Orange Juice and Ulcers

Two facts from the Near East last week renewed an old medical quarrel. When Dr. Edward L. Turner of Nashville was practicing medicine in Beirut, some time ago, he noticed a curious thing: every year in the late autumn his stomach-ulcer patients got worse. Late autumn was the time of the orange harvest, and the people of Syria are great orange eaters. Hmm, said Dr. Turner.

As Dr. Turner knew, gastroenterologists do not agree on whether or not ulcer diets should contain orange juice. The juice contains citric acid only in harmless traces, but it might stimulate the stomach to produce a more than normal amount of hydrochloric acid. Because they feared hydrochloric acid, some doctors banned orange juice; others prescribed it to keep up the vitamin C intake. Ulcer patients without enough vitamin C are in a bad way.

With two other Nashville physicians, Frank W. Claytor and William L. Smith, Dr. Turner devised an experiment, reported its results last week in The American Journal of Digestive Diseases. They gave orange juice to 15 subjects, took stomach samples after feeding. At other times they gave the same subjects equivalent amounts of 1) soft toast and tea; 2) rich milk. In all but two patients, the stomach acid averaged 75% higher after the orange juice than after the other diets. It looked as though ulcer patients should get their vitamin C from something else than orange juice. But the doctors were too cautious to say so definitely; they wanted still more facts.

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