Can Drinking Fruit Juices Make You Fat?

You might think that drinking fruit juices would be healthy for you. However, it could make you fatter than eating solid food. So is too much solid food or too much liquid food worse for your health?

One of the biggest problems with weight loss is determining how much you are really eating. Most people - when counting calories - tend to woefully under estimate the amount of calories they are eating and drinking every day. In fact, most people don't even think to count the calories in juices, coffee and other drinks. Yet, these calories can add 100 to several hundred calories a day. That is more than enough to defeat all of your weight loss potential right there.

In a recent study reported in the American Journal of Nutrition it was shown that liquid calories have a higher impact on your weight gain than do solid food calories. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that these liquid calories don't really take much energy to digest. Eating solid foods takes energy, which means you are burning calories every time you eat. Now this is not a whole lot, but you are burning some.

If you eat more protein, your body burns even more calories because it takes more energy to digest these foods. Drinking a liquid is very easy to digest, so not many calories are burned. The other reason is because of insulin. Insulin can be a help in burning calories, specifically sugars, but it can be a problem. The problem occurs if there is too much sugar hitting all at once. It can not handle all that sugar you might be getting in your juices and other drinks. What it can't handle, gets stored as fat.

This spiking of the insulin levels that is so prevalent with the foods and drinks you digest is one of the reasons diabetes is rising so rapidly. This same study found that if you do reduce the amount of sugary drinks in your diet that the average participant lost 2-4 pounds over a 6 month period. Even though that doesn't seem like much, just remember that there were no other changes in the diets of the participants. So just drinking less led to the weight loss.

So what should you be on the lookout for? Any soft drinks, fruit punches, diet drinks, fruit drinks, fruit juices - even the ones with 100% fruit juice. Don't forget those health drinks, like vitamin waters, and energy drinks that are loaded with sugars. Slurpees are another sugar laden bonanza. A lot of low fat drinks, like milk, make up for the less fat with more sugar. And all those special coffees that are so full of sugars that they negate any fat burning properties that the caffeine has. Here is a simple trick to help you get off the liquid sugar diet.

Drink a cold glass of water before you drink anything. This is also a good thing to do before you eat anything. The water is filling and will help you feel fuller so that you don't eat and drink as much. So keep drinking fruit juices for the health benefits, but do it in moderation.

Thanks, Mike Val

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