Where is Jack LaLanne when you really need him?

This post has been a niggling thought in the back of my head since I saw a piece on "Squeezing the Truths out of Juice Myths" on CBS The Early Show last week. The story bothered me when I saw it, but I ignored it and it's been festering like a splinter ever since.

This is a line from the story as posted on the Early Show website:

"Dr. Jennifer Ashton debunked myths about the health benefits of juice. In some cases, juices have more calories than soda."

I need to add a Dave Barry-like disclaimer here: I'm not making this up.

Say what? Since when is number of calories the determining factor in terms of whether or not a food is good for you?

Am I the only one who thinks it is dangerous for a "doctor" to be telling parents that soda is better for their children than juice because it has fewer calories?

Here's an excerpt from the show transcript:

A cup of apple juice, she said, can contain 117 calories while a cup of cola contains just 91 calories and is also less caloric than orange juice (105 calories). A cup of grape juice has 154 calories. There's also more than 37 grams of sugar in a glass of grape juice, compared with cola's 22 grams. "If you just go by calorie to calorie and put them head to head...you could be getting a lot more bang for the buck in terms of calories, obviously sugar, in the juice versus the soda," Ashton said.

Maybe there is some validity to the problem of parents giving their children too much of a good thing, but why not just tell them to try and get their kids to drink more water instead of making it look like - in a comparison between soda and juice - soda might be a better choice?

I'm pretty sure this is the same woman who tried to tell us a month or so ago that Fruit Loops contain an arsenal of antioxidants. http://cookingoutloud.blogspot.com/2009/08/is-there-some-conspiracy-to-keep-us.html

Stories like these make me wonder who is paying for these "studies."