Apple Juice
Food · Drink · Food, Typed Supps
An apple with the fibre removed and the sugar left in.
Stage by stage
- No chewing (Mouth): Four apples’ worth of sugar arrives in seconds, with none of the work that would have stopped you.
- No brake (Stomach): Without fibre or bulk, nothing slows gastric emptying or signals fullness.
- Free sugar (Circulation): Seven grams per 100 g, absorbed fast — WHO counts it as free sugar for exactly this reason.
- Fructose (Liver): Around half the sugar is fructose, handled hepatically as from any free-sugar source.
Timing
With food if at all. For children, the pattern matters more than the volume: sipping juice through the day is what drives caries, far more than the same amount drunk at once.
Time to effect
- 15–30 min: Glycaemic peak, faster than any whole fruit.
- Years: Cohort associations with metabolic risk run opposite to those of whole fruit.
Allergens
None of the fourteen major allergens. May contain: Sulphites. Derived from what this food is, not from a product label.
Eating patterns
Fits: Vegan, Vegetarian, Pescatarian, Halal, Kosher, Gluten-free. Depends on the product: Keto.
Satiety
Not scored: the satiety index is measured on 240 kcal servings, and nobody eats a 240 kcal serving of this. The question does not apply rather than the answer being unknown.
Environmental footprint
0.4 kg CO2e and 180 litres of freshwater per kg, matched to "Apples" in Poore & Nemecek (2018), Science 360.
Cost band
Cheap — roughly £2 per kg, as a band midpoint rather than a price.
Key nutrients
Nutrition per 100g
- Calories: 29
- Protein: 0.2g
- Carbohydrate: 7g
- of which sugars: 7g
- Fibre: 0.2g
- Sodium: 6mg
Food vs. supplement
The comparison that matters is not juice against soft drink but juice against the apple. In the same cohorts, whole fruit tracks with lower diabetes risk and juice tracks with higher — the difference is the fibre and the matrix, which is the only thing juicing removes.
Kitchen tip
If you like it, have it with a meal and in a glass rather than through the day — the sugar matters less than the pattern of exposure does for teeth.
Common myth
“It says no added sugar, so it counts as a serve of fruit.” In reality: WHO counts juice sugars as free sugars, because juicing breaks the cell walls that made them behave differently. Seven grams per 100 g is not far off lemonade’s 8.8 g. The vitamin C is genuinely useful and is usually added rather than intrinsic. Eat the apple — the fibre is the whole reason the two land differently in the research.
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