Surely everyone knows the “5 a day” initiative that promotes the consumption of five pieces of fresh fruit or vegetables daily, which is the minimum recommendation of daily consumption in a healthy diet. If you are counting your rations it is possible that someday you think “hey, I did not get to the five pieces … Well I have a juice and arranged.“ Error, a fairly common error besides.

A fruit juice is not the equivalent of a piece of fresh fruit: it does not contribute the same and does not cause the same reaction in our body when consuming it. We talk about fiber, sugar and chewing to understand why a piece of fruit is healthier than a juice.

One juice does not equal one serving of fruit

And we also mean homemade juices with the juicer or blender; Not so to the smoothies in which we took advantage of the whole fruit.

When squeezing the fruit we are discarding much of this: we leave in the juicer or the blender the pulp of the piece of fruit, where they are great part of its nutrients and, above all, the fiber.

We know that fruits may have more or less natural sugar content in them (and, as Chicote showed us , the more mature the fruit, the more sugar it will contain). By ingesting the fruit in the form of juice, without the fiber that gives us, we can give rise to a hyperglycemia in our organism ; That is, the sugar level in our blood undergoes a strong rise , something that would not happen if we were to ingest the whole fruit with the pulp and the fiber.

If we talk about commercial juices we should be aware that what we are taking is concentrated fruit juice in a certain proportion (a processed product, since it is often dehydrated and then added water) mixed with water. Of course, since 2013 the legislation prevents bottled juices from containing added sugar : in this case they should be called “nectars”, which, if we look at their nutritional information, are closer to a soda than a fruit juice.

Chewing and Satiety

The answer of our organism in relation to the sugar contained in the juices or in the pieces of whole fruit is not the same, as it is not if we speak of the feeling of satiation that they produce to us and others.

In the case of fruits, the fact of having to chew them already produces a greater satiety than to drink us a juice. During the chewing, which marks the beginning of the digestion process, signals are sent to the brain to indicate that the food must be finished. If we eat food without chewing (or just drinking, in the case of juices) that signal takes longer to occur, so we are likely to ingest more food from the account.

In addition, as indicated by Juan Revenga in this post, the amount of fruit that is needed to make a juice is significantly greater than we will ingest if we opt for whole fruits. This inevitably leads to an increase in calories and ingested sugar in case of opting for juices.

The fruit, always better whole and of season , or consumed in the form of smoothie (passing it whole by the mixer) that in the form of juice.