All juiced up: rating the top squeezes.

What's the best fruit juice?

>From the most to least nutritious popular ones, it's orange, grapefruit, prune, pineapple, grape, and apple (see "Orange You Glad?"). That's why we gave no Best Bites to juices that list nutrient-poor grape or apple (or pear) as the first juice ingredient.

Calories range from roughly 100 (orange, grapefruit, apple) to around 1 70 (grape, prune). But that's for just one cup (eight ounces). Single-serve bottles typically supply 16 ounces, and some hit 20 ounces.

Atkins, South Beach, and other low-carb diets have scared many people away from drinking juice. In fact, if you're watching your weight, you're better off with low-calorie beverages--water, seltzer, diet soda, tea, or coffee (minus the whipped cream and syrup). At the very least, you can cut the calories in half by mixing your favorite juice with seltzer.

If it's fruit you crave, peel an orange, spoon yourself some cantaloupe, or throw some blueberries into your cereal. You'll get fewer calories, more fiber, and richer flavor than you'd get from juice.

As a rule, if you're choosing between juice and a soft drink or sugar-sweetened "fruit" drink, cocktail, ade, beverage, or punch, the juice wins hands down. It's got nutrients (beyond easy-to-add vitamin C) and phytochemicals that you won't find in a bottle of artificially colored and flavored sugar-sweetened water.

Our Best Bites are mostly made with orange, grapefruit, or pineapple. End of story? Nowadays, it's just the beginning. It's all the rage. A trend that got its start in health food stores has hit the mainstream. Companies toss in a handful of vitamins, minerals, or other ingredients to make their juices stand out in the crowd.

Sometimes, it's just marketing. Take these two orange juices:

* Tropicana Pure Premium Essentials Healthy Heart "promotes cardiovascular health." Yet it has no more potassium ("for reduced risk of high blood pressure") or folate ("may help maintain a healthy cardiovascular system") than any other orange juice. Healthy Heart does have extra vitamins C and E, but there's no good evidence that they reduce the risk of heart disease. And it has 20 percent of a day's B-6 and B-12, but you're better off getting them from a multivitamin, which is likely to have an entire day's worth of each.

* Tropicana Pure Premium Essentials Immunity Defense "promotes a healthy immune system." Yet only weak evidence suggests that extra vitamins C and E and selenium can keep you from getting sick. Since the claim never mentions a disease, it doesn't need to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

In other cases, what's added really does make a difference ... like in these orange juices:

* Minute Maid Premium Heart Wise. "Proven to help reduce cholesterol," says the label, which adds that "LDL 'Bad' Cholesterol was reduced in a study of people with normal to borderline high total cholesterol who consumed 2 servings of Minute Maid Premium Heart Wise per day with meals for 8 weeks."

Like Tropicana's Healthy Heart, this juice has added vitamins (E, B-6, and B-12). But it's the added plant sterols that matter. They're not as powerful as cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, but they do cut LDL cholesterol by about 10 percent. The FDA has approved claims for plant sterols, which is why the label can mention heart disease. And Heart Wise is one of the first foods--other than spreads like Take Control and Benecol--that contain plant sterols.

* Florida's Natural, Minute Maid, Tropicana, or other orange juices with calcium + vitamin D. For people who don't drink milk, it's convenient to get calcium and vitamin D from juice. But preliminary research suggests that too much calcium (more than 1,500 mg a day in one study) may increase the risk of prostate cancer (see cover story).

If you're not getting much calcium from your food, it's okay to use calcium-fortified OJ ... as long as you keep track of how much you're drinking. Otherwise, drink unfortified juice and get your calcium from a supplement and your vitamin D from a multivitamin.

* Tropicana Essentials Light'n Healthy Juice Beverage. To cut the calories (and sugar) by a third, Tropicana mixes 60 percent juice with 40 percent water and the safe artificial sweetener sucralose (Splenda). Then the company adds enough vitamins, potassium, and magnesium to match 100 percent orange juice, and throws in some extra calcium and vitamin E.

