One More Reason To Avoid Fruit Juice

September 16, 10:19 AMDenver Low Carb ExaminerLinda Duffy

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Since becoming a low carb practitioner, I have avoided fruit juice. Sure it tastes good, and yeah, there are some vitamins in it, but let's be serious. It's basically just sugar water. A single cup of apple juice has 29 carbohydrates...over half of the total carbs I eat in a typical day. Once you remove the juice from the fruit, you turn it in to a blood glucose-raising, rapidly digested liquid that heads straight for the liver where it is easily converted to body fat. As for the vitamins, if heat was used in processing the juice, most of those vitamins are destroyed anyway. Amazingly, parents give this stuff to kids because it is "healthier" than soda. I know my parents thought that. My mouth full of fillings and lifelong obesity battle should tell you how "healthy" all that juice can be.

If you're a grown adult, and if you want to drink sugar water, go right ahead. Just don't give it to your children on a daily basis and don't kid yourself that juice is healthy. Along with its contribution to cavities and obesity, it can seriously screw up your medications. The general population seems to understand that grapefruit juice can be an issue when taking blood pressure pills, but grapefruit juice isn't the only problem....

"...grapefruit, orange, and apple juices decrease the absorption of several important medications:

The allergy drug Allegra, available generically as fexofenadine
The antibiotics ciprofloxacin (Cipro, Proquin), levofloxacin (Levaquin), and itraconazole (Sporanox)
The beta-blocker blood pressure drugs atenolol (Tenormin), celiprolol, and talinolol
The transplant-rejection drug cyclosporine (Gengraf, Neoral)
The cancer chemotherapy etoposide (Toposar, Vepesid)"

(Full Story)

David G. Bailey, PhD, one of the people who originally discovered the connection between medication problems and grapefruit juice in the 90's goes on to say, "This is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm sure we'll find more and more drugs that are affected this way".

While the substance in grapefruit and orange juice that interferes with medications has been identified, it still isn't known exactly what in apple juice is causing all the problems. Since apple juice is often used as a mixer for other fancier juice blends and cocktails, if you are a juice drinker, it can be pretty hard to avoid.

If you are taking medication, just skip the juice. All those carbohydrates aren't good for you even if you are completely healthy. Drink water or herbal tea and eat your fruit whole and fresh in limited quantities. Who knows, by doing just that you might not need the medication in the first place.