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Show Is Frozen Orange Juice nutritious As Fresh Juice? By WILLIAM J. GOLDWAG, M.D. Copley News Service Q. I grew up having orange juice every morning for breakfast and now I usually give it to my children regularly. We use frozen juice which is unsweetened. Now a friend of mine went to a nutritionist nu-tritionist who told her that the juice isn't that good, for you and it's better to have the orange itself. Isn't orange juice full of vitamin C? A. THERE'S nothing wrong with orange juice. The only problem, for some people, is to be aware that orange juice requires usually two or three oranges to be squeezed to make up a glass of juice. Much of the natural fruit sugar of the orange will be carried in the juice, so you are getting the carbohydrate equivalent of several oranges. Other nutrients are present in the fruit of the orange and especially in the inner layers of the peel, the white part that may stick to the orange when you peel it. These nutrients are not present in the juice so it is generally healthier to eat the whole natural fuit rather than just the liquid part. The same goes for grapefruit, grapes and apples. YOU'RE right about the vitamin vi-tamin C-there's more in the juice provided the juice is fresh and doesn't sit around too long since the vitamin activity ac-tivity deteriorates rapidly. If you do use the juice be sure it's not an orange drink but genuine juice. In these days of high pressure advertising, it may be difficult to distinguish the two. Q. My doctor says I have allergic rhinitis because my nose is always running or clogged up. It goes on most of the year. Sometimes antihistamines antihis-tamines help, but I usually end up having to spray my nose to keep it open even a little bit. RECENTLY I found myself using nose drops or spray almost al-most every hour and sometimes some-times even more often. It's beginning to interfere with my sleep and makes my mouth so dry, I can't talk or eat my food normally. Isn't there anything else I can do? A. You sound like you are becoming the victim of "rebound congestion." There are two reasons that this problem occurs in people with allergic rhinitis who use nose drops for a prolonged period of time. THE swollen membranes inside the nose become more sensitive than normal tissues to the irritation of the drugs sprayed or dropped on their surface. Although they shrink down for a while as a result of the drug action when it wears off, they may swell even more than they were before you used the drops or spray. This forces you to use even more and more frequently. Finally they may only give you relief for less than an hour or not at all. IN OTHER cases, the rebound is the body's way of reacting to the process of shrinking of the nasal tissue. They just swell more after being shrunk. This may be part of the, allergic process itself. The only thing you can do is to stop using the drops or sprays for a while until the body repairs its normal response re-sponse again. There's bound to be uncomfortable periods during which the stuffiness seems worse than ever, but it will actually improve once the irritants are removed. THERE are oral deconges-' deconges-' tants that help some people. These are drugs taken by mouth that help to narrow the small blood vessels supplying the tissue of the nose. The less blood flowing, the less congestion there is. Sometimes Some-times this works but often it doesn't and the side effects of rapid heart beat, nervousness and irritability may prevent their use for long. If you can put up with uncertainty un-certainty and lots of injections injec-tions then occasionally hyposensitization may be of use to you. This builds your body's resistance to the allergic aller-gic factor. I have seen patients pa-tients respond well to almost any method of treatment - or sometimes to nothing in particular. par-ticular. EMOTIONAL factors may cause stress enough to set off the reaction and techniques for altering your reactivity to stress can give relief Biofeedback can aid in relaxation as well as permit diverting blood away from the nasal tissues and may alleviate the symptoms Meditative practices can also alter tissue reactivity. |