Q: I have recently started to come down with a cold so I have doubled my vitamin C intake, started using zinc lozenges (3 a day) and taking E, D and B-50 along with echinacea. Will this help to lessen the severity and longevity of the cold?
A: If you live in this world, you're going to catch a lot of things—heat from your boss, bouquets at some weddings, and two to four colds every year. That's just part of the trade-off of interacting with people, shaking their hands, sharing subway poles, grabbing door knobs after them. If you come in contact with other people, you're going to spread and catch germs, spend some time sneezing, coughing, blowing and sniffling. But just because it's inevitable that you'll catch a cold, it doesn't mean you have to put up with all the consequences. Everybody seems to have their own remedy for what helps cure a cold, but the truth is you can't really cure a cold; you can only speed up its course. And there have only been three things that have been shown to really have an effect on speeding one up—chicken soup, zinc lozenges, and vitamin C. Take regular doses of any of the three at the moment you start feeling symptoms and for two to three days—that's one zinc lozenge every 6 hours, or a cup of chicken soup four times a day, or 500 milligrams of vitamin C four times each day with plenty of water. That can reduce the average time that a cold lasts from roughly five to three days. |
