I saw this and I was horrified by the what i feel to be misrepresentation of smoothies on the F word programme last night.
What a load of rubbish. Food and drink is all about moderation. If you eat and drink in excess, you will put weight on. Painting smoothies as the new enemy is ridiculous. They are a fantastic way to get vitamins and minerals into your system, and so much easier to get kids to drink a smoothie as part of their daily intake rather than to eat 5 portions of fruit/veg. My kids have a small smoothie every day at breakfast time with their cereal, and will continue to do so. I am getting quite sick and tired of people like JSP trying to influence us with their loud mouth brash comments and misleading "evidence"
smoothies are good for you. In moderation. just like everything else. So, Janet...
She was talking about the fact that people might not realise how much sugar was in a smoothie. Our answer would be that it's the same amount of sugar you'd find in the equivalent amount of fruit. We've done lots of research and have worked out that the two portions of fruit in our drinks have exactly the same amount of sugar in them as if you were to eat two portions of fruit. Unsurprising really, seeing as all we do is squash lots of fruit into bottles.
They go on....
quote:
Eating more fruit and veg is the second best thing you can do for your health after quitting smoking (I think we've said this before, but it's always worth repeating), so it seems slightly irresponsible to us to scare people away from getting fruit in whatever form they choose. Not enough people eat their five a day as it is, and seeing as our smoothies are made from nothing but 100% fruit, they therefore contain good things that fruit itself contains – lots of amazing fibre, vitamins, minerals, phytoprotectants and the sugar that occurs naturally within fruit.
Our smoothies are designed to be part of a healthy balanced diet (not necessarily an added extra on top of what you normally eat). So by all means substitute a smoothie for unhealthy snacks like chocolate bars, and don't get too spooked by Janet's big bottom scenario.
Think carefully, a smoothie, about 20 odd different pieces of fruit pulped to oblivion for your convenience, volume not possible to eat in whole form, sugar quite high, same calorific value per volume as a high sugar drink of coke/lilt etc, satisfaction level about the same. Eat 1 apple and the satisfaction level is high, less than half of the calories/sugar volume and the fibre ( which is the filing part) is also much higher, thus taking down the hunger element. I can understand where this one is coming from. Yes smoothies are a healthy drink, fully natural but nature presents us with sugars, no matter how natural they are still high in calories, You have to look at the bigger picture, smoothies are a concentrate, mostly of sugars, volume per volume 1 apple is more filling and less calorific value plus you take up more energy digesting the full fruit, I know what I would like to do better and which is better for me.
"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do" Benjamin Franklin "Some cause happiness wherever they go - others whenever they go" Oscar Wilde
about 20 odd different pieces of fruit pulped to oblivion for your convenience
not actually true of innocent smoothies for kids. my kids have the wedge cartons, and for example, the newest member of the innocent family is the peach and passionfruit. inside every wedge is 1 squeezed orange, 13 pressed grapes, 1/5 crushed peach, 1/5 mashed banana and some squashed passion fruit. now. forgive me if i am wrong, but this is approx 2.5 portions of fruit for a child.
My youngest child would live on fruit if I let her. She loves it, but my son really does not like fruit that much. He will drink a smoothie with his breakfast and he has an apple at lunchtime at school, but beyond that it's not an option, he just will not eat it.
My whole point on this is we can make anything "bad" for us if we over consume. If we are sensible and eat/drink in moderation, there is no reason why smoothies cannot be a fantastic addition to our diets. Obviously it's personal preference, but before people like the Street Porter woman go on TV banging her PC drum, she really needs to think before she speaks. How she can say a can of "lilt" is better for you than a NATURAL FRESH FRUIT drink such as innocent is beyond me. MODERATION is the key. The same as everything in our lives.
I thought this was a load of rubbish. Janet is obviously very weight conscious so of course she will hate anything with "sugar", "carbohydrate" and "fat" in it. This campaign was just full of buzzwords.
I liked this quote though.
"Drink one smoothie a day in addition to your normal calorie (another buzzword) intake and you could put on weight"
Wow really? Consuming something could make me put on weight?
Little Miss Innocent found the flaw in her comparison anyway. Lilt will cause you to put on less weight than eating fresh fruit too! Therefore with JSP logic lilt is better than fresh fruit.
Things like this really make me grind my teeth because they just pick on products with sugar or fat in it and automatically assume they are bad. Sugars and fats are a vital part of our diets and it annoys me to see public figures who are obsessed with being skinny telling people they are out-right bad.
I have already done this once but the post was deleted.
To address the issues raised. I am not condemming out of hand smoothies, they have their place but people are I feel being conned by the marketing. They do have their place when people feel they cannot eat fruit and veg or even don't like fruit and veg, but people do not realise that in a concentrated version without the full benefit of the whole fruit/veg/fibre etc then the sugars and calories are concentrated and the lack of fibre etc means that they are not as sasiating/filling as the "real" thing and that therefore they should take into account that they may feel more hungry than somebody who has eaten the unadulterated fruit/veg which may again encourage them to eat more than their recommended calorie intake. I appreciate that children don't always like what is good for them and if a child does not like fruit and you want to give them a smoothie then that is fine but you have to allow for the hunger factor and ensure that if they are still hungry having taken onboard a smoothie they don't exceed a healthy intake of calories to meet their growth/weight maintenance. It is a difficult line to tread with all the recommendations and guidelines meted out to parents and the general public these days but as long as you are sensible there should be no problem. I am not saying that you might as well give the child a can of lilt or indeed the adult a can of lilt instead of a smoothie but I think that articles such as this by JSP raise awareness that not everything labelled as "natural" is actually good for us. It is true that everything should be taken in moderation and balance. I am not familiar with the "wedges" mentioned but they are from what you say meant to be Peach and Passionfruit, you list a whole line of things that are also present so my theory that they are 20 odd bits of fruit pulped seems to be bourne out by this. Honey is natural but take too much and you might as well be drinking the proverbial can of lilt. I still think that if you can stomach it, 1 apple/orange/carrot in it's raw state giving for argument's sake 20 calories will be more filling than a smoothie of 20 apples, grapes, bananas etc etc in a lesser volume and probably containing 2 or 3 times more calories. ......or am I incorrect in my evalauation... I hope that this post does not offend anyone, it is not a personal attack and is my personal opinion. I thank you for taking the time to read it.
"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do" Benjamin Franklin "Some cause happiness wherever they go - others whenever they go" Oscar Wilde
People are always being conned by marketing. There is no argument there.
At the end of the day though smoothies are convenient and much better than stuffing your face with a bag of crisps or a chocolate milkshake.
Yes in an ideal world everyone would drink water and eat all their fruit and veg but this is not an ideal world. Unless you seriously think you can get everyone from smoothies to eating fruit it is probably a bad idea to convince them smoothies are bad, even worse so just on the basis that they have a lot of calories. They might end up replacing them with something with no nutritional value but is lower in calories.
An extra smoothie will not make you put on 13 pounds unless you are lazy. The problem there is not diet, it is lifestyle.
I once ready a study on people who drink wine and people who drink beer and their lifestyles. Wine has far more calories and sugar than lager which is mainly composed water, yet beer is associated with beer gut and assumed to make people fat. It's not the beer that gives people beer gut it's the lifestyle and trimmings that go with it.
Trying to say a smoothie a day will make someone put on a stone a year is a scare tactic with no factual basis whatsoever. This is no different to marketing tactics!
