A phlegm-filled cough. Nose blowing that rivals any air horn blast. Sneezes so severe that even good china in the next room isn’t safe. All of these, of course, are cold symptoms. But experts think that they’re also cold senders, launching tiny droplets of mucus into the air with every wheeze, hack and honk.
Inside these specks of mucus are soccer ball–shaped organisms called rhinoviruses, so tiny that 15,000 lined up side by side would barely span the space between two words on this page. Whether carried on a finger as you scratch your nose or inhaled through your nose or mouth, some of these malevolent microbes may eventually get the break they’re looking for: the chance to get inside your body.
It’s all downhill from there, literally. The wavelike downward motion of the tiny hairlike projections that line your throat pushes the virus as well as your normal throat mucus toward your esophagus. If you’re fortunate, powerful digestive acids destroy the virus before it can do any harm.
When you do become infected, however, the virus’s cold-producing plan begins to unfold. Finding a warm spot in your throat where your own mucus layer is thin and offers little protection, a single virus attaches itself to a cell and commandeers the cell’s own replicating capability. Office copiers should work so well: Within a few hours, over 100,000 viruses are created. “That’s the reason therapy is so difficult,” says Elliot Dick, Ph.D., professor of preventive medicine and chief of the respiratory virus research laboratory at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and one of the country’s leading cold researchers. “Viruses essentially become part of us, part of our cells.”
And all of that awful sneezing, snorting and coughing? That’s called the host response, your body’s way of fighting this unwanted guest from within. Before long, white blood cells, the avenging angels of your immune system, are rushed to the scene of the infection to kill the cells containing the virus. That influx of blood causes swelling in the sinuses. Stepped-up mucus production designed to trap the virus makes for a running nose and eventually a hacking cough.
Chances are, though, that the battle won’t be won for another seven days, the average length of the dreaded common cold. Is there anything you can do to put a stop to all of this mayhem? You could take vitamin C.
| Food Factors These dietary tips may help you keep your cold under control. Get souped up. Chalk up another one for Dr. Mom. Researchers at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach have found that hot chicken soup apparently increases the flow of mucus. Although researchers aren't sure whether it's the aroma or the taste, they say chicken soup helps make your nose run, which shortens the amount of time cold germs spend inside your nose. In a test, hot chicken soup worked better than hot water alone. Historians say chicken soup was first recommended for colds 800 years ago by Maimonides, court physician to Saladin, the caliph of Egypt. Drink plenty of fluids. The next time you come down with a cold, you can help banish that pesky virus to a digestive grave by drinking lots of liquids. When the mucus that lines your throat is moist, it traps viruses and sends them down to the stomach, where powerful digestive acids destroy them. Normally six to eight cups of water, milk, juice, lemonade or soup a day is enough to meet your liquid quota, but you can easily lose a quart or more of fluids a day when you're sick. The recommendation: Double your fluids. And avoid alcohol, which depletes your body of immune-boosting nutrients and causes dehydration. Grab some garlic. Long championed by garlic-lovers for fighting off colds, the odorous bulb is gaining new respect in, of all places, the laboratory. Studies with laboratory animals showed that garlic actually helps protect them from flu viruses while boosting their production of immune system antibodies. And preliminary studies showed that people who ate garlic for three weeks had enhanced immune system activity. Turn up the heat. Spicy foods containing hot peppers, curry and chili powder get your mucus flowing, which can help unplug your nose and make your cough more productive, experts say. |
What Research Says about Vitamin C
Taking vitamin C to treat a cold is about as common as.......well, the common cold.
And yet the controversy over its effectiveness continues, with the general public serving as its strongest advocate.
Ever since the late Linus Pauling, Ph.D., shocked the medical community with his book Vitamin C and the Common Cold, doctors have debated the merits of his recommendations. Among them: taking 500 to 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C every hour for several hours to reduce the length and severity of a cold. Dr. Pauling certainly walked his talk: For six years prior to his death at age 93, the two-time winner of the Nobel prize reportedly took 12,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day.
Dozens of studies of varying professionalism and reliability followed Dr. Pauling’s pronouncements, with mixed results. At last count, roughly half supported his megadose claim. The others, testing much lower doses, showed that vitamin C is of little help in ending a cold in progress.
