Drinking orange juice makes you happy

If the Vitamin C didn’t give you a good enough reason to drink orange juice before, a new study indicating that orange juice makes you happy may convince you to pour a glass.

Orange Juice and Happiness

New research from Florida’s Department of Citrus shows that people associate orange juice with positivity, carefreeness, and rejuvenation. The study was conducted through a series of in-depth interviews with Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, as well as a U.S. national survey of over 1,000 people. When asked how orange juice makes them feel, 1/3 of respondents said it brightens their mood, and over half said it gave them an “energizing boost”.

Obviously, orange juice is a delicious drink with lots of health benefits, but the research provided by Dr. Lyubomirsky is interesting to see how orange juice makes us feel, whether we’re conscious of the emotions or not.

The most environmentally friendly orange juice

It’s easy to say you’ll start drinking orange juice to brighten your mood – but what if the bottle of OJ you pick up at the supermarket actually has a huge carbon footprint? According to Lucy Siegle of the Guardian, drinking orange juice is a bit of a dilemma when it comes to living a green lifestyle. Lucy says,

Making a litre of fresh orange juice requires 958 litres of water for irrigation and 2 litres of tractor fuel. Then there are the pesticides. Orange production uses more than any other food crop, with obvious potential knock-on effects for both the biodiversity of the orange groves .. and the health of low-paid and unregulated fruit-picking staff.

So what’s the solution? Get your orange juice as fresh as you can. If you can squeeze it yourself, do it, and then throw the peels in a compost in your garden. If manual squeezing isn’t an option, try and find the most local OJ you can, and try to select a package that’s recyclable, or if not one you can reuse for another purpose.

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