Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2020 January 24

= January 24 =

How healthy are fruit juices?
How healthy are commercially available fruit juices, especially orange juice? Are they fattening? Freeknowledgecreator (talk) 09:08, 24 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Are you writing a book on nutrition, one question at a time? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 09:09, 24 January 2020 (UTC)
 * No as a matter of fact I am not. Once again I am asking a serious question, looking for a serious answer. It is a general question, not a question about my personal health. Freeknowledgecreator (talk) 09:10, 24 January 2020 (UTC)
 * That's not what I asked. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 09:21, 24 January 2020 (UTC)
 * OK. I'm not interested in some kind of confused argument/head-butting thing. I am asking a serious question about how healthy fruit juices are. Someone please answer it. Freeknowledgecreator (talk) 09:23, 24 January 2020 (UTC)
 * They are less healthy than people think. They're loaded with sugar, and you don't get any of the nutritional benefits of actually eating the fruit, such as digesting fiber.  Really though, you are in the wrong place.  Better to read some books on these topics.  As for fattening, yes, go by the calorie content.  2601:648:8202:96B0:0:0:0:4FFF (talk) 11:22, 24 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I subscribe to this view: eating fruits is healthy, the main reason is because fruits are low-calories. Fruit juices aren't fruits. Orange juice has the same amount of sugar as Coca Cola. Tgeorgescu (talk) 12:11, 24 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Coca-Cola Zero Sugar has no sugar. Freeknowledgecreator (talk) 06:39, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
 * There's a free internet based service called "Google" that you can use to research the answers to these questions. Your questions are of the type and format that if you type them into the search bar at this service, you get results that are more useful than asking here and waiting around for someone to give you an answer.  For just one example, I used your question title here "How healthy are fruit juices? and got a plethora of reliable sources you could use to answer your own questions, and on a time frame which is much faster than waiting for someone here to do it.  On the very first page of that search, I found this article from the BBC which itself cites and links to numerous studies and reliable sources which can answer your question.  -- Jayron 32 12:16, 24 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Healthy in what way? There is one big question these days, especially in the US, on health issues around the widespread use of high fructose corn syrup(HFCS). Now fruit juice might avoid that, or it might be a faked "fruit" juice made from HFCS dyed orange. Fruit juice itself contains fructose, and there are concerns over that too (if you're going to eat sugar, don't eat fructose as that sugar).
 * Then the issue of the sugars in fruit juice. If you're in the West, easy over-abundance of sugars is perhaps our worst dietary problem - even more so than fats. So why drink something like this which is so heavy in them?  Historically, fruit juice was seen as "healthy" in the mid 20th century, because it was scarce and it was a source of vitamin C  (unless you have a terrible diet, or you're an ancient mariner, you're unlikely to be short on vitamin C). This led to decades of misunderstanding since, still buoyed up by marketing, that "fruit juice is healthy" when in fact it isn't. At the most, it might be better than non-fruit-based, high sugar or carbonated drinks.
 * Then there's dentistry. Fruit juice is terrible there. Sugary and acidic. The only things worse are carbonated drinks (even soda water is bad for your teeth, just because carbonation makes it acidic). If you do drink fruit juice, don't drink it before bedtime and don't (don't!) clean your teeth for an hour after drinking it (i.e. if you need to clean your teeth, don't drink fruit juice beforehand). Andy Dingley (talk) 12:59, 24 January 2020 (UTC)


 * The advice of the UK National Health Service is to "limit the amount of fruit juice, vegetable juice or smoothie you have to no more than a combined total of 150ml a day (1 small glass)", but that this can count as one of your 5 A Day, so it's not all bad. Alansplodge (talk) 17:56, 24 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Most of them are extracted Fructose with reduced vitamines by makeing the bottle not expiring too fast. Or some are carbonhydrate-polutued water. -- Hans Haase (有问题吗) 04:44, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * This likely depends a lot on where you live. A lot of orange juice in NZ is indeed just juice from oranges, potentially reconstituted, with some small additives (maybe vitamin C and flavour). Probably one of the bigger differences is whether the juice is re-constituted, and also whether there's any pulp. While you do get other juice juice blends in NZ, fruit juices with added sugar in the form of 'sugar' or HFCS are actually rare. (Actually HFCS usage is somewhat rare here point blank.) Instead they go the cheat route of using apple juice as the sweetener and adding some other stuff so they can still say it's 99% juice or whatever. However none of them are considered particularly healthy. Freshly squeezing juice at home isn't either. As said, at best you can maybe say it's slightly better than normal sweetened soft drinks particularly in moderation. (Whether it's better than artificially sweetened soft drinks may be a different question. Likewise it may also depend slightly on your diet.) Nil Einne (talk) 08:32, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

After Man Continental Drift.
The book, After Man is set 50 million years in the future. Five of the most significant moves of the Continents by the time of the book are as follows. The first three seem expected from what I've seen on continental drift. I'm unsure whether the last two would be expected with current science in the field.Naraht (talk) 18:09, 24 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Africa has completely collided with Europe and raised mountains where the Mediterranean is
 * East Africa has split completely off of Africa
 * Australia has run into the East Indies and pushed them north and raised significant mountains
 * North America and Asia are now connected (closing of the Bering Straight) without significant change apparent change in sea level (supposedly due to the widening of the Atlantic)
 * South and Central America are no longer connected.


 * Our article Future of Earth has a little bit on this and some useful citations. Chris Scotese in his PaleoMap Project provides a map at 50 million years in the future. In that construction, this first and third point are predicted but the second one isn't. As to the fourth point, he shows that Baja California has slipped all the way up to Alaska - note that North America and northeastern Asia are actually on the same plate - the Bering Strait is not a plate boundary. In this construction, North and South America remain connected - they are currently slowly converging, so the fifth prediction seems unlikely on that basis. Mikenorton (talk) 17:08, 25 January 2020 (UTC)
 * You can read some more of the detail here. The breaking up along the East African Rift appears to be stopped by the continuing collision between the Arabian Plate and the Eurasian Plate causing the closing of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Mikenorton (talk) 17:27, 25 January 2020 (UTC)