Breakfast is usually considered to be the most important meal of the day. At breakfast time, most of us put some calories in our bodies, and then we prepare to begin with the most active part of our day.
But, the always-famous combination of breakfast cereals with fruit juice and toast has now become a taboo with the nutritional inventions. With the 'low-carb, low-glycemic index' food choices, cereals as wheat flakes are preferred more over cornflakes, white bread is replaced by the whole wheat bread with low-cal butter, and fruit juices by whole fruits.
So what happens to our all-time favorite breakfast?
Well, it may just have to get little healthy. The logical answer for the consumption of a couple of glasses of fruit juice is that fruits are healthy, therefore fruit juices are healthy. But, the logic doesn't apply to nutrition.
Even with no sugar added, zero preservatives, unstrained fruit juice would have the same amount of sugar as a cola beverage, because fruit is full of sugar!
The sugar is from fructose, which is naturally present in fruits; if it is '10 per cent juice', most of the sugar is in the form of high-fructose corn syrup. When a fruit juice is 'without added sugar', it means sucrose or table sugar is not added. But, the sugar of the fruit obviously remains. Sugar in 340 ml of fruit juice (no added sugar) is equivalent to calories in 340 ml (one can) of Coca-Cola.
All the above essentially, tells us that no matter which juice you choose, they all have more calories than the same amount of Coke. It tells us that juice - 100 per cent juice, no sugar added - contains about the same amount of sugar (or even more - 50 per cent more for grape juice) as the same volume of Coke. It tells us that, freshly-squeezed fruit juice without straining, is no different in calories (would be slightly higher in fibre).
With the promotion of fruit juices as a health drink, one has to figure out that...
- All that is healthy is not low-calorie.
- Fruit juices are caloric dense; also they are restricted for medical conditions like diabetes.
- A glass of juice a day is not complete nutrition. Also, its introduction in your diet should be well understood. If an individual is aiming at fat loss, fruit juice is definitely not the answer.
- Substitution of fruit juice with a whole fruit has lot more benefits.
- It's good to be health-conscious, but with the right advice. Half knowledge is worst than no knowledge.
(Inputs from Kinita S Kadakia, Mumbai-based diet consultant)
Flavonoids in orange juice neutralize the oxidative and inflammatory stress generated by high-fat, high-carb meals and help prevent blood vessel damage, claims a new study.
Free radicals, or reactive oxygen species, are known to induce inflammation in blood vessel linings and contribute to the risk of heart attack and stroke. In the new study, University at Buffalo endocrinologists say the potent preventative effect of orange juice likely is linked to its heavy load of the flavonoids naringenin and hesperidin, which are major antioxidants.
"Our data show, for the first time to our knowledge, that drinking orange juice with a meal high in fat and carbohydrates prevented the marked increases in reactive oxygen species and other inflammatory agents," says UB's Husam Ghanim, PhD, first author on the study.
"This did not happen when participants drank water or a sugary drink with the meal," he says. "These issues of inflammation following a meal are important because the resultant high glucose and high triglycerides are known to be related to the development of cardiovascular events."
The study involved three groups of 10 normal-weight healthy men and women between the ages of 20 and 40. After an overnight fast, participants ate a 900-calorie breakfast composed of an egg "muffin" sandwich, a sausage "muffin" sandwich and a serving of hash browns. The meal contained 81 grams of carbohydrates, 51 grams of fat and 32 grams protein.
Along with the breakfast, one group drank 300 calories of "not-from-concentrate" orange juice, a second group drank a 300-calorie glucose drink and the third group drank an equal amount of water. All participants were given 15 minutes to finish their food and drink. Blood samples were collected before the meal and at 1, 3 and 5 hours afterwards. There was no significant difference in inflammatory mediators among the groups before the meal.
Analysis of the samples after the meal showed that oxygen free radicals increased an average of 62 percent with water, 63 percent with the glucose and 47 percent with orange juice. There also was an increase in blood components known as toll-like receptors, which play an important role in the development of inflammation, atherosclerosis, obesity, insulin resistance, and injury to cardiac cells than can occur after a blocked vessel is reopened.
Orange juice also prevented a significant increase in SOCS-3, an important mediator of insulin resistance, which contributes to development of type 2 diabetes.
"These data emphasize that a high-fat, high-carbohydrate meal is profoundly and rapidly proinflammatory, and that this process occurs at the cellular and molecular level," says Paresh Dandona, MD, UB distinguished professor of medicine, director of the Diabetes-Endocrinology Center of Western New York at Kaleida Health and senior author on the study.
"In addition, specific proinflammatory genes are activated after the intake of glucose and a high-fat, high-carbohydrate meal, and these changes are observed in mononuclear cells that participate in vascular inflammation and insulin resistance," he says.
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