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Truth about common remedies for cold

Photo: G. P. Sampath Kumar

Suffering from cold

Nobody asks a doctor, “Well, what should I eat”, after receiving a diagnosis of cancer. Not so when it is the common cold. Virtually every Indian believes that some foods — ice-cream, curd, juice, soft drinks, citrus fruits, etc  212; cause cold and other foods — garlic, turmeric, pepper, chillies, chicken soup, citrus fruits, etc — can cure it. Here is the current medical consensus on the matter. Hint: there is good news ahead — for chickens.

Can food cause the common cold? Yes, but only if hands bearing the cold virus handled the food or if someone sneezed into it. Unlike steaming hot food, contaminated fare that is chilled or at room temperature can preserve the virus and spread the infection.

However, the thing to focus on is cleanliness of hands. A tetra pack of cold fruit juice, if made by sterile, automated processing, will not contain the virus.

Are grandma’s cold remedy foods any good? Yes, in every sense except that of a cure. Roasted pods of garlic, pepper rasam, turmeric-in-milk, mirchis, hot soups, all these certainly provide symptomatic relief. And, dammit, yes, that means a lot when your nose is dripping liquid jade; anything that perks you up enough to crawl out from under the blanket is worth having. None of these remedies actually reduces the severity or duration of a cold. Vitamin C was a promising candidate for a preventive/cure some decades ago, but it has not amounted to anything.

What about chicken soup? Ever since Moshe ben Mainmon, the 12th century Egyptian physician, advocated it as a cure, it has become entrenched in popular imagination. At first glance, modern medicine appears to validate it. But up close, the supportive evidence appears quite flimsy.

One study showed promising anti-inflammatory effects in the test tube; other small and poorly designed studies report symptomatic relief. But so far, no double blind study has been done in humans. Moreover, drug companies are not rushing to study chicken soup because, hey, even if it works, you cannot patent a cure that has been around for hundreds of years.

The decongestant effect of chicken soup is less potent than the weakest of modern decongestant drugs, so why kill a bird when you can pop a pill.

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