While cutting calories and added sugars is a good idea for many people, we only gave Best Bites to light juices that are at least 40 percent juice. That cutoff ensures that you're getting more than an uncarbonated diet soft drink with a few tablespoons of juice.

Note: Many juices that carry a "Sweetened with Splenda" logo--Ocean Spray's Light Cranberry Juice Cocktail, for example--also contain the poorly tested sweetener acesulfame potassium. Always check the ingredient list.

The Singles Scene

Juices are everywhere. Single-serve bottles now show up next to the soft drinks in convenience stores, gas stations, and vending machines.

That's good news for people who don't want water and don't want to waste their calories on regular soda pop. What's more, high-end juices like Odwalla and Naked often go beyond the usual apple and grape. If nothing else, juices or purees like pomegranate, blueberry, mango, peach, raspberry, and banana add richness and variety.

Whether these drinks can live up to their names (and their prices) is another story. Naked doesn't legally have to provide any evidence to back up names like Immunity Very Berry or Antioxidant Mighty Mango. (The added antioxidants may be there, but studies haven't demonstrated that they translate into a lower risk of disease.) Ditto for juices like Odwalla Wellness (it's got echinacea, which hasn't warded off colds in the better studies).

The same goes for POM Wonderful pomegranate juice, which calls itself "the antioxidant superpower." POM may he naturally rich in antioxidants, but so far, no one knows whether that means a lower risk of premature aging, heart disease, Alzheimer's, and cancer, as the tag on the bottle implies.

The Nutrition Facts labels on single-serve juices can also fool you. Though most containers hold 16 ounces (two cups)--and some hit 20 ounces--the labels give calories (and other nutrients) for just eight ounces. Drink a whole 16-ounce bottle and you've downed roughly 250 to 300 calories. Oops.

Just about any juice with "protein" in the name will also cost you calories. A bottle of Odwalla Super Protein 2004 has 360; Naked Protein Zone hits 400.

The take-home message: don't bother checking a juice's calories unless you check its serving size first.

Smoothies

If you've ever made a smoothie at home, odds are you threw some fresh fruit into a blender with milk, yogurt, buttermilk, or fruit juice. Store-bought smoothies are something else.

Some, like Tropicana and V8 Splash, have little or no yogurt or milk (or soy). Their ingredients--a mixture of juices and pureed fruit--look like the Odwalla and Naked juices, but with one key difference. Most smoothies are 50 to 90 percent sugars-plus-water. One exception we found: Bolthouse Farms Strawberry Banana Fruit Smoothie is 100 percent fruit puree and juice.

Most smoothies that are made with yogurt or milk are also loaded with sugar--even more than you'd get in a flavored yogurt. You can tell because they're higher in calories but no higher in nutrients.

For example, a (six-ounce) 150-calorie Dannon Vanilla Yogurt supplies seven grams of protein and 25 percent of a day's worth of calcium. A (10-ounce) Dannon Frusion Smoothie, on the other hand, has roughly the same amount of protein and calcium, but will cost you 270 calories.

We estimate that only about half of the 50 grains of sugar in a Frusion comes from the natural sugars in its yogurt and fruit juice. The rest is added. (It's only five percent juice, despite the pictures of fruit plastered on the label.) Yoplait's Nouriche Smoothie is probably about the same.

A few drinks help you minimize the added sugar. Dannon's (seven-ounce) Light 'n Fit Smoothie is mostly sweetened with sucralose (Splenda), so you get five grams of protein and 15 percent of a day's calcium for only 80 calories. (You also only get three percent juice.) A (11-ounce) Yoplait Nouriche Light Smoothie also contains sucralose, so its 170 calories deliver 10 grams of protein and 30 percent of a day's calcium. Both beat (fruit-less) Breyers Creme Savers Smoothies, which use sucralose plus the poorly tested artificial sweetener acesulfame potassium.

You could also look for Lifeway's line of flavored kefirs. No artificial sweeteners and less added sugar allow the tang of the delicious yogurt-like cultured milk to shine through.

The information for this article was compiled by Heather Jones and Tamar Genger, with help from Nicole Ferring.