Sugary Drinks

Food · Misleading · Engineered Foods

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Fruit Juice
100% juice is still liquid sugar: the fiber is nearly gone, and the World Health Organization (WHO) counts the sugar in juice as free sugar. But its evidence differs from that for sugar-sweetened soft drinks, and the two are not the same: in the same meta-analysis the risk estimate for juice was much smaller, and the authors judged it likely to be biased. Sweetened juice drinks belong with sugary drinks.

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What counts as a sugary drink

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Liquid sugar slips past the system your brain uses to decide it has had enough. After a sweetened milk tea, the next meal usually does not get smaller, so the calories are added on top instead of replacing anything. The chapter on why drinking sugar does not fill you walks through that bypass step by step.

What these drinks share is free sugar: single or paired sugars already pulled out of the food they came from. Sugar in solid food is slowed down by cell walls and fiber; sugar in a drink has almost none of that buffer. A 330 mL can of cola holds about 35 g of sugar, and it is often gone in a few minutes.

Educational content, not medical advice — consult a clinician.

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