Smoothies are not as healthy as they appear to be because they also lots of sugar.
(Mirror Daily, United States) – George Osborne, the British Chancellor, announced that Great Britain will adopt the sugar tax on all such drinks except for fruit juices and smoothies. This means that the British people will end up paying the same amount of money on fruit juice as they pay on soda, but researchers warn them that fruit juice has a high sugar content as well.
After the announcement was made, a team of scientists decided to test the sugar quantities in the exempt drinks. Their discoveries were published in the journal BMJ Open on the 23rd of March.
According to their analysis, smoothies and fruit juices that target children contain absurdly high amounts of the sweet substance. Their tests show that roughly half of the children oriented beverages were filled with sugar. Only one of those drinks was enough to satisfy the daily recommended dose.
A child must consume approximately 19 grams, or roughly 5 teaspoons of sugar in a day. But almost half of the products that were tested by the team contained that amount.
The researchers tested over 200 smoothies, fruit juices and fruit drinks from the British market. They chose their sample from products that were being sold in major supermarkets like Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Marks and Spencer, Co-op, and Morrisons and Asda.
They searched for naturally and added sugars present in 100 ml of content. The levels of sugar were through the roof.
The average level of sugar in 21 juices was of 10.7 grams in 100 ml of content. But 24 smoothies took the lead with 13 grams of the substance present in 100 ml of juice.
Judging by the fact that the children oriented products are usually sold in small recipients, and an average juice box or smoothie bottle measures around 200 or 250 ml, and comparing with the 19 grams DRD, then it’s quite obvious that only one bottle or box of product was more than enough to satisfy an infant’s sugar crave.
A professor of clinical epidemiology at Liverpool University, and the lead author of the study, Simon Capewell, said that most people simply assume that smoothies and other fruit beverages are automatically healthy because they have a high content of fruit.
But this is not always the case seeing as the beverages contain high levels of either sugar, or aspartame. And while the latter was proved safe for consumption, parents should always consider giving real fruits to their children.
Image source: Flickr
Matthew Slotkin
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