Fruit juice in childhood leads to healthier diets
GETTING children as young as three to drink pure fruit juice every day will lead to healthy eating habits and could stop them getting fat, a study suggests.
Youngsters who consumed a cup a day or more from a pre-school age were more likely to go on to eat more fruit as they moved into their teens and less likely to put on weight compared to children who drank less than half a cup of juice a day.
Fears that sugar in fruit juice would lead to excess weight gain were unfounded because drinking fruit juice encourages better diets generally, according to the researchers who studied 100 children over ten years.
The Boston University paper found those who drank one or more cups of fruit juice a day when they were between three and six years old had ‘significantly higher’ amounts of whole fruit in their diets by the time they were 14 to 17 compared to those who drank less than half a cup a day at a younger age.
The study, published in the journal BMC Nutrition, also found that the juice drinkers had a generally healthier diet and were less likely to have suffered ‘excessive weight gain’ by the time they reached their teens.
Those pre-schoolers who drank the most juice were nearly four times as likely to meet the US equivalent of five-a-day guidelines by the time they hit their teenage years, the study found.
There was no change in BMI from drinking fruit juice, despite fears over its sugar content, because it helped get the children into eating whole fruit as they got older.
Lead researcher Dr Lynn Moore said: ‘Fruit consumption, particularly whole fruit consumption, has many health benefits throughout the lifespan.
‘Avoiding juice during these early formative years may have unintended effects on evolving dietary behaviours.
‘Juice drinking in young children may promote better diet quality and higher intakes of whole fruit. These benefits, associated with moderate intakes of 100 per cent fruit juice, were not accompanied by any adverse effects on childhood weight.’