Juice is a liquid naturally contained in fruit or vegetable tissue. Juice is prepared by mechanically squeezing or macerating fresh fruits or vegetables without the application of heat or solvents. For example, orange juice is the liquid extract of the fruit of the orange tree.

Juice may be prepared in the home from fresh fruits and vegetables using variety of hand or electric juicers. Many commercial juices are filtered to remove fiber or pulp, but high pulp fresh orange juice is a popular beverage. Juice may be marketed in concentrate form, sometimes frozen, requiring the user to add water to reconstitute the liquid back to its "original state".

However, concentrates generally have a noticeably different taste than their comparable "fresh-squeezed" versions. Other juices are reconstituted before packaging for retail sale. Common methods for preservation and processing of fruit juices include canning, pasteurization, freezing, evaporation and spray drying.

Popular juices include, but are not limited to, apple, orange, grapefruit, pineapple, tomato, passion fruit, mango, carrot, grape, cranberry and pomegranate. It has become increasingly popular to combine a variety of fruits into single juice drinks. Popular blends include cran-apple (cranberry and apple) and apple and blackcurrant.

A demonstration of this trend is that prepackaged single fruit juices have lost market share to prepackaged fruit juice combinations.[citation needed] A number of new companies have had considerable success supplying prepackaged fruit juice permutations on the basis of this transition. Juice bars have also become commonplace across most of the western world and offer similar juice blends. Most of these juice bars offer freshly made fruit juices, claiming that fresh juice is healthier.

The rationale for this claim is that once the fruit has been juiced, its antioxidants start to react with oxygen, which is a free radical, and so lose their health benefit.[citation needed] Juice is also commonly found in many cooking recipes from various cultures. The most popular are lime and lemon juice which help to add a slightly more sour or acidic taste to dishes.

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