The Sad Truth about Campbell's V8 Juice

It's important to step back from your daily routine once in a while and consider where your nutrition is coming from. One of the most important questions I ask myself when I do a mental checklist like this is: how many fruits and vegetables have I been eating lately? (The answer: never enough). If I had to guess, I would say that most people probably aren't getting enough, either1. Let’s face it: the obese didn't become overweight while eating salads for lunch and fruit for breakfast.

Yet, the big news in nutrition circles this week has been all about a new study2, which found that by choosing 7 servings of fruits and vegetables every day, you can reduce your risk of dying at any time by 42 percent. So in the face of such news, you may start looking for easy ways to increase your vegetable consumption.

Because the truth is, even among the health-conscious, many of us are getting too little fiber and nutrients from whole foods, and turning instead to supplements like "One-a-Day" Vitamin pills. But this type of band-aid nutrition just doesn't isn't the same as the real thing. As the cancer expert Dr. Agus writes in his book, A Short Guide to a Long Life, “The interactions of supplements and the body are very complex [...] We cannot expect a pill or packaged food product to satisfy our nutritional needs in the same way real food can.”3

Veggie drinks like V8 Juice will tell you they're here to help. In fact, V8 brags right on the label that it contains two full servings of veggies in each can. Does this translate to great benefits for your health? And if so, should you drink V8 every day?

Is V8 Really Good for You?

2 servings of veggies in each can:
 is this too good to be true?

First, let’s look at the ingredients in the low-sodium V8. The first things on the label are water and a vegetable juice blend: “Reconstituted juices of tomatoes, carrots, celery, beets, parsley, lettuce, watercress, and spinach.” You can't figure this out from the can itself, but the vegetable content is actually around 87% tomato juice. They choose tomatoes as the base for because tomatoes have a good flavor that most of us find pleasant, and also a high water content. So the first thing to notice is that although a can of V8 is designed to look like it contains a ton of different of veggies, the truth is that you’re actually getting about the same vegetable content as a can of tomato soup or spaghetti sauce with some added bonuses.

What does "Reconstituted" Mean?

But what about that strange word, reconstituted, that describes the veggie blend? Campbell’s Soup Company offers little detailed information about how they make V8 juice4, so we can only take an educated guess about what they might mean by “reconstituted.”

Since V8 is packaged in a variety of containers - they offer several sizes of cans and plastic bottles - concentrating the juices will make it easier and less expensive to transport the product between their manufacturing and bottling facilities, which could be separated by many miles. The juice may also be flash frozen and stored for a time (which would be easier in a concentrated state) before it's ready to be packaged and sent to stores. Then, before bottling the V8 Juice, Campbell’s adds water back into the concentrate, which is called “reconstituting.”

What happens to Vegetables during the Juicing Process?

A glass of V8 Juice, pictured here on my kitchen table

The most critical part of making V8 Juice involves taking whole vegetables and turning them into a drinkable form, a process known as juicing. Juicing vegetables comes with a major drawback, though. Unless Campbell’s uses a special processing facility that prevents oxygen from coming into contact with the blended vegetables, many plant nutrients and naturally occurring vitamins in the vegetables will be oxidized and rendered useless. As Dr. Agus explains in A Short Guide: “As soon as we expose the inner flesh of a fruit or vegetable to the oxygen-rich air, we oxidize it on the spot - especially if we subject the fruit or vegetable to the disruptive power of a blender. We change its whole makeup and the nutrition that went with it.”5

So despite the claim that V8 Juice contains two full servings of vegetables per can, it turns out that not all servings are made equal. The servings of vegetables in V8 Juice contain far fewer naturally-occurring vitamins and phytonutrients than whole, unblended vegetables.

Effects of Irradiation and Pasteurization

Just like milk and many other beverages you can find at the supermarket, V8 Juice is pasteurized. Pasteurization is necessary for food safety reasons, but just like the process of juicing, pasteurizing is also not without drawbacks6. Just like how bacteria and other harmful organic compounds are destroyed by the high heat of pasteurization, so too are many delicate vitamins and phytochemicals.

