The whistle’s blown, guys: the fruit juice you order or buy is not always a healthy choice. “Fruit juice and smoothies represent a new risk to our health because of the amount of sugar the apparently healthy drinks contain,” University of North Carolina Barry Popkin, Ph.D., told the British newspaper The Guardian.
Soda in Disguise
He’s worth a careful listen. Professor Popkin, along with George Bray, M.D., of Louisiana State University, are two respected nutrition experts who first blew the whistle on the role soft drinks play in the obesity epidemic nearly a decade ago. Now they’re warning the fruit smoothies are the latest delivery vehicle for sugar.
Men should pay attention. Men consume about 335 calories a day from sugar. A gram of sugar has about 4 calories, so that’s about 84 grams. A quick look at the numbers show that commercial smoothies can be sugar bombs. Consider a 16-ounce Coke. It has 41 grams of sugar. Not great. So the next time you go to McDonald’s you opt for the 16-ounce strawberry-banana smoothie. Congrats, that’s 54 grams of sugar. Jamba Juice’s 16-ounce banana-berry smoothie? That’ll be 73 grams of sugar, thank you.
Sweetened fruit juice concentrates are used most often in sweetening smoothies, second only to corn syrup. The sweet taste is what keeps them coming back for more.
Make Your Own Low-Sugar Fruit Smoothie
There’s a better way: Make your own. If you do, you can bypass the need for a lot of sugar. And you can still get that creamy, milkshake-like quality. Here’s how:
- Make sure you have what you need on hand, especially bags of frozen unsweetened in your freezer.
- Frozen bananas are a naturally sweet smoothie addition: peel, slice, and freeze individually on a baking sheet, then store in a zip-top freezer bag.
- In the fridge, make sure you have fat-free milk or unsweetened almond milk, and unsweetened fat-free yogurt; flavored yogurt is full of sugar.
To make your own fruit smooth, combine in an electric blender: 1 1/2 cups frozen fruit. (Here’s one combination I like: 1/2 cup banana, 1/2 cup raspberries, 1/2 cup mango chunks.) Add one cup almond milk, and 1/2 cup nonfat plain yogurt. Process until smooth, scraping sides as necessary. If desired, add a tablespoon of no-sugar protein powder or hemp seed before the yogurt. Makes 2 cups. Enjoy, guilt-free.
