chememit

Good point, that bit about fiber is wrong. What I said should probably be amended to mean that juice = (fruit - fiber). But surely that's no reason to stop drinking juice, unless people really use juice as a replacement for whole fruit, and fruit as a primary means of getting fiber. I guess it is a valid concern, though.

Chemical engineer's perspective: This is interesting. I'd learned about the chemical additives required for flavor in from-concentrate orange juice, since the dehydration ("concentration") by nature removes a lot of the more volatile chemicals that give OJ it's flavor. Without looking into it, I'd guess the deoxygenation process works by heating and pulling vacuum to lower oxygen solubility, which would also have the same consequence of removing the flavor compounds.

That said, the addition of chemical flavoring agents is completely irrelevant to health. Again I know more about process design than health science, but I do know that the flavoring chemicals that get removed and added are in such trace amounts that they likely have no health consequence, whether present or absent. In fact, many of the compounds are actually toxic at high concentrations.

And towards the "don't drink juice at all" argument, I feel like the world would be in a far better place health-wise if everyone drank juice instead of soda. At least juice is a fair representation of fruit, while soda is basically fructose dissolved in phosphoric acid. (The article mentions pectin and fiber as missing fruit components in juice - this is true as both are solids likely removed by juicing, but pectin is just a sugar polymer like starch, and fiber is just indigestible solids...nothing special health-wise). The argument reminds me of the people telling everyone not to go to college, just because in their specific case they didn't need it. Potentially decent advice for a small, already advantaged subset of the population, but horrible advice for everyone else.