Myosmith

People get way too stressed over the inflammatory headlines circulated on the interweb. Yes, if you soak a lab rat in fruit juice for 21 hours a day for six months, its risk of cancer rises by 1.2%

Fruit juices generally have a lot of sugar per ounce but don't stroke out, just consume it in moderation, maybe with some other higher fiber foods that will help limit the glycemic spike. If you like OJ, a small glass once in a while will have no detrimental effect. If you're guzzling a liter a day, you might want to reconsider.

There is a similar frenzy over the casein (a protein) in milk raising the risk of death from prostate cancer. If you look at the research further, casein does not increase the risk of getting prostate cancer. You have to take in quite a bit of milk to see any effect, but high levels of casein intake does appear to accelerate the growth rate of existing prostate cancers. What the articles don't tell you is that drinking milk in moderation also help decrease the incidence of colon and some other cancers. So, rather than some kind of death sentence for men, drinking milk in moderation is a bit of a trade off, decreasing the risk of some cancers and slightly increasing the growth rate of one specific cancer. If you have known prostate cancer, or a strong family history of prostate cancer, talk to your doctor about how much dairy you should be consuming.

Next they'll be telling me that drinking too much water is bad for me . . . wait . . . it is

All good things in moderation.

AnthonyG

I wonder about how well the study was carried out and controlled.
There is a grain of truth in it however as it is known that Fructose, the sugar in fruit can be problematic for human health when consumed in excess. Fructose can only be processed by the liver and excessive consumption of fructose is no better for our livers than excessive consumption of alcohol which also has to be processed by our livers.

PJay120

I have read a lot of this epidemiology.
I believe fruit juice should be considered to be in the same nutrition category as "sugary drinks," not "fruits and vegetables."

First: yes, the fiber in fruit is the big deal. Consider fiber to be like chain lube. You don't eat chain lube for energy, but you sure need it. There is something about fiber and our gut biome, or our bowel transit time, that leads to health or illness. Make a list of "healthy" dietary habits, and a list of "unhealthy" dietary habits. Now, make a list of things that make you "regular," or "constipated." Now, compare the lists.

Fruit has four benefits: 1 fluid/water, 2 vitamins/minerals 3 fiber 4 sugar. 1. you can drink water. 2. unless you have a distinct deficit, you are not really overcoming any vitamin or mineral deficit by drinking juice. Possibly, some with a really bad diet get VitaC deficit addressed. If your diet is THAT bad, you need more than a glass of OJ a day. 3. The fiber plays a huge, essential role in regularity. without this, you are in trouble in the long term. 4. sure, sugar is good for energy, and if you burn it up and brush your teeth you are OK. However, outside of fueling up for sports, you don't need that sugar. Plus, it registers as empty calories in your diet. For us big people, that may or may not be a problem, but it is a problem sometimes for kids and appetite.

The sugary beverage thing is probably a marker for who exercises less. Less than regular moderate exercise > overweight > cancer and other bad health states.

Athletes burn up the sugar so we dont get the slow metabolism which leads to slow bowel movement and excessive weight gain.

So, in the end: in this study, sugary drinks probably indicate less healthy lifestyle people; and it indicates tooth decay unless you have good dental hygiene practices.
And, I think fruit juice is not a 1:1 substitute for fresh fruit, because you miss the main benefit: the fiber.

blacknbluebikes 

Going out in the sun increases your risk of cancer.
Maintaining a stressful job increases your risk of heart attack.
Riding on the road definitely increases your risk of getting hit by a car.
Amazing I'm still here at all -- AND I already had cancer.
Seriously, enjoy the phriggin' juice move on.

Senrab62 

This is accurate. It becomes a dessert with less nutrients and not as it is intended for consumption. Why not just eat the fruit instead of just the sugary bits?

Occasionally is fine, but people's reluctance for veggies especially and fruits in their whole form is also not ideal.

KraneXL

Between sugar in fruit juices and table sugar there are two areas to consider: On the positive side, sugar in fruit (fructose) does not raise glucose levels so is diabetic safe. The body is also adapted to better deal with fructose than its is with sucrose. Fructose is also sweeter than table sugar so you'd use less of it.

