100% fruit juice does not cause weight gain in children: Study
Children who drink one serving of 100 per cent fruit juice a day don’t appear to gain significantly more weight than kids who consume no juice at all, a research review suggests.
Even though previous studies on fruit juice and weight gain have gotten mixed results, doctors often tell parents to avoid juices with added sugars and other ingredients altogether and to limit 100 per cent fruit juice to a single serving a day.
In the current study, one 6- to 8-ounce serving of 100 per cent fruit juice was associated with a small amount of weight gain in kids 1 to 6 years old, but the difference was too small to be clinically meaningful because it didn’t shift most children from a healthy weight to overweight. Fruit juice wasn’t linked to any weight gain in children aged 7 to 18.
“This finding was a little bit surprising,” said lead study author Brandon Auerbach, a researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Our team had thought that drinking one serving a day of 100 per cent fruit juice would be linked to a small but clinically important amount of weight gain.”
Parents shouldn’t take the results as a reason to let kids drink more juice, however.
“Aside from weight gain, there are still other reasons to chose whole fruit instead of 100 per cent fruit juice whenever possible,” Auerbach said. Too much juice can contribute to problems like poor nutrition, obesity and tooth decay.
Pure fruit juice is also not the same as fruit drinks, which typically have added sugars and can be just as harmful to kids as drinking sodas, Auerbach added.
For the current analysis, researchers examined data from eight previously published studies of juice and weight gain that included a total of more than 34,000 kids. Six were conducted in the US, one in Germany and one in the UK. Studies followed children for anywhere from one to a dozen years.
Three of the four studies looking at younger kids found a statistically meaningful association between 100 per cent fruit juice and weight gain, researchers report in Pediatrics.
Researchers looked at participants’ body mass index (BMI), a measure of weight relative to height, to assess trends in weight gain over time based on how much juice kids drank across all of the studies.
Kids with a BMI anywhere above the 5th percentile and below the 95th percentile in their age group are considered to have a healthy weight.
Among the younger kids in the analysis, one serving of fruit juice was associated with a 4 per cent increase in BMI percentile, too little to push most kids from the healthy to overweight BMI category.