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Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Sunday 18 August 2013

Is fruit juice bad for your health? Fruit juice could be worse for you than fizzy drinks -

Is fruit juice bad for your health? Fruit juice could be worse for you than fizzy drinks - 



Juice exudes health and vitality. It is officially one of your 'five-a-day'. It's what they sell in juice bars, those yogafied temples of wheatgrass.
But fruit juice is also, according to the American obesity expert Robert Lustig, basically just sugar and is therefore, in his view, a 'poison'. Lustig is the author of Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth about Sugar (4th Estate, £13.99), published earlier this year. He sees sugar as the major culprit in the obesity crisis. Not so surprising, except for his shock revelation that the worst sugars may be those that appear the healthiest. 'Calorie for calorie, 100 per cent orange juice is worse for you' than sugary sodas, Lustig says.
This sounds alarmist, until you read some of the case studies from Lustig's childhood obesity clinic in San Francisco. One eight-year-old already has high blood pressure, thanks to a three-glasses-a-day juice habit. A six-year-old Latino boy comes to the clinic weighing 100lb, 'wider than he is tall'. His mother, a poor farm worker, has been letting him drink a gallon of juice a day because a government welfare programme gives them the juice for free.
Obviously, most of us drink nothing like a gallon of juice a day. But our juice portions are still out of whack. Over the past 30 years consumption of fructose – the sugar in juice – has more than doubled. Juice didn't used to be seen as something with which you quenched your thirst; it was more like a vitamin shot, a tiny dose of goodness. A book from the 1920s on feeding children by L Emmett Holt says that you should give toddlers just one to four tablespoons (15-60ml) of fresh orange or peach juice. Compare this with today's 200ml children's juice boxes, which contain about 17g sugar, the equivalent of more than four teaspoons.
The biggest problem with juice, as far as Lustig is concerned, is the lack of fibre. When you eat a whole apple, the sugar is 'nicely balanced' by the fibre, giving 'the liver a chance to fully metabolise what's coming in'. When you down half a pint of apple juice it 'brings a huge dose of energy straight to the liver'. Smoothies are not much better, no matter how pretty the packaging, because when fruit is blended the insoluble fibre is 'torn to smithereens'.

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Update - Cops Ran Out of Free Doritos in 10 Minutes at Seattle Pot Festival -

Update - Cops Ran Out of Free Doritos in 10 Minutes at Seattle Pot Festival - 

On a day where free Doritos and pot aficionados join forces, it's only obvious that people who might be suffering from the munchies would want to get their hands a little dirty with some orange-y goodness.

But when the salty, cheesy snacks are free? Forget about it.
The Seattle Police Department descended on the city's annual Hempfest, which celebrates marijuana culture, to put into action a plan dubbed "Operation Orange Fingers."

In a move to draw attention to marijuana usage rules and restrictions in the state, officers handed out free Doritos with stickers about pot laws stuck on the bags. Not only delicious, but educational, each bag displayed a sticker of do's and don'ts of I-502, Washington's ballot measure that legalized the possession of marijuana in November.

But Seattle police found themselves at a serious deficit soon after they started sharing their chip stash with the Hempfest crowd. They managed to dole out the entire stash of free Doritos in about 10 minutes, according to the department's Twitter account.

Still, they satisfied the needs of "pretty much everyone who showed up for the morning gate-opening," they tweeted

So what do the cops consider the don'ts of an overwhelmingly popular pot law? 

The stickers instructed Washingtonians to remember to avoid driving while high, giving or selling weed to people under the age of 21, as well as forgoing pot use in public.

The do's? "Listen to the Dark Side of the Moon at a reasonable volume," the stickers said. For more information, Doritos-devourers could head to a website with more information on following state laws when smoking marijuana, or what it calls "marijuwhatnow literature."

"Distributing salty snacks at a festival celebrating hemp, I think, is deliberately ironic enough that people will accept them in good humor," Sgt. Sean Whitcomb told Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger. "We want to make sure people learn the rules and that they respect the vote."

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