Can drinking fruit juice really help you lose weight? Beware of the high-sugar trap that could actually lead to weight gain.

Besides enjoying eating fruit, many women are also particularly fond of fruit juice. In fact, drinking fruit juice is not as beneficial as eating whole fruit; even natural fruit juice can be considered little more than a sugary drink with a high sugar content.

Imagine trying to eat five apples in one go – it's quite difficult. But drinking a glass of juice made from five apples is easy. Have you noticed that drinking juice seems easier than eating whole fruit?

Drinking fruit juice and eating whole fruit are completely different. The biggest difference between juice and whole fruit lies in dietary fiber. The dietary fiber contained in whole fruit increases the volume of food in the digestive system, giving you a feeling of fullness after eating a certain amount of fruit, preventing you from overeating. The combination of dietary fiber and fructose in the fruit also helps slow down the absorption of fructose to some extent.

However, juicers break down the dietary fiber during the juicing process, especially those juicers that separate the juice from the pulp, filtering out all the dietary fiber. What's left is a glass of sugary water with a few trace elements; the dietary fiber is completely gone.

Therefore, when you easily drink the juice from four or five oranges, you're also consuming a lot more sugar. A 240ml can of cola contains about 27 grams of sugar, while the same amount of freshly squeezed apple juice contains 29 grams of sugar, and the same amount of grape juice contains as much as 38 grams of sugar. In 2014, an article published in the authoritative medical journal *The Lancet* titled "Fruit Juice: Just Another Form of Sugary Drink" stated that the dangers of fruit juice are no less than those of other sugary drinks. For weight loss, the fructose or glucose in fruit juice makes it easier to gain weight.

Moreover, the high-speed rotation of the juicer blades during juicing accelerates the oxidation of the fruit, leading to a significant loss of antioxidants and vitamin C.

Compared to natural fruit juice, commercially available concentrated or reconstituted fruit juices are even more dangerous, because in addition to the processing that leaves them with very few nutrients, they are also loaded with added sugar and food additives. Concentrated or reconstituted fruit juices are junk food marketed under the guise of health! Compared to whole fruits, the biggest problem with fruit juice is that it makes it easier to consume more sugar, including fructose, which poses significant health risks.

As we learned earlier, fructose is metabolized in the liver, just like alcohol, and does not cause fluctuations in blood sugar. However, our bodies usually prioritize glucose metabolism before fructose. When there is excess glucose in the body, the liver converts most of the fructose directly into fat and sends it to adipose tissue. Therefore, fructose generates fat faster than glucose. More than 40 years ago, scientists called fructose the sugar with the best fat-promoting effect.

Besides causing weight gain, fructose can also lead to serious health problems. When fructose is metabolized in the liver, it consumes a large amount of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), and under the action of fructokinase, it is further metabolized into purine bases, thus producing a large amount of uric acid. Fructose also leads to insulin resistance, further affecting the kidneys' ability to excrete uric acid, thus further promoting the increase of uric acid levels in the body and increasing the risk of gout. Therefore, people with high uric acid levels and gout are even less suitable for drinking high-fructose fruit juices.

Fruit juice is also a "hidden culprit" of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Because fructose can only be metabolized in the liver, once too much fructose is consumed, the liver will convert it into triglycerides and store them in the liver as lipid droplets, forming fatty liver. This is one of the reasons why many people develop fatty liver even without drinking alcohol. In a sense, fruit juice is a kind of "non-alcoholic" alcohol.

The fructose in fruit juice also undergoes glycation reactions with proteins in the human body, producing advanced glycation end products (AGEs). AGEs not only cause aging reactions on the skin such as wrinkles and age spots, but also accelerate the aging of body cells, causing various chronic diseases and making people more prone to weight gain.

Regardless of the form, fruit juice is a pseudo-healthy drink; it will not give you a good figure or good skin. If you really want to eat fruit, you can choose whole fruits with low sugar content, such as avocados and blueberries.