On June 9, 2010 the Environmental Law Foundation filed Notices of Violation of California Proposition 65 Toxics Right to Know law, alleging the toxic chemical lead was found in a variety of children’s and baby foods. A testing program by ELF found the toxic chemical lead in a variety of children’s and baby foods.
Products tested and results
Many brands of organic juice were found to contain levels of lead that exceed the California Proposition 35 limit of 0.5 micrograms of lead per serving. There is no safe level of lead exposure for children (or pregnant women, as lead passes through the placenta).
Juice is not a necessary component to our diet, especially industrially-processed juice. All bottled juices are fractionated beverages in which the juice has been removed from the pulp. They are not whole foods. They are then heated during the bottling process, turning them into a drink that is not much different from a fructose-sweetened soda.
Dr. Charles Billington, an appetite researcher at the University of Minnesota. said, “It’s pretty much the same as sugar water.”
Juice concentrates the sugar from fruit, so it is consumed more like a concentrated fructose sweetener, rather than in it’s natural state with all the corresponding water and fiber.
Consuming high levels of fructose is known to increase risk factors for heart disease and Type 2 diabetes because it is converted into fat by the liver more readily than glucose. It seems to ‘t matter whether the fructose is from soda or juice.
“Both are going to promote equal weight gain,” she said, adding that she’s perplexed by the fixation on the evils of sugar-sweetened beverages: “Why are they the only culprit?”
I myself don’t drink bottled juice, not even fresh juice sold under refrigeration. The sugars are just too concentrated. If I want juice, I take whole fruit and whiz it up in the blender with lots of purified water. In this way, I have whole fruit or vegetable juice. And none of the contaminants that might be introduced during industrial juicing and packaging.
