Apple juice can pose a health risk — from calories

MARILYNN MARCHIONE

AP Chief Med­ical Writer

It’s true — apple juice can pose a risk to your health. But not nec­es­sar­ily from the trace amounts of arsenic that peo­ple are argu­ing about.

Despite the government’s con­sid­er­a­tion of new lim­its on arsenic, nutri­tion experts say apple juice’s real dan­ger is to waist­lines and children’s teeth. Apple juice has few nat­ural nutri­ents, lots of calo­ries and, in some cases, more sugar than soda has. It trains a child to like very sweet things, dis­places bet­ter bev­er­ages and foods, and adds to the obe­sity prob­lem, its crit­ics say.

“It’s like sugar water,” said Judith Stern, a nutri­tion pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Davis, who has con­sulted for candy mak­ers as well as for Weight Watch­ers. “I won’t let my 3-year-old grand­son drink apple juice.”

Many juices are for­ti­fied with vit­a­mins, so they’re not just empty calo­ries. But that doesn’t appease some nutritionists.

“If it wasn’t healthy in the first place, adding vit­a­mins doesn’t make it into a health food,” and if it causes weight gain, it’s not a healthy choice, said Karen Ansel, a reg­is­tered dietit­ian in New York and spokes­woman for the Amer­i­can Dietetic Association.

The Amer­i­can Acad­emy of Pedi­atrics says juice can be part of a healthy diet, but its pol­icy is blunt: “Fruit juice offers no nutri­tional ben­e­fit for infants younger than 6 months” and no ben­e­fits over whole fruit for older kids.

Kids under 12 con­sume 28 per­cent of all juice and juice drinks, accord­ing to the acad­emy. Nation­wide, apple juice is sec­ond only to orange juice in pop­u­lar­ity. Amer­i­cans slurp 267 ounces of apple juice on aver­age each year, accord­ing to the Food Institute’s Almanac of Juice Prod­ucts and the Juice Prod­ucts Asso­ci­a­tion, a trade group. Lots more is con­sumed as an ingre­di­ent in juice drinks and var­i­ous foods.

Only 17 per­cent of the apple juice sold in the U.S. is pro­duced here. The rest comes from other coun­tries, mostly China, Argentina, Chile and Brazil, the asso­ci­a­tion says.

Television’s Dr. Mehmet Oz made that a key point a few months ago when he raised an alarm — some say a false alarm — over arsenic in apple juice, based on tests his show com­mis­sioned by a pri­vate lab. The Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion said that its own tests dis­agreed and that apple juice is safe.

How­ever, on Wednes­day, after Con­sumer Reports did its own tests on sev­eral juice brands and called along with other con­sumer groups for stricter stan­dards, the FDA said it will exam­ine whether its restric­tions on the amount of arsenic allowed in apple juice are strin­gent enough.

Some forms of arsenic, such as the type found in pes­ti­cides, can be toxic and may pose a can­cer risk if con­sumed at high lev­els or over a long period.

All juice sold in the United States must be safe and meet U.S. stan­dards, said Pat Fai­son, tech­ni­cal direc­tor for the juice asso­ci­a­tion. As for mak­ing good nutri­tion choices, “a lot of the infor­ma­tion that peo­ple need about fruit juices is on the label,” she said.

So what’s on those labels?

Car­bo­hy­drates, mostly sug­ars, in a much higher con­cen­tra­tion than in milk. Juice has a small amount of pro­tein and min­er­als and lacks the fiber in whole fruit, the pedi­atrics acad­emy notes.

Drink­ing juice deliv­ers a lot of calo­ries quickly so you don’t real­ize how much you’ve con­sumed, whereas you would have to eat a lot of apples to get the same amount, and “you would feel much, much more full from the apples,” Ansel said.

“Whole fruits are much bet­ter for you,” said Dr. Frank Greer, a Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin, Madi­son, pro­fes­sor and for­mer head of the pedi­atrics academy’s nutri­tion committee.

He noted that the WIC pro­gram — the U.S. Depart­ment of Agriculture’s nutri­tion pro­gram for Women, Infants and Chil­dren — revised its rules in 2005 to replace juice with baby food fruits and veg­eta­bles for chil­dren over 6 months. More than half of all infants born in the U.S. are eli­gi­ble for WIC, and the gov­ern­ment “really cut back severely on the abil­ity of moth­ers to get fruit juices” through the pro­gram, Greer said.

If you or your fam­ily drinks juice, here is some advice from nutri­tion experts:

—Choose a juice for­ti­fied with cal­cium and vit­a­min D-3.

—Give chil­dren only pas­teur­ized juice — that’s the only type safe from germs that can cause seri­ous disease.

—Don’t give juice before 6 months of age, and never put it in bot­tles or cov­ered cups that allow babies and chil­dren to con­sume it through­out the day, which can cause tooth decay. For the same rea­son, don’t give infants juice at bedtime.

—Limit juice to 4 to 6 ounces per day for chil­dren ages 1 to 6, and 8 to 12 ounces for those ages 7 to 18.

—Encour­age kids to eat fruit.

—Don’t be swayed by healthy-sounding label claims. “No sugar added” doesn’t mean it isn’t full of nat­u­rally occur­ring sugar. And “cholesterol-free” is silly — only ani­mal prod­ucts con­tain cholesterol.

Posted by AP News on Dec 1 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.