LONDON – Fruit juices and smoothies pose the next great health risk, warn the U.S. scientists who raised concerns about high fructose corn syrup in soft drinks, The Guardian reports.

Barry Popkin and George Bray, the scientists who raised concerns in 2004 about the health risks of high fructose corn syrup in soft drinks, say the amount of sugar in fruit drinks and smoothies represents a risk to our health.

"Smoothies and fruit juice are the new danger," said Popkin, a professor at the department of nutrition at the University of North Carolina. "It's kind of the next step in the evolution of the battle. And it's a really big part of it because in every country they've been replacing soft drinks with fruit juice and smoothies as the new healthy beverage.”

Popkin is even targeting the “five a day” advice of nutritionists. Drink vegetable juice, he said, not fruit juice. "Think of eating one orange or two and getting filled," he said. "Now think of drinking a smoothie with six oranges and two hours later it does not affect how much you eat. The entire literature shows that we feel full from drinking beverages like smoothies but it does not affect our overall food intake, whereas eating an orange does."

Also, all sugars are equal in their unhealthful effects, according to Popkin. ”The most important issue about added sugar is that everybody thinks it's cane sugar or maybe beet sugar or HFCS syrup or all the other syrups but globally the cheapest thing on the market almost is fruit juice concentrate coming out of China. It has created an overwhelming supply of apple juice concentrate. It is being used everywhere and it also gets around the sugar quotas that lots of countries have."