Before you feed your libido with a vitamin C-packed glass of orange juice, you might want to consider reaching for the whole fruit instead. In her recent book, Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice, Alissa Hamilton tells you what’s really in that not from concentrate box from the grocery store.

To keep it from oxidizing, manufacturers process Valencia orange juice to remove oxygen before it’s stored in huge tanks for almost a year at a time:

When the juice is stripped of oxygen it is also stripped of flavor providing chemicals. Juice companies therefore hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that formulate perfumes for Dior and Calvin Klein, to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make it taste fresh.

 

So how can we make sure our daily dose of vitamin C doesn’t come with a “flavor pack” of chemicals? Fresh squeezed juice is a great option, if you have a shop near you that does that kind of thing. Of course, you can also juice your own. My favorite option, though, is the one Hamilton suggests in her post on the topic: eating the whole orange. As she points out:

It’s higher in vitamin C than a glass of processed juice and the flavor is incomparable. The thick-skinned, easy to peel and separate Navel has been marketed as the eating orange of choice. But Navels have a lackluster flavor compared to the Valencia.

 

Sampling a Florida Valencia is a timely and good experiment, if only to refresh your senses and awaken them to the taste that your favorite brand of orange juice strives to imitate. Sure a whole Valencia orange may be messy, but all things considered, so is a glass of OJ produced by any of the major labels.

That sounds just delightful! Way better than a glass of mystery flavoring, for sure!

Source: Eat.Drink.Better.

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