Tips for Beating The Common Cold

It's winter, which means it's cold and flu season. Ergo, at least one out of every eight of you readers are experiencing some kind of viral misery at this very moment. It also means that TV commercials and Internet banner ads are doing their best to sell you some kind of tincture, pill or spray that promises to make your life while sick a breeze, if not outright cure you. Sorry, folks. If there was a cure for the common cold it'd be in lockdown in some billionaire's heavily fortified mansion waiting for customers who are willing to pay a small fortune for the convenience. For the rest of us, battling that blasted rhinovirus requires some time, a little know-how and some positive thinking. Here are some tips to put you on the mend as fast as modern technology will allow.

First, keep the over-the-counter medication off the regimen, at least during the day. All they do is treat symptoms and those that don't make you a groggy mess usually won't have much of an effect at all. Check the active ingredients of your average cold pill and it'll have arbitrary amounts of both expectorants (chemicals that promote coughing) and, yep, anti-expectorants. Do they contain medication that treat cold and flu symptoms? Technically, yes. Are they utterly ineffective in that configuration? Of course. It also doesn't take long for the body to build up a tolerance to those chemicals, so what little effect they may have will probably be short lived.

The only meds that should be in your cabinet at home for your cold is something that should help you sleep during the most unpleasant days of the illness, and not because they in themselves shorten the progression of the virus. No, plenty of rest is probably the best thing you can do for yourself when you've got the sniffles. Your body is fighting a war and you only have so much energy to devote to the battlefield. If you can, take a day off work or school and spend the better part of it in bed with your eyes closed.

Of course, don't neglect a vitamin-packed diet while you're resting. Eat normally as long as you're not experiencing stomach cramps or nausea and drink plenty of water. As for those items considered folk remedies, like chicken soup and orange juice, there is actually some science to back up their curative properties. The soup, for instance, has components that inhibit a natural immune system response called neutrophil migration, which is a technical term for the lumping of common white blood cells around an infection resulting in inflammation. Many cold symptoms are in fact inflammation, such as sinus pressure and a sore throat. A little soup won't slow your body's ability to fight the virus, but it will make you a bit more comfortable along the way.

But orange juice, or more specifically Vitamin C, is the real hero of getting over your cold. Aside from being a source of natural, non-jittery energy, Vitamin C is an important factor in the human immune system. With a proper balance of ascorbic acid, you can keep your cells from experiencing oxidative stress, a problem resulting from an overabundance of oxidizing free radicals. Don't overdo it with the OJ, though. Too much Vitamin C can actually make your T-cells' job harder and the high acidity in your system can result in urinary tract burns that are then open to infection.

It's definitely unpleasant to go through a cold and there's no way to avoid duking it out with a virus for a few days. But with rest, a vitamin-rich diet and a system clean of useless over-the-counter medication, the war shouldn't go on too long.