What's wrong with orange juice? Plenty, says Toronto author + Related articles

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What's wrong with orange juice? Plenty, says Toronto author

May 20, 2009 http://www.healthzone.ca/health/article/636563

Sampson

That glass of sunshine sitting on the breakfast table isn't as pure and simple as you think it is, according to an exposé of the orange juice industry. In her new book Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice, author Alissa Hamilton examines the "rift that exists between the reality of processed orange juice and retail rhetoric." Although orange juice "has come to symbolize purity in a glass," she writes, it may be heat processed, watered down, sugared up, doctored by flavour engineers and stored for a year. Hamilton, 36, lives in Toronto. She has a doctorate in environmental studies from Yale University and a law degree from the University of Toronto. She is a fellow with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, based in Minneapolis. The fellows are a diverse group working to change U.S. food policies and advance the idea of healthy, green and affordable food for all. She says making the food system more transparent is her particular area of interest. Q: What would consumers be surprised to discover about orange juice? A: The leading producers of "not from concentrate" (a.k.a. pasteurized) orange juice keep their juice in million-gallon aseptic storage tanks to ensure a year-round supply. Juice stored this way has to be stripped of oxygen, a process known as de-aeration, so it doesn't oxidize in the tanks. When the juice is stripped of oxygen, it is also stripped of flavour-providing chemicals ... If you were to try the juice coming out of the tanks, it would taste like sugar water. Juice companies therefore hire flavour and fragrance companies, the same ones that make popular perfumes and colognes, to fabricate flavour packs to add back to their product to make it taste like orange juice. Q: What are flavour packs? A: Flavour packs are derived from the orange essence and oils that are lost from orange juice during processing. Flavour houses break down these essence and oils into their constituent chemicals and then reassemble the chemicals into formulations that resemble nothing found in nature. Most of the juice sold in North America contains flavour packs that have especially high concentrations of ethyl butyrate, a chemical found in orange essence that the industry has discovered Americans like and associate with the flavour of a freshly squeezed orange. Q: How is the labelling of orange juice misleading or confusing? A: A good example is the statement that appeared at the top of Tropicana's new and now discontinued carton: "squeezed from fresh oranges." While meaningless – one would hope the oranges were fresh when squeezed – the statement could easily be misread as "fresh squeezed" by all but the most discerning shoppers. Not much has changed since the early 1960s, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began to regulate orange juice in part to stop orange juice manufacturers from marketing their processed products as fresh. Q: What type of orange juice is closest to pure or fresh squeezed? Frozen concentrate, bottled or chilled in cartons? A: It's hard to compare. What's important is price is not an accurate measure of the extent to which a product has been processed. For instance, "not from concentrate" orange juice, which is sold chilled in cartons, is the most expensive but not necessarily the least processed ... Any product that has a 60-plus day shelf life and is available year-round has to be heavily processed. If you want a product that is fresh-squeezed or close to it, the "best before" date is a good gauge. Fresh-squeezed juice doesn't last for more than a couple of days. Q: Where does Canada's orange juice come from? A: Florida is the birthplace of the orange juice industry. Even Californians will admit Florida grows an exceptionally good juice orange ... But most orange juice sold in North America, Canada included, now comes from Brazil, where there are fewer environmental regulations, and land and labour are cheaper. Q: Do you still drink orange juice? Should people buy less orange juice? A: I prefer to eat a whole orange, literally: I even eat the pith, and save the peel for cooking. But I have nothing against orange juice, especially if it's freshly squeezed from Florida Valencias, which are considered the "Cadillac of oranges" ... for their juiciness, deep orange colour and rich orange flavour. We take it for granted that we can have orange juice for breakfast 365 days of the year. But even orange juice has a season. Now is the best time to drink it, since from March until the end of June, Florida Valencias are in their prime. Toronto Star

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RELATED ARTICLE:

Dirty Secrets of the Food Processing Industry Source: by Sally Fallon.

http://www.westonaprice.org/modernfood/dirty-secrets.html

extract

ORANGE JUICE

A quote from Processed and Prepared Foods states that "a new orange juice processing plant is completely automated and can process up to 1,800 tons of oranges per day to produce frozen concentrate, single strength juice, oil extracted from the peel, and cattle feed." They throw the whole orange in there and they actually add enzymes to get as much of the juice as they can even out of the skin. It is a very heavily sprayed crop, being sprayed with organophosphates, cholinesterase inhibitors, which are real mindbenders. They are very toxic to the nervous system and when they put the oranges in the vats and squeeze them, all that pesticide goes into the processing unit. Then they add acids to get every single bit of juice out of these oranges. So you already have a very, very toxic soup.

What about the peel used for cattle feed? This is something new in this business of cattle prisons. The dried left-over citrus peel is processed into cakes which are still loaded with cholinesterase inhibitors and organophosphates. Mark Purdey in England has shown this is correlated with Mad Cow Disease. The use of organophosphates either as a spray on the cows or in their feed is one of the causes of the degeneration of the brain and nervous system in the cow and if it's doing it to the cow, there's a possibility it's doing it to you also. And these things are in the orange juice!

Another abstract states that "Various acid sprays for improving fruit peel quality and increasing juice yield are added to these processed oranges." The FDA or the USDA has told us that we can no longer buy raw juice. But it might surprise you to know that they have found fungus that is resistant to pressure and heat in the processed juices. They found that 17% of Nigerian packages of orange juice and 20% of mango and tomato juices contained these heat resistant fungi. So there is plenty of danger from contamination from these pasteurized juices. They also found E. coli in the orange juice that was pressure resistant and had survived pasteurization.

In one study, heat-treated and acid-hydrolyzed orange juice was tested for mutagenic activity. The authors hypothesized that the heating process produces intermediate products, which under test conditions, give rise to mutagenicity, and cytotoxicity. In other words you have got cancer-causing compounds in your orange juice. In another study, gel filtration and high performance liquid chromatography were used to obtain mutagenic fractions from heated orange juice and they consisted of several different compounds. You have heated your orange juice to death, you have processed it and yet you still have all of these toxic compounds in it.

How does the orange juice stay cloudy? They add soy protein combined with soluble pectin, and that keeps it permanently cloudy. It might be interesting to know, for those of you who are allergic to soy.

Another study shows just how toxic and damaging these juices are to teeth. They found that rats had more tooth decay from these commercial juices than they did from soda pop which is loaded with sugar. So if you want juice with your breakfast, squeeze yourself an organic orange and that's a great place to put your cod liver oil.