What’s the difference between eating oranges and drinking orange juice?

Introduction

Oranges are very common fruits while orange juice is a very common drink in our daily life. As we can tell from the word, orange juice is liquid extracted from oranges, but do you know that there is a quite big difference between eating oranges and drinking orange juice? Orange juice, especially these you bought from supermarkets got much higher sugar content than what you might think.

Figure 1: A bottle of orange juice

A bottle of orange juice got about eight teaspoons of sugar. You would wonder same amount of oranges should contain the same amount of sugar since orange juice is extracted from oranges. The main factor makes these two different is the fiber.

Satiety

Image2: Orange juice and oranges

The most remarkable effect the fiber can bring us is that it can keep you satisfied.   An experiment was done to figure out how many oranges and orange juice can a people consume? The result shows that a woman can approximately consume one and a half oranges until they feel full which contains about three teaspoons of sugar while a woman can consume 0.75L orange juice before they are full which contains eighteen teaspoons of sugar. For detailed information, you can check The effect of fiber on satiety and food intake: a systematic review.

Slow release into the blood

Besides the satiety fiber can bring it to us, fiber actually makes the sugar that we have eaten releases very slowly into our blood. That’ quite beneficial to our body. A sudden increase in sugar will definitely have a negative effect.

Other negative effects of consuming orange juice

Drinking sugary drinks such as orange juice will result in consuming more calories which differ from what we expected. When you consume drinks contain sugar, you will be able to consume calories easier than drinking drinks without sugar, so you are less likely to feel full. As the result, drinking sugary drinks will not only make you feel full but also make you more likely to consume more calories.

The negative effect will be larger if your orange juice is brought from the market instead of home-made juice. The food companies will try to make the juice more delicious by adding the additive so that they can sell more to get more benefit. In defense of sugar tells some reasons for that. That directly results in the high sugar concentration.

CONCLUSION

Consuming orange juice may result in high calories and high sugar, but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have orange juice. It’s ok to consume orange juice in a suitable range. However, you should eat more oranges instead of drinking orange juice since oranges are much healthier for you than orange juice.