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Organic Gardening

Retail lemon juice question

7 years ago

This may not be the correct forum to post this, but I'll ask anyway:

Many of the retail "real' lemon juice products available at the store show zero calories in their product. If these are really lemon juice, how is it that they are sugar free? My understanding is that a cup of lemon juice should have around 65 calories per cup, so these products that are supposedly real lemon juice must be just citric acid in water? What do you think....how do they get away with billing it as real juice?

Rick in CT

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Comments (3)

gardengal48 (PNW Z8/9)
7 years ago
Most prepared grocery items list calories by serving size. The serving size of prepared reconstituted lemon juice could be so small as to be almost calorie-free :-) For example, a lemon wedge only has one calorie, a tablespoon only 3. An average whole lemon only has around 17 calories! btw, it is not necessarily the sugar content that determines calories but the amount of carbs.......there is very little sugar in a lemon but a fair amount of carbohydrates.

Reconstituted lemon products (i.e. 'RealLemon' juice) are not the same as a squeezing a fresh lemon. There is a lot of water and what is called 'lemon oil' extracted from the leaves as well as preservatives. If you want real lemon juice, use a real lemon!!
pooroldirtfarmer
7 years ago
I find it entertaining that the label on lemon juice says "contains artificial ingredients", while the label on dish soap says "contains real lemon juice"... I'm sure what you are looking at is chemistry set lemon juice like most of the products that are sold to us as "real".

Heck, "100% pure fresh squeezed orange juice" gets pasteurized, stored in tanks for months, then gets re-assembled with "flavor packs" because the pasteurization process kills the flavor. Because the ingredients in the flavor packs were derived from oranges, they can call it "real".

Welcome to America, "Reality" TV = fake crap, "Real" food products = fake crap.
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It looks like I picked up Ken's "cranky rants" banner, LOL. I worked in a cannery when I was in college. When you're sourcing fruit, determining standards in the field, grading, testing in the lab, it's easy to arrive at consistency. Lemons by the boxcar tend to average out and I certainly can see that for commercial applications a ton of lemons is consistently more acidic than an equivalent amount of bottled. But the home canner uses only one or two or three lemons, which individually may be lower in acidity. Who can know? There is just no way to account for all the things which may happen with a canning formula in the home kitchen. You make applesauce and use windfalls, which are less acid than apples picked from the tree, not even imagining it's an issue. Inexperienced canners, especially, are prone to doing the unimaginable. I can say as a teacher, I can't count the ways the human mind can re-configure the most basic of instructions. I told a friend how to can tomatoes, believing I'd covered every possible way for it to go wrong, only to discover he'd decided water up to the level of the fruit in the jar was sufficient for a boiling water bath. Fortunately, my husband happened to go down the street to visit, spotted the error and insisted he re-process the batch. Sorry if I came across as hostile. Canning fatigue. Like farmers, glad to see the end of harvest. Carol
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Thanks. That's is what I was thinking too, but was hoping to confirm it from a more experienced crew than I! This will only be my third canning experience -- I put up jalapeno's last year. This year my garden is much more productive and so far I have canned 4 quarts of salsa using a recipe from the Bell Blue Book.
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Linda- Aren't you being just a tad over-dramatic, possibly narrow minded, or do you really have such high standards that it causes you to become ill thinking someone uses an option to fresh citrus juice? As you can see from other posts in this thread, others happen to like (and use) TRUE products Here's a reality check, fresh citrus is often very expensive where I live, while a packet of TRUE lemon (lime or orange) will do just fine for small amounts of juice in recipes, sprinkled on fish, added to a dressing or spread for flavoring, making a quick recipe of Lemon Bars - or where a bottle of lemon juice gets wasted from neglect - as the original post indicated (wasted food is the most expensive food we buy). Those of use who are accustomed to home food storage try to have something that is a viable option that has a long shelf-life and still has good flavor and value. Our personal standards may be different - but different isn't right or wrong - just a choice. If you haven't actually tried the TRUE products, don't knock it - your criticism about the unknown isn't at all helpful in the conversation - it's just your preconceived notion without merit. If you try it, please have an open mind to those of us who don't have fresh citrus falling from trees in our back yards, and $1 (or more) for a tiny lemon when you need 1 teaspoon or 1 tablespoon of juice is just not going to happen. -Grainlady
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rhizo_1 (North AL) zone 7
7 years ago
redbeard, you need to let us know the name/brand of the product of which you are speaking. How can we answer your question otherwise?

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