Are doughnuts healthier than fruit juice?
I had breakfast with some friends at the weekend, and seeing some cranberry juice on the table, thought I’d try some instead of my usual tea. Now cranberries are pretty sweet on their own – but this juice was so sickly sweet, I thought my teeth were going to fall out. I looked at the ingredients (should have done that first) and saw:
Ingredients: Water, Cranberry Juice from Concentrate (25%), Sugar, Vitamin C, Flavourings
Yep, sugar and flavourings added to an already sweet and flavourful drink! And why add vitamin C to a juice made from the very fruit that contains vitamin C?
How much sugar? In a 500ml bottle a total of 53.5 grams (nearly 2 oz) of sugar. There are 4 grams of sugar in a teaspoon, meaning this one little bottle contained almost 14 teaspoons of sugar! 14!
For comparison an original glazed Krispy Kreme doughnut (surely everyone would agree this is most definitely not a health food) contains 10g of sugar. In fact, the most sugary Krispy Kreme doughnut I could find (Butterscotch Fudge) contains 53g of sugar – marginally less than the bottle of cranberry juice. Yet we all see doughnuts as a bad food – and amazingly many people still push fruit juices as a health food.
The sugar pushers seem to try to get around the ridiculous sugar contents, by giving nutritional information based on a 100ml serve. But how many people have you seen with a 500ml bottle divide it into five servings? None, because almost everyone absent-mindedly finishes the bottle. And how many people get a calculator out at the breakfast table?
PS these are the ingredients for the Krispy Kreme doughnut, that contains the same amount of sugar as the fruit juice (recognise many of these?!):
Doughnut: Wheat Flour, Dextrose, Vegetable Oil (Palm Oil, Sunflower Oil), Water, Sugar, Wheat Gluten, Egg Yolks, Yeast, Skimmed Milk, Salt, Emulsififers (E471), Preservative (E282), Stabiliser (E466), Flavourings. Kreme Filling: Sugar, Vegetable Oil, Vegetable Shortening (Vegetable Oils, Emulsifier (E471)), Water, Ground Coffee Beans, Dried Glucose Syrup, Salt, Emulsifiers (E471, E435, E322, E477, E475), Flavouring. Icing: Sugar, Water, Vegetable Oil, Fat Reduced Cocoa Powder (32%), Dried Glucose Syrup, Emulsifiers (E322, E471), Salt, Flavouring Caramel Flavour Fudge: Sugar, Full Cream Sweetened Condensed Milk, Fondant (Sugar, Glucose, Water), Glucose, Vegetable Oil, Butter Oil, Natural Flavour.
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I wouldn’t judge based on just sugar. At least the juice has some nutritional benefits. The donuts can cause some major damage with those ingredients.
Hi Kristi,I was just comparing the sugar content – I think most people have no idea how much sugar is in a fruit juice.
Have you ever had fresh cranberries? They’re bitter. There is absolutely no way one could describe them as sweet. That’s why you won’t find 100% cranberry juice marketed as something you actually drink straight (it’s sold in some European countries to use for cooking and baking though). Also, I’d assume that the vitamin C is added because any naturally occurring vitamin C is lost during processing.
I’ve pretty much given up on ‘fruity’ things that are not the whole, actual fruit. You just can’t expect to get any nutrition out of commercially produced fruit products.