9. Juice
Juice, either homemade or freshly squeezed from a café or shop (as long as there’s no added sugar) is a healthy option for refreshing our thirst, but we should only have a small 200ml glass of it per day. Water is always the best option for keeping thirst at bay.
This is because juice, even if made using 100% fruit, is essentially a sugary drink. Fructose, or fruit sugar might not be as demonised as sucrose (normal table, or white sugar) but it’s still sugar and the body will process it in the same way. It’ll quickly spike our blood sugar levels but as ever, as sure as night follows day, a blood sugar crash follows a spike. So if we drink a fruit juice alone for breakfast, we’re likely to feel hungry pretty soon afterwards.
A smoothie is a better option, where whole fruits are blended to still contain the pulp and all the valuable fibre (unlike a juice which is lacking in fibre). Fibre also masks the fruit sugar, helping to slow down its absorption by the blood, meaning that our blood sugar levels rise much more slowly than after consuming a juice.
