Juice exudes health and vitality. It is officially one of your ‘five-a-day’. It’s what they sell in juice bars, those yogafied temples of wheatgrass.

But fruit juice is also, according to the American obesity expert Robert Lustig, basically just sugar and is therefore, in his view, a ‘poison’. Lustig is the author of Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth about Sugar (4th Estate, £13.99), published earlier this year. He sees sugar as the major culprit in the obesity crisis. Not so surprising, except for his shock revelation that the worst sugars may be those that appear the healthiest. ‘Calorie for calorie, 100 per cent orange juice is worse for you’ than sugary sodas, Lustig says.

This sounds alarmist, until you read some of the case studies from Lustig’s childhood obesity clinic in San Francisco. One eight-year-old already has high blood pressure, thanks to a three-glasses-a-day juice habit. A six-year-old Latino boy comes to the clinic weighing 100lb, ‘wider than he is tall’. His mother, a poor farm worker, has been letting him drink a gallon of juice a day because a government welfare programme gives them the juice for free.

Obviously, most of us drink nothing like a gallon of juice a day. But our juice portions are still out of whack. Over the past 30 years consumption of fructose – the sugar in juice – has more than doubled. Juice didn’t used to be seen as something with which you quenched your thirst; it was more like a vitamin shot, a tiny dose of goodness. A book from the 1920s on feeding children by L Emmett Holt says that you should give toddlers just one to four tablespoons (15-60ml) of fresh orange or peach juice. Compare this with today’s 200ml children’s juice boxes, which contain about 17g sugar, the equivalent of more than four teaspoons.

The biggest problem with juice, as far as Lustig is concerned, is the lack of fibre. When you eat a whole apple, the sugar is ‘nicely balanced’ by the fibre, giving ‘the liver a chance to fully metabolise what’s coming in’. When you down half a pint of apple juice it ‘brings a huge dose of energy straight to the liver’. Smoothies are not much better, no matter how pretty the packaging, because when fruit is blended the insoluble fibre is ‘torn to smithereens’.

Is fruit juice bad for your health? – Telegraph

Preschool parents take note: If your kid is clamoring for a daily hit of soda, sugary sports drinks, or fruit drink, you may want to just say no.

Young children who drink sugar sweetened beverages every day are more likely to be obese than their non-sugary-drink-guzzling friends, according to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics.

While this may seem self-evident, some previous reports that looked at a smaller group of preschool-aged children had not seen the same correlation.

Sugary drinks cause weight gain in preschoolers, study finds – latimes.com

When mice were fed a diet that was 25% added sugars – an amount consumed by many humans – the females died at twice the normal rate and the males were less likely to reproduce and hold territory, scientists said in a study published Tuesday.

The study shows “that added sugar consumed at concentrations currently considered safe exerts dramatic impacts on mammalian health,” the researchers said in the study, published in the journal Nature Communications. “Many researchers have already made calls for reevaluation of these safe levels of consumption.”

The study’s senior author, University of Utah biology professor Wayne Potts, said earlier studies fed mice sugars at levels higher than people eat in sodas, cookies, candy and other items. The current study stuck to levels eaten by people.

Scientists say sugar at levels considered safe is harmful – latimes.com

Babies born to obese mothers may face an increased risk of dying early from heart problems in their adult life, according to research published late Tuesday that paints an alarming picture of the future as obesity-related disease is handed down from one generation to the next.

The comprehensive study looked at nearly 30,000 women who gave birth in Aberdeen between 1950 and 1976 and who were weighed and measured in early pregnancy. When the researchers then searched for death certificates among the nearly 38,000 children – by then aged 34 to 61 – they found that those whose mothers had been obese had a 35% higher chance of dying as a result of cardiovascular disease than the children of normal-weight mothers. Health records showed that they also had a 42% higher risk of being treated in hospital for heart problems.

Experts called for more effort to educate young women who might become pregnant about good eating habits and exercise as the implications of the study became clear. One in five pregnant women today is obese. If the researchers are right, the UK could face a huge rise in heart disease and early deaths as the children of these obese mothers hit middle age.

Obese mothers’ babies face bigger risk of early death, says report | Society | The Guardian

A man has died after competing in a State of Origin pie-eating competition.

The man, 64, was taken to Townsville Hospital from the pub at Bushland Beach, northwest of Townsville.

He died at 10.30pm, police say.

An employee at the Bushland Beach Tavern confirmed the man appeared to choke while competing in a half-time chilli pie-eating competition last night.

The employee said he was working in the bar when he saw the man, a regular at the pub, fall to the ground.

Stuffed to death: Man dies after competing in pie eating contest – NYPOST.com