It's kind of bizarre that the government is still recommending fruit juice. I mean I love it and drink a little bit myself, but based on what we know now about the effects of sugar it's barely healthier than soda pop.

> At least half of the recommended amount of fruit should come from whole fruit, rather than 100% fruit juice.

Baby steps. They also recommend having at least half of the grains in a diet be whole grains.* For the best diet, both of these proportions should be as high as possible in most cases.

* https://www.myplate.gov/eat-healthy/grains

It’s not bizarre when you consider pizza as a vegetable. [0]

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/pizza-still-a-vegetable-for-u...

Fruits should be eaten as a whole, so fibers act along the sugars. Drinking just the fruit juice isn't too far from a Coke.

Fruit juice means fresh fruit juiced without adding any sugar right? Some people refer to fruit juice as the ones you see in tetrapacks.

Real fruit juice is very much different from soda pop.

If we're just looking at sugar content, it's really not that different. Pepsi has ~11% more sugar than fresh apple juice:

25g of sugar in 285g of juice[0] = that's 37 grams in 355ml of juice[1] vs. 41 grams of sugar in 355ml of soda[2], which is 110.8% more than the juice[3].

The half gram of fiber probably makes it little better, but it's still a very sugary drink.

[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=fresh+apple+juice+nutr... [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=25*(355%2F240) [2] https://www.pepsi.com/#!products/pepsi [3] https://www.google.com/search?q=41%2F37

I might be remembering the details wrong, but I heard an actual doctor saying there is difference between fresh fruit juice and soda pop.

I found this that seems like what the doctor said, but I'm not sure. Click on 'transcript' and read it.

https://nutritionfacts.org/video/if-fructose-is-bad-what-abo...

Edit: Other than this, fresh fruit juice contains minerals, vitamins, antioxidants etc etc.

High fructose corn syrup is not the same thing as fructose, all other things being equal. Fiber also helps modulate the insulin response. Sugar isn't the enemy, if you're eating fruit you're getting a lot more than fructose from it. The problem is when people get a large % of their calories from nutritionally deficient food, like soda.

Fruit and vegetable consumption is often researched as a single metric, so dietary recommendations tend to lump them together.

The benefit of diversifying your diet (for example, by adding more fruits if you don't eat much of them) is to include nutrients that would otherwise be missing. Not just the macronutrients and micronutrients, but also other antioxidants such as polyphenols.[1]

The UK NHS recommendation touches on this briefly:[2]

> To get the most out of your 5 A Day, your 5 portions should include a variety of fruit and vegetables. This is because different fruits and vegetables contain different combinations of fibre, vitamins, minerals and other nutrients.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_antioxidants_in_food

[2] https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/why-5-a-day/

It's probably fine to go without fruit, as your ancestors can't possibly have eaten it every day. However, I find that a diet too heavily focused on vegetables leaves me still wanting "dessert" even when my stomach feels full; fruit calms that feeling. Also fruit is great for slowing down a meal and for adding a lot of bulk relative to the calories inside.

That makes sense. I do often find myself craving a dessert after eating what is otherwise a very satisfying meal. I should try fruit afterwards. A few years ago, whenever I felt too full from a big meal, I would eat a banana, which felt like it helped.

(Alas, this morning I opened up the freezing while making a salad for breakfast and discovered that a housemate had left a massive ice cream cake in there, so I had no choice but to indulge.)