Quash Your Cold

 Vitamin C squashes colds dead

"A healthy body is a guest chamber for the soul: a sick body a prison." - Francis Bacon, Sr.

Your body needs four things for optimal health:

• Highest-quality food you can afford
• Unlimited clean water 
• Exercise 
• Sleep  

Simple. These happen to be the same things that all animals need. You provide them for your pet (if you don't have one, you would), doesn't your body deserve the same? 

  

If you shortchange yourself on one of those four things for a period of time, you are weakening your body and at risk of getting sick. A sniffly, exhausting, cotton-headed misery known as a cold will lay you low and it will take four times longer than normal to get things done. Blech.

Researchers have recently decoded the genome for the common cold virus, but don't expect a cure anytime soon (weak business case). In the meantime, MindfulEats has come up with a method for quashing colds. It has either prevented them from coming on, or radically shortened their duration. DISCLAIMER - this is not medically proven, and involves Vitamin C (which is hotly debated), but it always works for us. The main point is that you don't need to be helpless before a cold and defenselessly wait for it to knock you out. This works for us - figure out what works for you.

What to do - Mindless Eats Approach to Quashing Colds

1. Admit you have a cold. Don't lie to yourself and pretend you don't. If you have a slight sore throat or sniffles, that's not normal - it's an incoming cold. You can't prevent it if you don't treat it.
2. Load up on Vitamin C. I take 2,000 mg after breakfast, lunch, dinner and before bed. Yup, that's 8,000 mg a day. And I have as much citrus as possible on top of the vitamins. C has fervent advocates (Linus Pauling took 6,000-18,000 mg per day) and ballyhooers. It's necessary for your body's function and is essential for healing wounds. There are many C skeptics that do not think it helps colds and think high doses are toxic. Vitamin C is water soluble, which means your body eliminates what it does not use through urine. C works for me and is the most important part of my regimen for killing a cold. I take megadoses when I'm sick, but don't take it as a supplement otherwise. 
3. Have chicken soup. I make an exception to not eating meat for chicken soup when I have a cold. It works. The University of Nebraska published a study in 2000 that demonstrated efficacy. Even out of a can. It works so well that I once made chicken noodle soup for a sick beau, even though I never make chicken. That was the end of the cold, but I didn't get a thank you, so that was also the end of the beau. (see, it also smokes out bad boyfriends)
4. Drink lots of water. You're getting dehydrated, so drink up.
5. Make hot herbal tea with lots of lemon and honey. If I'm really sick, I default to the ancient Taiwanese remedy of just hot water, lots of lemon and honey. 
6. Exercise. You might be fatigued, but I find moderate exercise seems to clear the congestion. So do these studies.  
7. Go to bed early. Your body needs the rest.

This routine knocks out my most evil cold. What works for you?

Update: 2/19/11 New research suggests that taking zinc can shorten or reduce your cold if you take it within the first 24 hours. 

What I ate: 2 cups of coffee, 1 orange, 1 oz. pumpkin seeds, quinoa, stir-fried tempeh + spinach + shitaake mushrooms (resavored), 3 oz. pistachios, 6 squares dark chocolate, 1 slice whole wheat bread + hummus, 1 apple, quinoa, steamed broccoli + tofu + shitaakes, 1/2 cup yougurt + 1t jam, 1 hot chocolate

Exercise: vinyassa yoga