# Critical Sarcasm for the knees

# Old Ass Sudotask

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## Orange Juice vs The Cold

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Does Orange Juice help fight the common cold? Do we drink it before? After? Is this all bullshit? Let's find out.

## So what do they say?

According to Fox, "a number of studies that suggested ... taking the FDA-recommended daily dose of vitamin C ... could shorten the duration of a cold by a day." Other studies claim, "that taking up to four times the daily recommended dose of vitamin C could do wonders."

The daily recommended dose is about 90 milligrams, so four times that amount is only about 360mg, no where near the 2000mg limit.

Well, this is all about vitamin C so far, not orange juice, let's dig further.

Dig dig dig. Dig dig dig.

Wow, it seems that everyone only wants to say the same thing. People for it say:

Vitamin C may help reduce duration of a cold by a day!

Challengers say:

At best, vitamin C only helps reduce by a day, but people tend to overdose.

Pretty much the same thing. But we don't give a fuck about vitamin C. We want to know about orange juice.

## Enough with the vitamin C!

According to hopkinsmedicine.org "cold symptoms may be similar to certain bacterial infections, allergies, and other medical conditions."

With that in mind, a 2013 article claims that vitamin C can kill some bacteria that modern drugs can't, and perhaps more importantly:

> “Vitamin C fell out of favor when antibiotics came in, but this study shows the potential of using vitamin C to kill infection,” David Brownstein, M.D., told Newsmax Health.

Hmm. So obtaining vitamin C from orange juice could help quite a bit in the case of a bacterial infection. Mr. Brownstein clearly claims that vitamin C is effectively the antibiotics of old.

While this is probably a good enough reason to drink some orange juice when sick, this is still not about orange juice itself.

## No one wants to talk about orange juice!

So what is orange juice? Perhaps more simply, what is an orange?

An orange, if you were to break it all the way down, it would end up as "an extremely long list ... of hundreds of proteins, essential oils, sugars, and the like."

Perhaps there is something about the orange, in addition to vitamin C, that seems to have so many people convinced.

But to keep it simple, according to cliffnotes.com, orange juice is mostly "water, sugar, and citric acid."

Most sources agree that water is good for helping the body fight any infection whether it is viral or bacterial. Sugar can be helpful if your blood sugar is low from a poor diet, disease, or if you are loosing all your food in the toilet.

Diabetics, however, may have to be careful with this. And of course vitamin C, which may or may not help if you have a cold, will probably do some good if your body is trying to fight a misdiagnosed bacterial infection.

When I get sick, especially if I think it's a common cold, I go and drink a bottle of orange juice that day. Within two days my body usually fights off whatever it was that was bothering it.

Perhaps my body is simply good at fighting off the microscopic invaders. Perhaps it's placebo. Perhaps orange juice simply kicks ass in other ways. In either case, for me, it seems to work.