And that is precisely what vitamin C advocates have claimed all along: If you’re going to take vitamin C for a cold, you have to take a lot. In fact, a review conducted by a British researcher found that all of the studies done since 1970 in which people were taking 1,000 milligrams or more of vitamin C a day to reduce the symptoms of their colds showed positive results, including a 72 percent reduction in the duration of cold symptoms.
| Prescriptions for Healing Some doctors recommend taking these nutrients to help banish cold symptoms. Nutrient Daily Amount
Vitamin C 2,000 milligrams, taken as 4 divided doses Zinc gluconate 24 milligrams, dissolved in your mouth every 2 hours (up to 8 lozenges a day)
MEDICAL ALERT: Doses of vitamin C larger than 1,200 milligrams a day can cause diarrhea in some people. |
Vitamin C Primes Your Defenses
One study, conducted by Dr. Dick and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, even showed that taking vitamin C before you get a cold can be helpful.
His research team found a way to study the spread of the common cold up close. They gathered a roomful of male volunteers, placed tiny amounts of cold virus directly in the nostrils of 8 and then watched the contagion spread to the other 12 as the men sneezed, coughed and blew their noses. Along with poker chips and playing cards, they passed cold viruses to each other. Within a week, almost without fail, Dr. Dick says, every man in the virus-filled, windowless room had a cold.
In three separate studies, Dr. Dick didn’t just try to get the men sick. He also experimented with vitamin C to see if it offered any protection.
In each study, half of the men were given 500-milligram doses of vitamin C at breakfast, lunch and dinner and before bed each day, for a total of 2,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day. The rest got placebos (look-alike dummy pills). “Unlike other studies, we didn’t have to trust whether they were going to take the vitamin C,” says Dr. Dick. “We actually gave it to them. Either they came up to the lab or we went around to where they were housed and gave it to them with a little glass of water.”
The pretreatment continued for 31¼2 weeks; then the poker games began. All of the men caught colds even though they maintained their 2,000-milligram-a-day vitamin C intakes. The study results, however, showed that vi tamin C was helpful in weakening their colds’ effects.
“We found during those experiments that the vitamin C greatly reduced symptoms of a cold,” says Dr. Dick. “The length was a little shorter, but that wasn’t the main thing. The main thing was that those who took vitamin C just weren’t very ill, while some of the others got real humdingers of a cold.”
In fact, only 1 person in the entire vitamin C–taking group came down with a full-fledged cold, while 16 in the placebo group had moderate or severe colds, Dr. Dick says.
So what is it about vitamin C that seems to make it useful for fighting colds?
Your immune system contains a number of natural defenders that spring into action at the first sign of an invading microorganism such as a cold virus. Among them are white blood cells. When your vitamin C levels are high, your white blood cells are apparently reinvigorated, giving them more of the energy they need to neutralize the virus, explains Dr. Dick. “The best experimentation that I’ve seen suggests vitamin C is in some way or another stimulating the white blood cells to function better,” he says. “They attack the infected cell, gather around it, destroy it and then clean up.”
And what about the skeptics? “Our results are nice and positive, and a lot of other people’s results aren’t nice and positive,” says Dr. Dick. “But nobody has looked at it in the fashion that we have.”
Once a skeptic himself, Dr. Dick now takes 2,000 milligrams of vitamin C an hour for three hours at the first sign of cold symptoms. “Usually the cold is gone by then, but if not, I’ll take 1,000 milligrams an hour until it is,” says Dr. Dick. “I thought it was a bunch of foolishness, too. Not anymore.”
The Daily Value for vitamin C is only 60 milligrams. Doses larger than 1,200 milligrams a day can cause diarrhea in some people.
Zinc: Another Cold Controversy
Long appreciated for its immune-boosting power, zinc attracted considerable attention in the 1980s as a cold remedy, and in a remarkable way.
George Eby of Austin, Texas, observed a three-year-old girl who suffered repeated severe colds. He reported giving her a 50-milligram zinc gluconate tablet at the start of one of her colds in a bid to boost her immune system.
But she refused to swallow the tablet, instead dissolving it in her mouth. Her symptoms were gone within a few hours, far faster than usual. After observing zinc’s cold-stopping effect several more times, Eby wondered whether sucking, not swallowing, zinc might actually be the long-sought cure for the common cold.
