It’s always irritated me that people have this idea that those nasty little boxes or bottles or packs of juice are so healthy, not like that awful unhealthy soda.

junior gets an overdose

I’m prompted to write this now because Consumer Reports tested 31 popular grocery brand juices and found a lot of arsenic and lead in quite a lot of them.

Arsenic causes cancer amongst other things. Lead poisons nervous systems - especially ones that are developing, so has a particular effect on kids (who are the main consumers of juice of course).

And the Sugar

But let us not also overlook the sugar issue. There seems to be this idea that because juice comes from something “natural” that it must be OK.

Well, sugar comes from sugar beet or sugar cane, both of which are “natural” - or that “high fructose corn syrup” (which is to be sanitized by renaming it.)

And for comparison 8 oz of Coke contains 26g of sugar. 8 oz of orange juice contains 24 - not a very significant difference.

Other reports from the Internet are that a 16 oz bottle of apple juice has 56g sugar - so 8 oz has 28g - more than the Coke. Twelve ounces of grape soda has 159 calories. Same quantity of grape juice has 228 calories.

CBS News reports that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no juice before age 6 months. And then just 4-6 oz per day up to age six - but how many parents are filling their kids sippy cups with all kinds of juice?

The $10 billion juice industry isn’t happy with the restrictive advice - surprise surprise. CBS reported “Carol Freysinger, executive director of the Juice Products Association  . . .is critical of doctors, telling parents to eliminate juice, saying it gives a bad name to a healthy beverage and could prevent people from getting important nutrients juice offers”.

Despite the guidelines, 60 percent of 1-year-olds drink juice, averaging 11½ ounces a day, according to 2002 USDA data. That’s up from 57 percent less than a decade before reports CBS.

If you want to get a good feel for how much sugar is in these drinks, take a look at Marshall Brain’s Science of the Brain video on U-Tube urging you to add the equivalent amount of sugar (7 ½ teaspoonfuls) to an 8 oz glass of water.

 Anyone familiar with P.G. Wodhous’ stories of Jeeves will know that when Berty Wooster had some particularly tricky problem, he would tell Jeeves to go eat kippers.

Incidently, note Dr House in his former incarnation

Now anyone who knows what’s good will eat kippers for their own sake - and not those nasty leathery “Kipper Fillets” you get in a tin from Wegmans or wherever. The succulent, moist real thing from the fishmonger in Essex Road just down from Cross Street - oh but damn, I’m forgetting, you have to go to London for that.

But the idea is that fish is good for your cognition (not just heavy drinking as in my post Alcohol for Your Heart Brain and Pecker).

Cyrus Raji from University of Pittsburgh Medical Center reported to Web.MD that 70 year olds eating one fish serving a week had bigger brains and more grey matter, and of particular interest had a reduced rate of Alzheimer’s and dementia, after 10 yrs, than their non-fishy counterparts.

It always intrigues me what a good job the red wine marketing people have done.

They have really sold the idea that red wine is only booze that’s good for the heart.

Norman Kaplan of Framingham Heart Study fame always said it’s the alcohol not the red wine specifically. Now a study reported from Italy would seem to support that.

It showed a different alcoholic drink, beer, has the same benefit as red wine, and can lower the risk of cardiovascular disease by 31%.

Actually there have been other studies showing the benefits of different types of beer - and it’s noted malt has a lot of those healthy vitamins - especially B6 and B12, and antioxidant flavanoids.

Also in a study, reported by John Folts of the University of Wisconsin to the American Heart Association it was noted dark beer can have particular benefits - Guinness has substantially more anti-clotting activity than Heineken.

No wonder the Irish are so healthy - and maybe their procreativity is not the result of their Catholicism, if we are to believe another report in the Journal of Sexual Medicine that moderate drinking protects against impotence in the long term (it’s all to do with keeping the blood flowing to the relevant parts I guess).

But “moderate” is the operative word. We all know about “brewers droop” and how you can’t get a good stiffy when you’ve had a serious skinful.

And, get this, it can even make you cognite better.

A study reported in the American Journal of Epidemiol;ogy showed people who drank did better than people who didn’t in a series of test to assess intellectual ability.

Other studies, also reported in the AJE noted that alcohol consumption may have a beneficial cognitive function in women, but not necessarily in men - I’m sure that’s just because men were trying to hit on the women after a few drinks, and the women maintained their cool and disdain (and probably the study was done by a woman).

In another however, it showed women who drank moderately (2-4 drinks a day) showed superior performance to abstainers. But that men also had some benefit - but they had to drink 4-8 drinks a day.

What amazes me is the quantity. Here am I telling my patients a healthy amount is an average of one drink a day/seven drinks a week for women. And two drinks a day/fourteen drinks a week for a man.

That’s a little different from the up to 30 drinks a week that were correlated with improved intellectual ability in the first study. Or the second, with up to 8 drinks a day correlating with “superior performance in many cognitive domains”

I’d have expected someone drinking 56 drinks a week to be a driveling idiot. But let’s drink to that.