What is healthier / better for you? 5 A Day

SparciaM

I have a juicer and regularly make my own juices.

Example today: 1 Apple, 1 Orange, 1 Lemon, 1 Carrot and 1 Kiwi = 5 portions juiced but only count to 1 of my 5 a day.

Yet if i'd just ate those fruits/veg I'd get 5 portions there.

My juicing book suggests juicing fruits and veg as they are healthier and better for you - yet the NHS and WHO guidelines differs in this respect. Who is right?

Should I be juicing or eating? Why do the juicing guys say you get more benefits from juice than eating, yet the regulatory bodies say eating is better?

babyblooz

Maybe because they want to sell juicers!

I always thought you needed the actual plant material to help your intestines push the waste material through, ie. provide roughage!

beautiful_ravens

I dont know. Taking a guess, perhaps when they say juice they mean shop bought juice.
Also perhaps some fruit and veg needs chewing to release certain properties...? Some stuff reacts with enzymes in saliva I believe.
But I too would have thought that if you juiced 5 fruit and veg into a drink, thats 5 portions. I wouldnt do it myself, I eat and drink 5 various things over the course of a day.

msb5262

Quote from babyblooz, post #2:
I always thought you needed the actual plant material to help your intestines push the waste material through, ie. provide roughage!

I think the problem with juicing is exactly that - juicing the fruit/vegetables is a form of processing, therefore eating the fruit/vegetables would be better for your body.
If we are meant to eat less processed foods, I'm afraid that includes ALL forms of processing including peeling, mashing etc - a potato cooked in its skin is better for you than the same potato peeled and mashed. It's very annoying as I like jacket potatoes but I LOVE mashed potatoes!
MsB

taplady

I agree with msb :T- its all down to the fibre and juicing is not making our bodies do the work and keeping our bowels(sp?) healthy. Juice is healthy of course but not as good as eating the fruit or veg in its original state.
The more unprocessed a food is the longer it takes our bodies to use and therefore it keeps up full up longer so we done need to eat snacks etc.

SparciaM

I'll have to do more research, as lots of websites says pure fruit juice from a juicer is way better for you than eating the fruit. ie juicing an apple is better than eating it - as you get more nutrients out of juicing raw fruit and veg, than you do eating it / cooking it. "By extracting fresh juice from the fruit and vegetables you absorb more nutrients because the fibres in the fruit and veg make it harder to digest." - so I guess it boils down to: Do you want more fibre fruit & veg portions or do you want nutrients/healthy maybe!?!

calleyw

The NHS has changed the rules on smoothies see below.

Q: Do juices and smoothies count?
A: One 150ml glass of unsweetened 100% fruit or vegetable juice can count as a portion. But only one glass counts, further glasses of juice don’t count toward your total 5 A DAY portions.
One smoothie containing all the edible pulped fruit or vegetable may count as more than one 5 A DAY portion, but this depends on the quantity of fruits or vegetables and/or juice used, as well as how the smoothie has been made.
For a single smoothie to qualify as being two portions, it must contain either:

• at least 80g of one variety of whole fruit and/or vegetable and at least 150ml of a different variety of 100% fruit and/or vegetable juice, or
• a minimum of 80g of one variety of whole fruit and/or vegetable and at least 80g of another variety of whole fruit and/or vegetable.

Smoothies can only count as a maximum of two of your 5 A DAY, however much you drink.


HTH.


Yours


Calley

babyshoes

I wonder if the guidelines are also considering the fact that vitamin C begins to degrade as soon as it comes into contact with air? This isn't too much of a problem with freshly squeezed juice, but leave it to sit for even an hour or so and a lot of the vitamin C is lost, so bought juice will have very little of it left at all, even if it is packaged quickly.

ubamother

There also might be an issue in that while sitting down and eating all that list of fruit/veg given would make you feel pretty full, drinking the more or less equivalent calorie value of them wouldn't affect how satisfied you feel, so if excess calories are an issue, you would be adding extra calories to your day that don't make you feel satisfied - you could have the juice with your breakfast, while if you ate the fruit/veg, that probably would be breakfast.

phizzimum

I know some people use the leftover pulp - for example if you have pulp from veg juice you could mix it in a bolognaise sauce or something never tried it myself so I can't really comment on whether it would be very nice or not!

(DH's juicer is lurking in the back of the cupboard - he hasn't used it for a couple of years but it was so expensive we can't bear to get rid of it!)