Recently, many residents of megacities have been concerned about the organic nature of food. Caring for the health of young children, caring parents increasingly buy them juice in a box, explaining this to dissatisfied children by the fact that they contain a lot of preservatives, which means that they are harmful to health. But are these juices so terrible?
Our fears, as a rule, come from the assumption that the manufacturer definitely wants to save on us. To understand whether this is so or not, consider the production process from fruit on the tree to juice in the package.
How to make packaged juice
- On extensive plantations collect fruit. The biggest fruit fields are located here, in Russia( in the Kuban, for example), Chile, Brazil, Florida in the USA.
- Fruits are sorted carefully. To the next stage are allowed exclusively intact, whole and ripe fruit.
- Fruit is washed( cleansing of dust and other contaminants).
- Purified fruit is ground, then with the help of giant presses squeeze juice out of them. It will become the basis of the packaged product.
- Water is separated from the juice. Here is the very moment of the "birth" of concentrated juice, which is not at all the powder that adults so frighten young children, no, for consistency it looks like mashed potatoes or honey. The release of water is necessary to transport juice over long distances.
- Concentrated juice is poured on 200-liter drums, placed in a cold store, and, as a rule, by sea, is delivered to the destination.
- In the juice arrived at the factory, water is again poured in, but already cleaned and specially prepared, in the volume that was originally allocated. This gives the label "reconstituted" on a box of juice.
- Then the juice is heated for about 30 seconds at a temperature of not more than 85 degrees. Pasteurization( not boiling) allows you to save all the useful properties.
- Pour the juice into a cardboard package six layers thick.
Is juice harmful in packets?
Of course, not every juice producer strictly maintains all the necessary production stages. Someone does not clean the fruit very carefully, someone allows getting into the processing of not very benign fruits. .. But after buying a cheap product, one does not need to hope that the quality will be good.
Another guarantee of the purity of juice sold on the territory of our country is the Russian legislation. Prohibited sugar, preservatives and colorants. If they are present, then this drink is called not juice, but nectar.
The long shelf life is explained by the above described pasteurization and aseptic packaging. After all, rolling up banks with cucumbers in the summer, we do not doubt their safety for a long period and in the naturalness of the product, is not it?
Summing up, you can no doubt say that freshly squeezed juice, of course, is much more useful for our health, but its packaged fellow will not harm the body at all. Vitamins in it, of course, are smaller than in freshly squeezed, due to pasteurization and long-term storage, but there is certainly no harm.