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 occasions 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!

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 (by this I don’t mean “full of artificial sweeteners”, I mean “without any sweetener”) or low-sugar teas like Teany, Teas’ Tea, or Honest Tea.

2 Comments bubble tea, calories, juice, Powerade, soda, sugar, weight loss, You Ask/I Answer

Gatorade and Powerade have spent millions on advertising campaigns to make us believe that their products are synonymous with fitness, health, and well-being.

Their entire selling point is that their products offer some of the precious minerals we lose when exercising heavily, among them potassium. Keep in mind that we should be getting approximately 4,000 milligrams of potassium a day as you read the following.

When looking past the smoke and mirrors, we find that:

* 90 calories
* 22 grams (5 1/2 teaspoons) of sugar
* 47 milligrams of potassium (a measly 1%!)

In other words, don’t buy the hype.

3 Comments drinks, Gatorade, hype, potassium, Powerade, product reviews, sugar