A juicy trend
In any supermarket you can find rows of smoothies and many different kinds of fruit juices to tempt your palate. Bookshops are full of books devoted to ‘super juices’ that will ‘turbo-charge your life in just 14 days’ and ‘the best 50 smoothies’, and juicers dominate the sales of kitchen gadgets.

Although the trend towards juices and smoothies started in the health conscious 1990s it seems to have reached a saturation point in the last couple of years. This is particularly true of the availability of some of the more exotic juices such as kiwi and passion fruit which now seem to outnumber the bog-standard orange and apple juices.

How much is too much?
However, it seems as if the British are getting a bit too carried away with their juices thinking that just by drinking them we are magically answering all our unhealthy lifestyle problems. Figures published in January showed that Britain consumes 2.2 billion litres of juice drinks a year – this is about 36 litres for every man, woman and child!

5 fruits not 5 juices!
But some of us are relying on nice and easy fruit juices to replace all the fruit and vegetables that health and dietary organisations say we should be eating. We’re all told that we should eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day and this is being ‘translated’ by some into drinking five or more glasses of fruit juice or smoothies.

So now we’re getting lots of information about being too excessive in our juice drinking! ‘It’s fine to have it as one of your portions, but it can’t count as all five – no matter how much you drink’ warns Dr Frankie Phillips of the British Dietetic Association. It’s great to have so much choice and variety in what juices and smoothies we can buy or make ourselves but for some people in the UK it’s too much of a trend!

Stella
June 2005

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