I used to love Naked Juices. As in, I basically had one 15.2 fl oz Blue Machine or Red Machine per day. This was until I realized that the "health juice" I thought was filling me up from my 7:30 am breakfast until my 12:30 pm lunch wasn't really a health juice. I decided to spend some time researching and answer my own question: Is Naked Juice healthy?
So, What's Actually in These Things?
I wouldn't call myself a health fiend at all. As a matter of fact, I'm usually someone who eats whatever I am in the mood for. I like to call it my "see food diet." I see food, and I eat the food. It's as simple as that. However, when drinking Naked Juices, I would frequently read the side of the container that displayed the different fruits that are in each bottle and how much of each fruit there was.
Every time, all I saw were these astronomical numbers of how many full fruits were in each bottle. For example, the Power-C Machine has 1 and 1/2 full guavas. Crazy. After looking at these ingredient lists for several months, I decided to do some more research to find out what else is in these juices and how this company is making any money considering how much fresh fruit costs and the high volume of it they're using
My research taught me a lot, but mostly, I learned that I should probably stop drinking Naked Juices or at least stop drinking 15+ fluid ounces of them per day. Metabolically, Naked Juice contains the exact same number of grams of sugar that a can of Mountain Dew soda does (61 grams to be exact). Although the sugar found in Naked is natural fructose (unlike the soda's high fructose corn syrup), that's still a lot.
When consuming sugar in such high doses, where the sugar is coming from doesn't matter to your body. Sugar is sugar, plain and simple. Both forms of sugar are turned into glucose in your liver. It is then metabolized into fatty acids triglycerides, or the damaging form of cholesterol. Thus, it is recommended that people keep all sugar intake to a minimum.
But, There's Not That Much Sugar, Right?
Wrong. Naked's Strawberry Banana flavor, which has no sugar added, still contains 46 grams of sugar. This is a crazy amount of sugar, even though all of it is natural.
Since Naked Juices don't have added sugar, they are a bit healthier for you, than, say, a Mountain Dew soda, but they don't have any significant amount of fiber. Fiber, which is present in unadulterated forms of fruit, cannot be digested so it keeps you feeling fuller longer and keeps your blood sugar levels in check.
When you juice a fruit, it loses all the fiber in it. This makes it incredibly hard for your body to digest the sugars in the juice. Your body can handle the amount of sugar in a piece of raw fruit because it has fiber. However, drinking a product like Naked Juice is too much sugar for your body to handle in one sitting, especially if you are drinking this day after day.
I Can Still Deal With This
Naked Juices are also very caloric. Bottles have 300+ calories in them. That's an insane amount of calories for a drink. Even though they are really, really filling, most people drink Naked Juices with their breakfast. You'd think that you're being super healthy and drinking a juice, but you're really putting a wild amount of extra calories in your body, none of which are helping your "diet" or health kick.
The Naked Juice Lawsuit
Now for the main event... the Naked Juice lawsuit. Very long story short, Naked Juices were being marketed as something that they weren't. From 2007-2013, the bottles said that the contents were "all natural." I use that term VERY loosely (and apparently so do the makers of Naked Juice). What I mean is that it was later found out that not everything in the bottle was natural, meaning that it wasn't all natural.
Apparently, only the fruits and vegetables were natural. However, the vitamin boosts that were added to some of the drinks were far from natural. Not only is this incredibly misleading, it is false advertising.
Also, there is a lot of question about whether or not Naked Juices can advertise as non-GMO products, meaning that there is no genetic modification in the ingredients that are used in the juices.
The Naked Juice company seems to have some trouble understanding what exactly it means to use ingredients that are not genetically modified, so they hired a third party expert to confirm that the juices could be marketed as non-GMO. The lawsuit was settled by Naked's parent company, PepsiCo for $9 million.
So, yeah. Naked Juices are definitely not all that they're hyped up to be. Honestly, they're pretty unhealthy, and even though they already had a huge lawsuit, I still feel like I don't exactly know what I'm putting into my body when I drink one of them, which is a little scary if you ask me. If you're really in the mood for a juice detox, however, I would recommend using one of these ways to detox your body, because Naked Juices will for sure not work.