Originally published December 11 2005
Expert takes a critical look at homemade remedies for the cold
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Lucie Hoe helps readers sort through a variety of old folk remedies, to find which are effective in helping with the common cold.
Building the body's defences by stoking up the immune system with disease-fighting nutrients is said to help relieve a runny or blocked nose.
Some nutrition scientists have shown that small amounts of alcohol can act as anti-inflammatory agents on the mucus membranes.
"Hot fluid has a demulcent and soothing action and tasty drinks containing slightly bitter flavours such as lemon and citric acid are particularly beneficial," says Professor Ron Eccles, director of the Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University.
Hot drinks containing paracetamol provide relief from fever, he says, although there is little evidence that the small doses of oral decongestant and vitamin C in many of the hot drink formulations are helpful.
Anecdotal evidence shows that taking large amounts of garlic at the onset of a cold can reduce its duration.
The World Health Organisation may have endorsed echinacea for the treatment of the common cold, but a report in the New England Journal of Medicine this year by Stanford University medical researchers revealed that the herbal supplement is not as effective as many people think.
Remarkably, your grandmother's advice to take a bowl of chicken soup when you have a cold has been proved by scientists to be correct.
Hot water bottles may be highly overrated Eccles says that hot soups of any kind "promote airway secretions and have a calmative action on an inflamed throat".
Consuming hot fluids also means that viruses, which thrive on fixed temperatures, are likely to be killed off more quickly.
Gijs van den Brink, a cell biologist at the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam, showed that eating and fasting cause brief fluctuations in the amount of two chemical messengers called cytokines in healthy volunteers.
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