, and they may also have added fat that contributes to your calorie intake (even if they are healthy fats). Even for smoothies or fruit blends that are just fruit and nothing else, most experts these days recommend eating some fruit every day but not too much, because of the high sugar content (beyond the recommended intake, it’s better to eat more vegetables than more fruit). So you have to be mindful of how many portions of fruit are in a smoothie, which is easy to underestimate.
If you dislike fruit, then blended fruits may be a good option. However, personally I would encourage you to keep trying different fruits as your life will be enriched and made easier by the ability to enjoy whole fruits (which are easier and cheaper to obtain than blended fruit). Tastes can be acquired and aversions can be overcome with experience. Maybe start with something like a crisp apple or some grapes, which (to my mind anyway) have a pretty approachable texture (as opposed to, say, a peach).
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