There are a couple of different types of pasteurization, and Campbell’s doesn't specify which kind it uses in manufacturing V8 Juice. But we know that one step in the process is to irradiate the juices with Gamma Rays to remove harmful parasites, insect larvae, and other pathogens. Irradiation is known destroy vitamins A, B12, D and E.7

What are the implications? While you can certainly feel safe as you sip on your V8, the downside is that the nutritional profile of your drink is nothing like what you would get if you took the same ingredients from your own garden or local farmer’s market and made your own V8 Juice at home.

Added Ingredients and Antioxidants in V8

Low Sodium V8 Juice Nutrition Facts

In order to replace some of the nutrients that are lost during pasteurization, Campbell’s has to add them back during one of the final steps of its process. Turning again to the ingredients label, we can see that “Potassium Chloride, Magnesium, Salt, Natural Flavoring, Vitamin C, and Citric Acid” add up to around 2% of your V8 Juice.

In my opinion, when you think about all the processing that the juices go through, plus these added ingredients, V8 seems more like a dietary supplement than a real food. While some of the additives, like salt, are likely added to preserve freshness, others are there just to boost the percentages of nutrients that are listed on the nutrition facts label. This is the same tactic that packaged foods have been using to mislead consumers for years. The philosophy in this marketing strategy is simple: food manufacturers show off how “healthy” their product is by listing high percentages of vitamins on the nutrition facts, and consumers are more likely to buy such products because of the supposed health benefits.

I don't have the qualifications to make a verdict on this, but we only have to turn back to Dr. Agus’s chapter on supplements in A Short Guide to reveal the true nature of such a practice: “The body likes to create free radicals to attack “bad” cells, including cancerous ones. If you block this mechanism by taking copious amounts of vitamins, especially those touted as antioxidants, [...] you block a physiological process. You disrupt a system we don’t fully understand yet.”8

An 11.5 oz can of V8 contains 180% of your daily value of Vitamin C, one of the most commonly advocated antioxidants on packaged foods. Just ask yourself: if you are consuming this much Vitamin C from one can of V8, then how much is your total intake among all the foods you eat in a day? How much disruption might you be causing to your body’s natural defense mechanisms by self-medicating in this way?

The Verdict on V8 Juice

If you are looking for an easy way to boost your daily intake of vegetables, then V8 is not the way to go. You will probably be fine with drinking it on occasion, on those days when you’re busy or on the go and you don’t have time to fuss around with homemade meals. But don’t fool yourself: There are far better alternatives. One large salad a day made from locally grown vegetables and some fresh fruit during breakfast might be the only changes you need to bring your fruit and vegetable consumption up to par. But don’t turn to store-bought alternatives.

The easiest and quickest solutions are rarely the best ones.

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Notes and References

1. We live in a time when obesity prevalence in the US has risen to over a third of adults and 17% of youth. See: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1832542
2. University College London. "New evidence linking fruit and vegetable consumption with lower mortality." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 31 March 2014. Accessed 06 April 2014. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140331194030.htm>.
3. Agus, David. "Vitamins and Supplements." A Short Guide to a Long Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. 154-55. Print.
4. I reached out to Campbell's to comment on this article, so I’ll update this post in the future if they reply to me.
5. Agus, David. "Juicing." A Short Guide to a Long Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. 150-51. Print.
6. The effects of Pasteurization are well known in dairy products. A 2011 meta-analysis of 40 studies published in the Journal of Food Protection found that “Vitamins B12 and E decreased following pasteurization, and vitamin A increased. Random effects meta-analysis revealed no significant effect of pasteurization on vitamin B6 concentrations.” See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22054181
7. Dubois, Sirah. "Does Pasteurization Affect the Nutrients in Fruit?" Woman. N.p., n.d. Web. Accessed 06 Apr. 2014. <http://woman.thenest.com/pasteurization-affect-nutrients-fruit-9199.html>.
8. Agus, David. "Vitamins and Supplements." A Short Guide to a Long Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. 155. Print.
9. This post may contain affiliate links. See my note on affiliate links and my promise of opinion integrity here (bottom of page).