Vegetable Juice

Food · Drink · Food, Typed Supps

The one juice that isn’t a sugar problem. It’s a salt one instead.

Stage by stage

Salt first (Taste): 240 mg of sodium per 100 g is what makes it taste of anything — unsalted, it tastes flat.
Low sugar (Stomach): 2.1 g per 100 g, a third of fruit juice, and the one real advantage of the category.
Carotenoids (Small intestine): Processing improves lycopene uptake — but it needs dietary fat to be absorbed at all.
Sodium load (Circulation): A 250 mL glass adds around 600 mg of sodium against a 2,000 mg daily target.

Timing

With fat, for the carotenoids. The sodium is the reason not to make it an all-day drink.

Time to effect

4–8 hrs: Carotenoids appear in circulation after a fat-containing meal.
Weeks: Any blood pressure effect of the sodium load, in salt-sensitive people.

Allergens

None of the fourteen major allergens. May contain: Celery, Sulphites. Derived from what this food is, not from a product label.

Eating patterns

Fits: Vegan, Vegetarian, Pescatarian, Halal, Kosher, Keto, Gluten-free. Depends on the product: Low-FODMAP.

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

0.5 kg CO2e and 108 litres of freshwater per kg, matched to "Other vegetables" 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: 17
Protein: 0.9g
Carbohydrate: 2.7g
of which sugars: 2.1g
Fibre: 0.6g
Sodium: 240mg

Food vs. supplement

Lycopene supplements have repeatedly failed to reproduce the associations seen with tomato-rich diets, which is one of the better arguments that the whole food is doing something the isolated compound is not.

Kitchen tip

Have it with something containing fat if the carotenoids are the reason you are drinking it. Without any fat in the meal, most of the lycopene passes straight through.

Common myth

“A glass of vegetable juice covers a serve of vegetables.” In reality: No guideline counts it, and the reason is the same as for fruit juice: the fibre and the chewing are gone. What survives is genuinely good — the carotenoids are actually better absorbed from processed tomato than raw, and the vitamin C is high. Treat it as a useful drink with a real salt cost, not as a shortcut past the vegetable drawer.