Customer Reviews

Santa Cruz Organic Orange Juice, 8-Ounce Aseptic Boxes (Pack of 27)

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This is a juice drink CONTAINS 25% JUICE! This product is incorrectly advertised by AMAZON. It is NOT orange juice. It contains orange juice, water and other ingredients.

There is a serious lack of knowledge about nutrition in this country. Most people think all you need to know about nutrition is at the fat, protein, and carbohydrate level, and oh, yes, you need vitamins and some minerals. There is so much more to nutrition than that. In fact, you need to get certain plant proteins, animal proteins, plant fats, animal fats, plant carbohydrates, and animal carbohydrates, along with certain chemical elements and compounds (to the exclusion of others), in your diet, not just daily, but from minute to minute. Thus your craving for orange juice reflects a need for particular chemical elements or compounds found readily in oranges at that very minute.

I think another reviewer said it correctly, Santa Cruz Orange Drink is only 25% juice. Amazon has mislabeled it as Orange Juice, and should relabel it Orange Drink or Orange Juice (Drink). Anything that says it is from concentrates is usually stretching the word "concentrate" to mean "original concentration". I had always thought that concentrate meant drying the product out a bit to remove water. The only way that can be done is by applying heat and heat breaks down antioxidants to the point that they remove all antioxidant properties.

Pasteurization does the same thing and most juice drinks sold in the US are pasteurized. They have to add ascorbic acid to get Vitamin C in the final product, but they did not add the A and B vitamins to this product, most of which are also lost. They mix orange with mango "juice" in this drink. Since both are pasteurized, you get none of the enzymes that mango has (same for pineapple and kiwi) and is the main reason why you would want mango (or pineapple and kiwi which are not in this drink) in the first place. The same applies to canning processes that heat the product first, so you cannot get any enzymes or antioxidants from canned fruit, veges. These "aseptic boxes" do not use heat to seal them, thus they are better for storing the original fruit juice in them, if only that is what Santa Cruz did.

The reason why I say this drink is for the Juicy-Juice crowd is that it is un-flavored to the same degree that Juicy-Juice is, which is also watered down. Furthermore, like Capri Sun, which also uses aseptic containers, Juicy-Juice removes most of the antioxidants by super-filtering their product (to flow through a straw more easily). You know this because if you pour the contents into a glass you will see almost a complete lack of color. This becomes obvious for the grape, raspberry and cherry drinks. Most of the color is found in fibrous connective tissue (pulp) inside the fruit, and holds most of the antioxidants. This is why doctors tell us that eating fruits and veges with strong color in them, the reds and blues especially, gives us the most antioxidants. Antioxidants are carried by the cells inside this connective tissue as well as the fluid filled cells of the working tissue (parenchyma).

Thus for their juice drinks in plastic bottles, they have to add something with the color of the fruit to them, which may mean that they are not as super-filtered as the aseptic container juices. They could add a little bit of beet juice to provide the red color, but they would have to declare it on the label if it exceeds a certain level. We cannot tell from the super-processing activity of our fruit "juice" providers what we are actually getting in our food.

All that being said, Santa Cruz does keep some color in their "juice", but that could all be due to the high bromine content of oranges and mangoes, another reason why we might suddenly desire a drink of orange juice. Bromine is critical to the body for repairing epithelia (coverings over tendon, ligament, linings to the gut, lungs, blood vessels, ducts and skin surface). This means that it cannot remove the color by removing the connective tissue (pulp) from its orange or mango juice.

Another component to oranges that we often drink the juice or eat the fruit to obtain is certain plant proteins (these include enzymes), found only in the connective tissue and which are also filtered out by these companies.

What we can deduce from this discussion is that maybe we need less processing to our foods. If you cannot get access to good fresh oranges and a juicer, then it is a real problem to find what you need to eat in the processed food section of the grocery. I found out that a really good high-speed blender (e.g. a commercial Vita-Mixer) can really grind up the pulp so fine that it is not a problem keeping it in your juice. You cannot sip it through a tiny straw (like the ones packaged with the aseptic boxes), but you keep all the vitamins and proteins (including valuable enzymes) intact.

The product is so perfect for being on the go and the service excellent!
I know I will order again!

My daughter loves these and our local store is always running out. Great for on the go and for simple hydration. So convenient to have them delivered.