· FOOD (JUICE) FRAUD
IT is tempting to pick up a bottle of juice in the supermarket aisle. But the closer you look at the ingredients, the more alarmed you might be. Not every juice is as natural and pure as you might think.
1. No Fiber: Most dietitians and websites recommend eating your fruit, not drinking it; fruit juices won’t have any of the fiber that a piece of fruit has because it’s been stripped away during the processing. But that doesn’t mean you should avoid juices altogether – you just have to know what to look for.
2. Load of calories: The term "100 percent fruit juice" sounds good, right? The good news is that 100 percent fruit juice is made purely from the juices of real fruits. One study published in the American Journal of Health Promotion even found that kids who drank more than 6 ounces of 100 percent juice had more nutritious diets than their peers. But there are a few problems with 100 percent real fruit juice: you get way more sugar and calories, for starters. Your glass of 100 percent fruit juice has about twice the amount of calories as a piece of fruit;
3. Cheap substitutes: You might think that your fruity combination juice is a mix of all your favorite juices – but you’re more likely to find apple and grape juices in there. Apple and grape juices are seen as the "fillers" of most juices, because they’re cheap to make. So that blueberry-pomegranate juice may contain 100 percent fruit juice of blueberries and pomegranates, but may also have apple and grape juice in it. Pomegranate juice is a high-value ingredient and a high-priced ingredient, and adulteration appears to be widespread. Stick to single-fruit juice (like 100 percent pomegranate fruit juice) and read the ingredients labels very carefully. The higher up the ingredient is on the list, the more you’ll find of it – so if your juice has apple and grape way up at the top, you’re getting a lot of those from your bottle.
4. Fake Fiber :Because juicing strips away the fiber from natural fruits, some juice makers add additional fiber back into their products. But some juice makers have been found in the past to add in synthetic fiber, making your wholesome juice not quite so natural. For example, one review of supermarket juices published by the nonprofit watchdog Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) found that Welch’s 100 Percent Grape Juice with Fiber (which suggests that one serving can give you 10 percent of your daily needs in fiber) was made with maltodextrin, an additive that acts more like a starch-like carbohydrate. However, the study said, the label advertised that the fiber came from the whole grapes, and not an additive. In 2011, a lawsuit was filed against Naked Juice.for misleading language on the labeling that ignored the "added synthetic compounds," like "Fibersol-2 (a proprietary synthetic digestion-resistant fiber), fructooligosaccharides (a synthetic fiber and sweetener), and inulin (an artificial and invisible fiber added to foods to… increase fiber content without the typical fiber mouthfeel)." You can still find maltodextrin on the ingredient list for Blue Machine Naked Juice.
5. Artificial (and Natural) Colorings: Certain juices will contain dyes in them. The one under the most fire is Red 40, a dye and Yellow 6, was found in several brands of orange juice in one study. And as some point out, using even natural additives like beet concentrate or carrot concentrate for color can cause big problems for those with food allergies, so it’s best to read those ingredient labels carefully.
6. Flavor Packs: ethyl butyrate is one ingredient you might see on your juice ingredient label, as "flavor pack" that makes your juice so appetizing. Tropicana Juice is one such company to come under fire (and lawsuits) for using flavor packs in orange juice to give it a "distinctive" and consistent taste. As Food Renegade explains: "When the juice is stripped of oxygen it is also stripped of flavor-providing chemicals. Juice companies therefore hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that formulate perfumes for Dior and Calvin Klein, to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make it taste fresh. Flavor packs aren’t listed as an ingredient on the label because technically they are derived from orange essence and oil. Yet those in the industry will tell you that the flavor packs, whether made for reconstituted or pasteurized orange juice, resemble nothing found in nature."Coca-Cola’s Simply Orange juice is another such example of a product "made with an algorithm." The "Black Book" model, Bloomberg recently revealed, is how Coca-Cola can replicate the same taste of orange juice despite the variables of juice production – using "natural fragrances and flavors."