Firstly I had to go to the supermarket to access the ingredients found in packaged fruits as this information is not readily available on their websites. I will not mention names here as all manufacturers seemed to do the same thing. There are too many varieties out there anyway. I ventured off to the supermarket thinking this would be easy. Read the ingredients, make my assessment of the ingredients and move on. The reality was that nothing is what it seems. I have been working on this all morning very little information gained. Let me explain.
Sample one: Ingredients was 58% fruit, with refined fruit juice and ascorbic acid. This had me baffled. The product came in a plastic container so I could see the fruit packed inside. If there was 58% fruit, what was the other 42%? And then there was the Refined Fruit Juice!! Do you know that I could not find any information on what exactly Refined Fruit Juice (RFJ) meant?? I was unable to see if this was simply the juice from the fruit that occurs naturally or what it meant. Of course it is not natural juice or else this would be written in capital letters for all to see. No refined fruit juice could simply mean the water the fruit was cleaned in, washed in perhaps, who knows?
I decided the best way to compare fresh fruit and packaged fruit is to do a side by side nutritional chart. The results were quite amazing and here they are:
| Peaches Packaged in RFJ | Whole peach | |
| 140gm | 175gm | |
| FAT | 0.1GM | 0 |
| CHO | 20.6GM | 17 |
| SUGARS | 16.0GM | 15 |
| FIBRE | 1.3GM | 3 |
| PROT | 1.1GM | 2 |
| SODIUM | 8MG | 0 |
| Kj | 354 | 275 |
What do the results tell you?? The 8gm of sodium is due to the preservative factor. There is double the fibre found in fresh peaches vs packaged making me ask have the fruits been tampered with? How can there be less fibre?? The fruit in packaged products is certainly slimier and softer, has this evolved due to consumer demand? Have the manufacturers decided to get rid of the firmness and fibre because people are now too lazy to chew?
Next time you use processed over fresh, you are not really adding one of your five a day. You are more adding just another processed product the body has to work twice as hard to digest it, which can be difficult for those under a lot of stress, but that is for another blog.
bye for now
Julie Dargan RN, ND, BHSc
I found myself here because I was also looking for answers on what "refined fruit juice" means... if you came to this page looking for answers, move along because there are none here just bad information.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, from what I can tell "refined" means filtered to remove the solids (including fibre) that will settle in canning so the thin clear sugarly liquid is all that is left.
So how do we make sense of the numbers, let's start by noting we are comparing 140g of something to 175g of something different (grams is "g" not "GM") we aren't comparing the same amounts, and if you aren't paying attention you may not have even noticed that we aren't comparing peaches to peaches!
Lets fix that: in our 140g serving size we presumeably have 58% peach, so 81g, about 46% of our whole peach. No assuming refined juice has no fibre and we drain our serve of canned peach we have 1.3g of fibre for 81g of canned peach. Whereas 81g of our non canned peach has a whopping extra 0.1g hardly double, and a figure that could even just be due to rounding error.
Talking of rounding error, we have those mysterious tiny figures that aren't consistent, 0.1g of fat vs. 0(grams?), 8mg of sodium vs. 0. 8mg is cannot be explained as a "preservative", this tiny amount of salt would not have any significant perservative effect (ie. this would be well below the levels bacteria can tolerate). Note that the column on the left uses more decimal places - it looks to me like we are seeing two nutrition information systems compared as if they were the same. Where in Australian nutritional labels will express fat as "LESS THAN 0.1g" when the value was to small to measure, or the sodium level as "LESS THAN 5mg" when it was too small to measue, overseas these are in many cases accepted to be labelled as nil values (peaches do contain "fat" or peach oil wouldn't exist)
What is clear from the numbers is that refined juice is a very sugary product, that with respect to GI will likely not be much healthier (if at all) than the sugar syrup it replaces; and do note that clause "with respect to GI", there is not a single measure of healthiness, and to some extent changes in GI affect all juices fruits and vegetables.