Orange Juice, anyone?

Orange Juice, anyone?

Think all orange juice is created equal? Makes you wonder why they have a 99¢ orange juice, $2.30 orange juice and $3.50 orange juice while all of them is in 1 lit. bottle?
If you do wonder why… read on.

The first and the most important feature that distinguish the difference in the orange juice is, of course, the ingredients! So when you go to pick up a carton of orange juice, pay attention on it’s ingredients.

You see, there are a lot of stuffs inside the orange juice. Some of them is healthy and therefore, desirable. While some of them… are not. Let’s take a look at each one of them, shall we?

First we have freshly squeezed orange juice. It would mean that it does only undergo few processes. Namely squeezing and most likely pasteurizing. So it’s the closest thing you can get from a really squeezed orange (or the orange that you squeeze yourself.)

Then we have the orange juice from concentrate. The typical orange juice from concentrate had been sweetened, compacted, Frozen, thawed and de-concentrated. So although it does come from an orange, it has an additional sugar and no longer have the full benefit of an orange.

Added Vitamin (blah, blah) and fortified with mineral (blah blah). This would mean that the producer isn’t even sure their product have vitamins. So they need to add some.

Permitted coloring. Does it suggesting that their orange juice is not of orange color?

Artificial flavoring??? My goodness… it’s orange juice that does not look like orange juice and doesn’t even taste like orange juice…

Other chemical mumbo jumbo. Let me obtain my right of silence here as we all know that the more artificial chemical it won’t be the better. (or are we?)

The other thing we must pay attention to our juice is the manufacturing country. The simple rule of thumb is that the closer the manufacturing place to you, the fresher it’ll be. Although this factor could easily negated by the fact that some premium OJ were actually airflown.

On the bottomline, be careful when choosing your orange juice or any other juice. Before you decide to pick that up, be sure to check the ingredients, the nutrition facts and any other thing that put the price tag on the OJ you choose.

For me, I’d recommend my favorite OJ from Florida’s Natural. Their ingredients is the simplest of any other brand in the market: “100% pasteurized freshly squeezed orange juice”. Yeah, their price is slightly more expensive but our health is priceless, isn’t it?

Cheers… (with OJ)

Cons

PS: You can learn more about nutrition and food facts more thoroughly on Nutritiondata.com

PPS: The best thing, of course. Buy the real orange and squeeze it yourself! Ha!