On the other hand, it doesn't naturally come in the form of juice except that which is contained in fruit so you don't consume very much of it at one time. Consider, the amount of oranges you would eat as compared to that number used to make a typical glass of orange juice.

Even so, these studies tend to use many times the amount of a substance anyone would normally consume when they render these cancer causing conclusions.

bobwysiwyg

Longevity dramatically increases one's risk of cancer. Any solutions to this dilemma?

wolfchild

Some people like to talk about how our ancestors of long time ago didn't have all these modern disease like cancer, diabetes, heart disease etc...but I think the main reason why is because most of them didn't live long enough to experience all those age related diseases.

trailangel

You can't eat or drink anything these days..... it'll kill you.

KraneXL

Come on now, you know better than that. Its the 'over-consumption of these thing our ancestors didn't have the technology to do that is killing us today. They didn't have the ability to go to the fridge and cook up snacks 24/7 the way we do today. They ate once, and that was it.

Digger Goreman

Beware the reductionism in science, and try to get as basic as possible. Sugars are fuel. Unrefined sugars require cellular synergies that render them more benign. Refined sugars are there in "overdrive" mode, ready to boost anything, including fat production and feeding cancers.

Meat and diary can set up your cancer... sugars (especially refined) give it immediate overdrive energy.

bobwysiwyg

Exactly my point. As we age we are less able to combat whatever. Science evolves faster than our genes.

fly135

Best advice anyone will ever give WRT diet. You can choose to eat carbs for fat or energy. Sugar without fiber = fat. Sugar with fiber = energy.

Gyrine

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/u...core-ios-share

berner

burnthesheep

100 mL increase from what baseline?

Zero mL? 500mL? 1000mL?

What was the normative sugar intake overall for these individuals?

Kind of like alcohol. It's different going from zero to one drink per day, or from 3 drinks per day to 5. Whereas going 1 drink to 2 drinks might not do squat.

Crap studies.

One year, red wine is good. Then it's bad. Then it's beer is good. Then it's bad. Then blah blah blah.

Moderation is best. Even moderation of moderation is good. Lol.

79pmooney

Yes, but ... leukemias and breast cancers regularly hit people who are not old, even by the standards of 100 millennia ago. Pretty clear that we are subjecting our bodies to chemicals and conditions our bodies did not evolve to deal with.

Carbonfiberboy 

Childhood death is much less common now than it was, historically. We don't know the diagnoses of course, just the fact of death. IOW we don't know anything about the health of ancient populations, except that it wasn't as good as it is now.

That said, it has been shown that it's better not to have chemicals enter our bodies which are known to be harmful. Food is not among those chemicals known to be harmful. Too much and too little food have both been shown to be harmful, but that's about it. That's not complicated. We are extremely adaptable omnivores.

There's a fun article in JAMA showing that most media articles about health concern things which may or may not be true. There are noticeably few media articles about things known to be harmful like tobacco and high alcohol consumption.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...rticle/2753533

willibrord

Chemicals and sugar are the two things we consume that we should do without. For the first time in a century life expectancy is not increasing, indeed decreasing, in large part to these substances being a large part of our current diet.

Clyde1820

Many such liquids are engineered items.

It would be interesting to know whether straight fresh-squeezed fruits contributed to the same conditions in the same way, or whether it's mostly the engineered products doing this (via their severe sugar and faux-sugar additives).

Carbonfiberboy 

Unfortunately for these theories, the evidence does not support them.

1) Life expectancy in the US is increasing, not decreaseing. However our rate of increase is less than that of other developed countries due to our poor health care system: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/...es/#item-start

2) Sugar has nothing to do with it. Overeating does, however overeating is common in other countries also:

Pure sucrose comprises 20% of the diet of Kenyan runners. They don't seem to suffer from it. https://runnersconnect.net/diet-of-kenyan-runners/

Studies have shown that a diet of even 25% sucrose does not cause insulin resistance or cardiovascular risk in non-diabetics, as long as calorie consumption is not increased: https://diabetes.diabetesjournals.or...5/12/3566.full

Again, it's not the sugar, or the fat, or the . . . it's overeating that's the problem.

OBoile

Given that literally everything is a chemical, what exactly do you expect us to eat/drink?
https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress...atural-banana/