Chances are you've been sick this winter. It's inevitable, it's annoying, and it's war. You've probably armed yourself on the advice of your own Joint Chiefs of Staff — your mother, your best friend, your doctor, and that holistic-roller friend of a friend who never gets sick. My own current report from the field: Waking in the Valley of the Dolls, I pop a few Sudafed to shake off the previous night's NyQuil coma — and then spend the day equally tweaked and disoriented. So in an age of immune-boosting gimmicks — last year, Americans spent $2.9 billion on over-the-counter cold medication and another $400 million on natural remedies — I went on a mission to find out what, if anything, actually works.
"We believe in throwing the kitchen sink at an infection," Dr. Oz Garcia, a self-described "nutritional counselor and life-extension specialist," tells me in his office on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Rather than offer up any mythical silver bullet, Garcia suggests a number of modest-seeming measures, including drops of green tea extract mixed in water, recently given cold-and-flu-fighting bona fides in a study published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. Oh — and Mom was right about chicken soup. Research conducted by the University of Nebraska Medical Center found that its combination of ingredients helps stop the movement of neutrophils — mucus-forming white blood cells that kick in during viral infections like colds to attack bacteria.
Warmth itself helps, of course. When the temperature drops, so does your immune system. Garcia suggests an "extremities soak" at the first shiver of ill will: Sit on the edge of your bathtub with your legs immersed in piping-hot water and your back swathed in towels. Drink something hot, and then sink your arms elbow-deep into the tub. (A Japanese or Korean bathhouse — or the steam room or sauna at your gym — also does the trick.)
When you're sweating out toxins, though, you're losing essential fluids along with them, so, whether you're soaking, steaming, or just plain suffering, be sure to load plenty of water back in. "Dehydration is one of the biggest problems we face, second only to stress and lack of sleep," explains Samuel Zeiler, my naturopathic "wellness coach" at the Robust Life Center in Seattle, whom I listened to in between sniffles. Zeiler advised taking vitamin D drops to give the immune system an extra boost, as well as an omega-3 fatty acid such as cod liver oil, a super-food high in vitamins D and A. I've started swallowing a tablespoonful of cod liver oil every morning — and unless your name is Thor, I'd recommend the mint flavor, or mixing it with aloe vera juice. Though testing this while I'm already sick isn't ideal, something about it seems to be helping.
In the interest of hard reason, I call the pragmatic Dr. Mark Moyad, immune and cold expert at the University of Michigan Medical Center, who enlightens me on "the Las Vegas effect" (his coinage). "People fly to Vegas and come back saying, 'That plane made me ill,'?" he says. "Well, the plane didn't make you ill — you drank a lot of alcohol, you got hit by secondhand smoke, and you hardly slept; all of that reduces your immunity. You're set up to be infected." The one counteractive Moyad stands firmly behind — as does Garcia — is plain-old vitamin C. "Ascorbic acid seems to have an anti-inflammatory effect," Garcia told me, "so the chills are not so dramatic, and the adrenal system seems to respond with better efficiency." (The adrenal glands control the stress response — and mine are hyperactive, according to Zeiler.) Think of vitamin C as a sort of supplemental exhale for those too beleaguered for the lotus position.
Moyad is alternately scathing and dismissive when talking about the Machiavellian marketing employed by companies preying on the fact that when you're feeling lousy, you're a captive audience — it's like being hungry in a supermarket. For starters, he derides Airborne as a "concoction of a million different things, 99 percent of which have no evidence at all." Emergen-C is also guilty: "These companies just dress themselves around a huge quantity of vitamin C."
But what if something that hasn't been proven to work makes you feel better anyway? On the all-natural route, Garcia recommends cracking open a capsule of zinc picolinate — a mineral bound to the picolinic fatty acid found in mother's milk — onto the back of your throat to reduce inflammation and viral activity. Zeiler has me taking echinacea, the widely used herbal immune booster, every morning as a simple preventative measure. Moyad thinks this, along with homeopathy in general — a treatment method based on administering minute doses of a substance that, in larger amounts, produces symptoms similar to the disease itself — is simply a waste of money. But Zeiler is unflappable — seeing how well his patients respond to echinacea is proof enough. That brings us to Zicam, a homeopathic remedy employing a microscopic amount of zinc. Garcia, a fence-sitter on echinacea, is more decisive on this one: "Zicam is very Old World medicine in very modern packaging."
More fundamentally, immune health is tied to your overall health — including, importantly, the way you care for your nose and mouth, which Garcia says is "your first line of defense against what's attacking." The first thing he tells a sick patient is to buy a new toothbrush and a therapeutic toothpaste like Arm & Hammer's, which more effectively cleans out bacteria with peroxide, fluoride, and bicarbonate; gargle with a mouthwash like Alkalol; and remove a lot of the infection with a tongue cleaner, which you can buy at a drug store. To prevent a cold from becoming a sinus infection, both Garcia and Moyad swear by saline solution, such as Simply Saline or Entsol. Garcia goes a step further, recommending the neti pot (an ancient design much like a long-spouted teapot) to irrigate the nasal passages, or even a Waterpik with saline solution in the well and an extended tip to reach up into the sinus. As a beginner, I settled on a turkey-baster-like product called Nasaline — and for the first time in two years avoided an infection following common cold congestion.
Ultimately, a cold probably can't be outsmarted — and it certainly can't be outrun. "Being sick means it's time to slow down for a short period of time," says Moyad. "And that's not necessarily a bad thing. The way our immune system learns is by being ill." Yes, there are simple steps you can take to control an illness: Get enough sleep; drink lots of water; take vitamin C. But as the last cold expert I consulted — my grandmother — told me, "You can do all of these things and your cold will last seven days, or you can do none of them and your cold will last a week."
