You Ask, I Answer: Fruit Juice/Sugar

Thanks for answering my first question on fruit juice and sugar content.

So if you're drinking 3 or 4 big glasses of some kind of fruit juice instead of 3 or 4 sodas a day you [are] still taking in empty calories and large amounts of sugar like with the soda, right?

So if you need something to drink while surfing the Internet or just watching TV fruit juice wouldn't be the best improvement over soda.

What about PowerAid or something like that, would it be better than both soda and bottled fruit juice? Or should we really only be reaching for a water bottle to actually get any kind of improvement?

-- Andrew Carney
Spokane, WA

Yes, four glasses of conventional fruit juice are pretty much equal to 3 or 4 sodas.

I say "pretty much" and not "exactly equal to" because although calorie content is not too difference, fruit juice does not contain phosphoric acid, (which can leech calcium from your bones) and in many occassions does provide naturally-occurring vitamins and minerals not present in soda.

That being said, consider that four cups (a cup being eight ounces) of juice a day can add as much as 640 calories to your day!

That's a LOT of extra calories a day -- more than a Big Mac!

If you were to change nothing about your eating but lower your juice intake from four cups of juice to two cups of juice, you would lose 15 - 20 pounds over the course of a year.

Replacing soda with juice isn't the best swap. PowerAid, meanwhile, is still basically empty calories.

This is not to say you should never have juice.

I don't know how large your glasses are, but let's assume each glass you pour is about 8 ounces. I would have no more than 2 a day (keep in mind, that is still 320 calories); ideally, one.

What can you do instead? Water is one solution, but there are other more flavorful alternatives, if that is what you seek:

Canada Dry flavored seltzer water

Hint Water

Sugar-free (or low-sugar) teas like Teany, Teas' Tea, or Honest Tea.

Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Bubble Tea

Asian cuisine is often associated with an aura of health and balance. This doesn't strike me as particularly weird, since traditional Asian diets are lower in saturated fat and less processed than those of Western countries.

However, the Americanization of Asian food has resulted in sushi rolls dowsed in mayonnaise and covered in over-sized tempura shrimp as well as Chinese food that often surpasses McDonald's worst offenders in the sodium and saturaed fat categories (If General Tso ate his chicken every day, he probably suffered a massive heart attack at 25).

One "healthy" Asian drink that continues to increase in popularity is boba, affectionately known on these shores as bubble tea.

Quite the rage in Los Angeles and New York, this drink consists of tea, milk, sugar or honey, and 30 or 40 tapioca balls. It is consumed via a thick, colorful straw that allows the sweet, gummy tapioca balls to fly into your mouth and deliver quite a unique sensation.

Bubble tea can be comprised of black, green, or white tea, either plain or flavored in a variety of ways (ie: mango, sesame, coconut, etc.)

Before I understood much about nutrition, I considered this a light, refreshing, exotic treat. In fact, I lived exactly half a block away from an amazing bubble tea "house", which basically turned into my home away from the dorms.

I might as well have visited McDonald's.

Consider a standard 12 ounce serving of bubble tea.

Four ounces of whole milk provide 73 calories
Eight ounces of black tea provide 2 calories
One tablespoon of honey provides 64 calories

Here comes the pearl-clutching shocker.

Each tapioca ball packs in approximately 10 calories. Multiply that by 30 and you get... 300 calories of pure starch!

A little addition brings the total to 439 calories, and approximately 50 grams of sugar -- almost two soda cans' worth!

That's calorically equal to two grande skim caramel macchiatos or two 10 ounce cups of Dunkin' Donuts Hot Chocolate.

Bubble tea is one of my favorite indulgences and I encourage everyone to try it at least once in their lifetime, but consider it a high-calorie, high-sugar treat and not your daily dose of tea antioxidants.