Even though she was shilling for a juice company, Pebbles Flintstone may have had the right idea.
Grape juice has tested as the healthiest and easiest for babies to digest compared to the highly popular apple juice and pear juice, a Miami researcher says.
“Not all juices are created equal,” says Dr. Fima Lifshitz, chief of staff at Miami Children’s Hospital. “Nature created a juice that may be more favorable for better absorption by little babies.”
Why? It’s in the sugar.
While at a hospital in Brooklyn, Lifshitz and two colleagues tested the juices on 104 healthy children, ages 4 months through 5 1/2 years.
Apple and pear juices contain mostly fructose (fruit sugar), with a little glucose (the kind found in the blood), sucrose (table sugar) and sorbitol.
Sorbitol is pretty much undigestible and fructose often is not fully digested. The result: all those unabsorbed carbohydrates can sometimes disrupt the gastrointestinal tracts of little juicers, causing diarrhea, gas and other nasty effects, Lifshitz says. Grape juice also contains lots of fructose, but in equal amounts to the easily digestible glucose. The balance makes the fructose more digestible, Lifshitz says.
Only 20 percent who drank white grape juice were found with incomplete digestion, compared to 24 percent with purple grape, 41 percent with apple and 84 percent with pear.
Hence, grape is the best juice for babies being weaned, he says.
“You want to give the one that would be absorbed the best,” Lifshitz says. “They need the sugar for additional energy.”
Children are able to digest apple juice as well as grape by the time they reach age 3, pear juice by the time they reach 5.
Lifshitz published the results in the April edition of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.
Two words of caution:
* The study’s cost was partly paid by Welch Foods Inc., of Pebbles fame. Lifshitz says he found the differences among juices before he asked Welch for funding.
* Don’t flood the kids with too much juice. Despite wide perceptions that juice is healthy, it is almost pure sugar with vitamins added. Studies show that too much juice can crowd out other foods and stunt babies from growing. Lifshitz and others recommend no juice before age six months, no more than four ounces a day until age 1 and no more than six ounces a day thereafter.
