In this post pandemic world, when lockdowns and restrictions have impacted several conventional businesses in Pakistan, there are new avenues of commerce opening up especially online and investors are exploring business cases for a range of startups like fresh fruits store in Karachi, online grocery service, delivery service and a bunch of others that can operate in this new ecosystem. Karachi, the city of lights, is populated by over 16 million people and supports businesses of all types and sizes. Most of us cool-as-ice city slickers feel that we never have enough time for anything. We’re whining about traffic, load shedding and socio-political turmoil all the time and have oriented our lives towards everything fast paced. The overall environmental deterioration is also continuously impacting us from all directions. It has its role as a consistently looming source of depression and it also impacts our bodies as biological entities on a daily basis, whether we consciously acknowledge it or not. In such strife, both internally and externally, we go on with our daily struggles of getting as many things right as we can. We try our best as good Samaritans to not add more waste to the already excessively polluted environment, we try to act nicely even when fraught with all sorts of insecurities, we try to be human in silos of commerce and we also try to stay calm in the unrelenting hot weather. While such struggles are archetypical of our busy city lives, we try and translate the same attitude in our food choices as well. Organic food items and restaurants may still be well out of the reach for the ordinary folks but all echelons of society find ways of adding natural juices and foods to their diet, one way or another. Whether one stops over to a roadside hawker for a vitalizing glass of cold-pressed juice or waits in line for the sugarcane juice street vendor to serve them a cold glass of nutrient rich juice, we have our ways of confronting life’s struggles. However, in the overall cacophony of the hustle and bustle of the big city, it is easy to lose sight of things that matter the most. We’re here today to bring to your notice some of things that you should be careful about when considering buying “healthy” grocery or food items.

Real bummer Alert! Fresh juices can also be bad for my health?

Juices are one example of the food items we consider completely benign but if you look deeply enough, you might find things that bring you quite the shock. Cold pressed juices, for instance, can potentially increase food poisoning risk, according to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). They taste really tantalizing and fresh, obviously, but not having undergone pasteurization enables the bacterial growth on the external sides of the fruit or vegetable to enter the glass of juice that you consume. Pasteurizing it, on the other hand, fights off the bacteria that gets you sick and throwing up all night. One can still argue that so many people consume all types of juices all the time and it is very rare for people to get sick because of them, but mostly vulnerable people are the older adults, children and pregnant women because for people with strong immunity such bacteria are destroyed within their bodies. So, the idea of approaching a fresh fruits store in Karachi is something you need to confront with due caution.

But homemade juices are in the clear, right?

Freshly made or home prepared juices are still much healthier compared to the pre-packaged varieties lying in store shelves in terms of the food poisoning risk they pose because the microbes contained have much more time to breed and incubate. Nonetheless, if you choose to go for the homemade option make sure at least to follow the correct food safety and hygiene guidelines, like cleaning the produce completely and thoroughly, washing your hands, sterilizing the juicers, etc. Another method in use for bottled juice preparation is flash pasteurization, whereby the temperature of the juice is increased for a shorter time span compared to conventional methods of pasteurizing it. It has been touted as a solution for the nutrient loss that is arguably caused by traditional pasteurization as the shorter heat exposure is proposed to preserve nutrition while destroying bacteria. In our opinion, make time to juice your fruits or veggies and if that is not doable carefully read the product labels of your pre-bottled juices.

Foodborne conditions are not something you can take lightly, there is a reason why it is said that you are what you eat. Some of the many forms such conditions can manifest themselves include diarrhea, fever, cramping, headaches and vomiting. If you think your urbanite lifestyle was tough, carelessness in this regard can surely make it tougher to deal with.