How Orange Juice Marketing Made It a Breakfast Staple

Starting my day right. Fresh orange juice, pure health in a glass.

Who told you juice is health? Everyone knows that. It's fruit, isn't it?

From someone who had far too many oranges to sell, maybe.

Now that you say it... Shh, not another word. Watch this.

California, the 1920s. Growers plant orange trees by the million, and the harvest outruns what the country can eat.

Whole fruit rots in the groves, a mountain of oranges no one will buy.

So they hire an advertising man named Albert Laskit to make the surplus disappear. His idea is simple: Stop eating the fruit.

Drink it. One orange in a bite becomes three in a glass.

Begin every morning with orange juice for your strength, for your children.

Then war comes. Scientists freeze the juice into concentrate to ship vitamin C to the troops.

The war ends, and the factories sit on an ocean of concentrate they must now sell.

So juice is crowned part of a complete balanced breakfast, sung by smiling movie stars. They pour it into little boxes, hand it to children, and stamp it with a cartoon fruit and the word "natural." Then the truth.

Strip a fruit of its fiber and you are left with sugar water, a glass that hides as much sugar as soda, sold to you as medicine.

Today, the healthy shelf is a wall of sugar wearing fruit costumes, and we thank them for the favor.

Every choice you make begins with an idea someone else put in your head.

How much have you swallowed only because it was sweet?

You're free to think what they decide or go quiet.

Watch, learn, like, subscribe, and evolve quietly until you become the wolf.