Fruit, or Fruit Juice?

I say, eat the whole food. First off, you know more about what you're putting in your body with the whole fruit. You have no idea whether the best fruit are being juiced for your consumption, but it's highly unlikely. If the fruit were that damned good, the agribusiness peddling it to you would be happy to sell you the whole item, instead of paying good money to process it further.

Secondly, you have no control over the processing. At any point in the process of turning a fruit into fruit juice, contamination might occur, as we've seen from recent reports of E. coli contamination of spinach, lettuce, and cantaloupes. The more processed a food is, the more likely it is to be contaminated. We don't even need to consider the additives, colorings, flavourings, et cetera ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

Thirdly, when you eat a whole fruit, you ingest all the various nutrients contained therein: the antioxidants, the micronutrients, the fiber. Processing that fruit into juice destroys some nutrients and simply eliminates others. Fruit juice, for example, contains far less fiber than the whole fruit.

Fourthly, and finally, food and eating are a sensual experience, and should be. The colors, tastes, smells and textures of the fruit, whether you're experiencing it with the nerve endings in your skin, or the tastebuds on your tongue, are all engineered by the fruit's producer, the tree, for maximum appeal to you with the understanding that you will disperse its seeds to make more trees and more fruit. Why settle for the denatured, bottled juice, when you can delight in the sweet juices running down your chin, stickying your fingers, when you can feel the texture on your tongue and in your mouth as the fruit slowly becomes a part of your tissues?

Nevertheless, here's yet another article touting the antioxidant benefits of juice. Humph.

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