Juice

One thing that rather bugs me is juice. For whatever reason juice has a reputation of being a healthy drink. This reputation is undeserved. This is particularly true of most juice on the market since it is actually often as low as 5% juice with the rest being sugar or HFCS. There is absolutely no reason to expect those drinks to be any better for you than a soda.

Even 100% fruit juice is a mostly modern addition to the diet. Essentially when you juice a fruit you are extracting the soluble molecules from it. The main molecule that is extracted? sugar(mostly fructose). All this sugar leads fruit juice to be about as high a Calorie drink as you can find. Since the main increase in Calories in the American diet over the last 30 years has come from beverages there is good reason to expect that replacing water with fruit juice has been part of the reason for our expanding bellies.