[header=Sneaky Sugar in Fruit Juice]Of course, if you’re concerned about your weight or you have diabetes, you already knew that you should avoid soda. However, fruit juices—even without added sugar—are almost as bad. Think about it: You don’t have to add sugar to fruit juice to come up with a sugar-sweetened beverage. All the sugar in fruit is in the juice. When you take the juice from several pieces of fruit and put it all in one glass, you, in effect, create a sugar-sweetened beverage. You also leave behind the natural sugar blockers–the cellulose barriers, cell walls, and fiber.Even if you include the whole fruit—for example, if you make a smoothie by pulverizing fruit in a blender—consuming fruit in liquid form increases its glycemic load. The reason is that you tend to consume more fruit when it’s liquefied than you do when you eat it whole. In other words, the serving sizes are larger.One reason sugar-sweetened beverages tend to make people fat is that, despite containing plenty of calories, they don’t curb your hunger. In a study reported in the International Journal of Obesity and Related Metabolic Disorders, researchers at Purdue University had a group of subjects consume 450 calories a day in the form of jelly beans and another group the same amount of calories in sugar-sweetened beverages, then kept track of the number of calories they consumed for 4 weeks. The group that ate the jelly beans reduced the number of calories they ate by approximately the same number of calories that they consumed in the jelly beans. The group that drank the sugar-sweetened beverages did not reduce their food consumption at all. Sugar-containing beverages have the unique effect of adding to calories from other foods rather than replacing them.In a way, the fact that sugar-sweetened beverages don’t suppress appetite is good news. Usually, if you try to eliminate a particular food from your diet, you end up eating more of others. But just as consuming sugar-containing beverages doesn’t reduce your appetite, eliminating them doesn’t increase your appetite. It’s a freebie—you can reduce calories without increasing hunger. People who drink sugar-containing beverages are often surprised at how easy it is to lose weight when they give them up.
