Juice Junkie

My name is Jake, and I am a juice junkie. I might as well admit it, since it's better than admitting that I'm actually hooked on sugar. In an effort to reduce my sugar intake I switched from drinking sodas to juice. Those of you familiar with the nutritional labels on juice will not be surprised to hear that the switch was easy and I experienced no withdrawal. I can maintain my sugar habit just as well, if not better, with juice.

I have some good excuses, I swear. I've heard that the (more natural?) sugar in juice is better for me than the (more processed?) sugar in soda and other things. I only drink 100% juice, so there isn't extra "sugar water" in there. And doesn't a glass of 100% juice count as a fruit/vegetable serving from the food pyramid? This stuff should be downright healthy for me!

Even the 100% juice scene is not as rosy as you might think, though. It turns out that lots of juice has added sugar, so the juice companies are deliberately feeding my habit. I mean, why add sugar to juice? Has my entire life been a lie, and fruit juice actually tastes terrible unless you dump sugar in it? Lemonade works that way, but that's because it uses lemons! Apples taste sweet when you eat them. Or do they have added sugar too?

And if it weren't bad enough that you have to look for 100% juice with the label "no sugar added", there's a game I play semi-regularly when I have a new brand of juice called Guess the Ingredients. This isn't as easy as you would think. That bottle of Cranberry Raspberry 100% juice may actually have cranberry and/or raspberry juice (or it may not), but the bulk of it is commonly some mixture of apple and grape juice with flavoring to achieve the cranberry or raspberry effect. So check the "juice" you're drinking next time, and see if it's actually all 100% juice. And if it is, check to see if it has added sugar (safe to assume if it doesn't say "no sugar added"). And if there's no extra sugar, check to see if the juice is actually the kind the label says, or whether it's some other kind of juice. Is there a reason it's so hard to figure out what I'm actually drinking?

Anyway, when I guess the ingredients, the biggest challenge is usually trying to figure out from the taste whether apple or grape juice is the primary ingredient. This weekend, while drinking some Hansen's Apple Strawberry, I checked the label to see how much grape juice and flavoring was providing the "strawberry" half and was amazed to discover that it actually is strawberry juice! Hooray for Hansen's! Well, hooray for the apple strawberry, anyway. The best that can be said about the Pomegranate Juice is that there's more pomegranate juice than grape juice in it, although there's more high fructose corn syrup than either of them.