Like most people, fruit juices were a part of my life from a very young age. Almost everyone remembers having canned fruit juice and cookies as a child during recess, or some other break. In my case, it was that awful canned pineapple juice. I don't know if you remember how that stuff tastes, but it is not half as good as a real pineapple! I guess the best way to think about canned fruit juice is that it tastes like juice that has been heated, stuck in a tin can, and left for several months, which is exactly what has been done to it! It is no wonder that so many kids drink soda instead of juice. They don't understand how good it can actually taste.
The canned fruit juice concentrate my parents would get was better, but it still wasn't all that good. What I liked about orange juice concentrate was that it was thick and sweet. My mom never used quite as much water as the container recommended, and as a result we always had supersaturated orange juice. It was a way to get us to drink more fruit juice, and I think it worked. Although we would have still preferred having some soda, we Were still happy whenever we saw our mom defrost an orange juice can. What we didn't realize was that the juice we were having was not much healthier than the soda pop that we craved.
It turns out that fruit juice concentrate – and most juice you buy in a store for that matter – adds sugar to make it sweeter. As if this were not bad enough, the canning process destroys many of the vitamins that make the juice healthy in the first place. I am sure that all around this country, millions of parents think that they are serving their children something much healthier than they actually are.
The bottom line is that the only way to have healthy fruit juices is to squeeze them yourself. Although it is possible to buy fruit juice in a store that is reasonably healthy, it still isn't nearly as good as fresh squeezed juice. Pasteurizing – The process that makes foods stay fresh when they are put in cans, bottles, or cartons – destroyed many vitamins and minerals. All you are left with is the sugar, the water, and some fiber. Drinking fresh juice, by contrast, gives you a much greater supply of antioxidants, vitamin C, and other nutrients.
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