Eby conducted a scientific study to see if he was on to something. Published in a medical journal, the results of the study were promising. Those who took plain, awful-tasting zinc gluconate tablets reported that their symptoms were gone after an average of 4 days, while those taking better-tasting placebos said that their colds lasted an average of 11 days.
“The results seemed very significant. But the problem was that the zinc gluconate tasted so bad, there was some concern that people had reported their colds were over just because they didn’t want to take this awful-tasting stuff anymore,” says John C. Godfrey, Ph.D., a medicinal chemist and president of Godfrey Science and Design, a food supplement consulting service based in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania.
In their haste to develop a tastier zinc gluconate cold lozenge, some researchers mixed in additives that apparently rendered the cold-stopping merits of zinc gluconate inactive. “You can take zinc gluconate and add citric acid to it, which is what one pharmaceutical company did, to make something that tastes acceptable. It really does wipe out the nauseating flavor of zinc, but it also inactivates the zinc,” says Dr. Godfrey.
Tinkering in his own kitchen with ingredients that he had purchased in a local health food store, Dr. Godfrey combined zinc gluconate and glycine into a lozenge that tasted pretty good to his family—and also seemed to knock out their colds.
“I noticed, and my family reported to me, that when they had colds, as soon as they put one of these lozenges in their mouths, their symptoms disappeared,” he says. “It was very dramatic. You would be all stuffed up and sneezing, with a sore throat, and you would put one of these in your mouth, and then you’d actually be getting relief. You could actually hear little crackling noises in your sinuses as they opened up. The postnasal drip is rapidly reduced. Sneezing is not totally wiped out, but it goes way down.”
Watching your family get better hardly constitutes a scientific study. Dr. Godfrey followed up his observations, however, with a study conducted at the Dartmouth College Health Service in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Researchers divided 73 college students into two groups: those who were given zinc gluconate and glycine lozenges and those who took similar-tasting pla cebos. The students were told to suck on the lozenges at two-hour intervals and to take up to eight lozenges a day. Each lozenge contained roughly 24 milligrams of zinc. (The Daily Value for zinc is 15 milligrams.)
Researchers discovered that those students who started taking the zinc gluconate lozenges 1 day after they first felt ill suffered from their colds for only 4.3 days. Those who took placebos suffered for 9.2 days. “Cough, nasal drainage and congestion were the symptoms most improved,” says Dr. Godfrey. “That was an indication that the earlier and more vigorously you treat a cold, the better the result will be. That’s where our research since then has been focused.”
And what is it about zinc gluconate that causes the improvement? There are at least two theories. The unique shape of the rhinovirus that helps it hook into your cells also fits the active ingredient in zinc perfectly, almost like a bag over a bowling ball. “The geometry fits very neatly,” says Dr. Godfrey.
Another possibility: Zinc gluconate concentrations in your mouth may literally short-circuit the nerve in your nose that’s responsible for sneezes and other symptoms, says Dr. Godfrey.
Will Dr. Godfrey’s results end the great zinc debate? Maybe not. Plain zinc gluconate tastes awful, and just swallowing it isn’t enough to treat a cold. You have to suck on zinc gluconate to get its symptom-banishing effects. Stomach discomfort is an occasional side effect that can usually be avoided by eating something first; even a cracker will do, says Dr. Godfrey.
If you’re looking for zinc lozenges in a pharmacy or health food store, here’s what you need to know: Steer clear of zinc lozenges that are combined with citrate, tartrate, orotate or mannitol/sorbitol. They may taste good, but the cold-stopping capabilities of the zinc are completely inactivated, according to Dr. Godfrey. In addition to its bad taste, plain zinc gluconate can cause mouth soreness, but it will do the job. The pleasant-tasting, clinically proven zinc gluconate with glycine is available through the Quigley Corporation, P.O. Box, 1349, Doylestown, PA 18901. No matter which form you choose, a general treatment regimen is one 24-milligram lozenge dissolved in your mouth every two hours (up to eight lozenges a day) to help relieve cold symptoms.
Are zinc lozenges worth taking? “I guess it depends on how you look at a cold,” says John H. Turco, Ph.D., director of the Dartmouth College Health Service. “Some people feel like a cold isn’t a tremendous setback. But obviously, if you can get rid of some of the symptoms, it’s probably worth it.”
