Sunday 21 June 2020

The food police are at it again

and telling me that fruit juice is as bad for you as soft drinks - because of the sugar content.
Now I have always been a good little cat and bought the "unsweetened" variety of orange juice for the Senior Cat's breakfast. There is a particularly nice, indeed outstandingly good, brand of orange juice available in this state. I buy that. We do not drink a lot of it. The Senior Cat has a glass about the size of a sherry glass for breakfast. If I have some I water it down a bit. I always have done. We thought we were being well behaved, restrained and sensible about this,
But it seems that we are not and that we should not be drinking fruit juice - because of the sugar content. Uh? Fruit has sugar in it. Fruit is supposed to be good for you. I know you shouldn't be consuming large quantities of juice, that a large glass of juice is likely to be several large oranges worth of juice. It is like many other things isn't it? A little of it is actually a good thing?
No, the food police want to label it the way they label soft drinks. It seems they are not taking into account the fact that there are differing sorts of sugars. The real problem with the sugar in soft drinks is that they are made with added sugar, not naturally occurring sugar. Are the food police going to tell us to stop eating fruit too? Of course they won't.
What they need to do is educate people. It would be better to put a picture of sixty oranges on the container and say, "It took this many oranges to make this much juice. A serve is equal to six oranges." (I am making the numbers up of course.) That would be much more likely to make people think. They could cease to make sweetened orange juice. We don't need that. Simply telling us "this is not good for you" won't work.
 

2 comments:

jeanfromcornwall said...

The Food Police are getting a bit too strident (not to mention stupid).

It is not the sugar - it is the fact that there is far too much sugar added to all sorts of things because they have decided that we the customers want everything to be SWEET. So they also take the sugar out of their recipes and replace it with artificials - disgusting aftertaste, or the add a stuff called glucose-fructose syrup which is also a kind of horrid/sweet - it is cheap way of using up excess production of American sweetcorn. Anything to avoid saying sugar on the label.

Personally I never hold back from fruit - but I like it as it comes - even lemons. And the concentration and pasteurisation of the packaged juices is fine - saves me the work that makes my hands ache.

catdownunder said...

And I am someone who does not like sugar on my cereal - definitely limits the choices! I do not have sugar in tea or, on the rare occasions I drink it, coffee. Sigh - you are so right!