The truth about orange juice

orange-871282749123hSB3I don’t know why, but during these cold winter months, orange juice is on my mind a lot.  Those thoughts lead back to the story of how the juice gets from orchard to your table…and I feel it’s high time I use this blog to spread the word.

My concern is with ready-to-pour orange juice that you’ll find in about any store.  Do you really think that’s fresh squeezed, yet available that way 365 days a year?  Forget the labeling.  It’s processed food like any other.  The deal is, the oranges are harvested and squeezed, then stored in giant vats until it’s ready to be bottled and shipped.  However, fresh squeezed orange juice goes bad quickly.  So, the oxygen is pumped out of those tanks.  Sadly, this also eliminates most of the flavor.  Thus, when it’s time to bottle and ship the juice, chemicals are added to add flavor.  Since these chemicals are derived from naturally occurring compounds in oranges, they aren’t considered artificial flavoring…so the labeling doesn’t draw attention to this fact.

If you want to avoid this artificial flavoring (“flavor packs”, it’s called), buy organic.  There’s a great chart that shows which orange juices do and do not use these flavor packs, over at Toxinless (short summary: if you’re not buying organic juice, you’re not buying 100% natural, real juice).

How do you avoid this?  Well I’m pretty sure that if you just buy frozen orange juice concentrate, it will have skipped this flavoring step.  I’m just not 100% certain of that, it’s tough to verify as this isn’t exactly something the industry wants to talk about.

You can read more about this over at WikiPedia, or check out the book Squeezed for more.  Follow this link for another good article on this subject.

Retina implants (bionic eye)

bionic eyeThe FDA has approved a retina implant, the Argus II, using a sheet of electrodes to partially restore vision.  The restored vision is nowhere near perfect, it’s extremely basic, but does provide some level of pattern recognition (it only has 60 electrodes though, so you’re not going to be making out any detail).  A camera on a pair of glasses captures the image which is them converted into signals transmitted to the retina implant.  A more advanced design, the Alpha IMS (not yet FDA approved), allows users to make out mouth shapes (like smiles), large objects like cars or trees, thanks to its 1500 electrodes (vs. the Argus II’s 60).  It also doesn’t require head-mounted glasses like the Argus II, but is still very much in the testing phase.

Timbuk2 releases a backpack…for dogs

329-3-2220_inuseTimbuk2, perhaps better known for their awesome laptop bags,(I’ve used them for years and love them, very well made), has actually started selling a backpack for dogs.  No, not one for your dog to wear…but a backpack to allow YOU to carry your dog!  As a dog lover, this sounds completely ridiculous to me, but perhaps if I lived in a bit city I’d find the need to carry my dog rather than let him walk around?  I don’t know.  Although, my dog is rather large for that (he’s a beagle).  If you feel this is something that you really, really need in your life, you can find it for $90 at Timbuk2’s product page here.  Please reconsider though…dogs LOVE going for walks, smelling and peeing on everything, and trying to trip you with their leashes.  Don’t deprive them of that!

Yes…I did consider that maybe this was some kind of a joke…but I learned about this via an email from them…and it’s nowhere near April 1st…so I think this might actually be a real product!

Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Baskerville 2 by Anders Noren.

Up ↑