On The Cold Front When The Inevitable Winter Cold Hijacks Your Body, Fight Back With These Old And New Folk Treatments

With winter on its way, the cold war is heating up again.

Once again, the invaders (i.e., viruses) are poised to strike deep into enemy territory (i.e., your nose and throat) with the help of their allies (i.e., your already-infected kids and co-workers).

The average adult catches a couple of colds each year (twice that for parents with children at home), while kids typically come down with six or more.

What’s in your arsenal? The heavy artillery - antibiotics - blow away bacteria, but they’re helpless against the viruses that cause colds and flu.

And while vaccines can be effective against the flu, which is caused by a relatively limited number of strains, more than 200 viruses can cause colds. That’s just too many fronts to try to fight on.

Of course, your body has its own natural defenses - which are part of the problem. The immune system produces mucus to trap the virus and flush it out, leaving you with a stuffed-up head and a runny nose.

Over-the-counter decongestants and antihistamines can help, but they also bring such side effects as drowsiness and excitability.

“They help you with symptoms, but they don’t shorten the course of the cold at all,” says Dr. Marilyn Ream, a Group Health Northwest physician in Spokane. Ream recommends them in cases of serious congestion and advises patients who fly with colds to use Afrin nasal spray a half-hour before takeoff to prevent sinus problems because of changing air pressure.

To combat colds, many people turn to more natural remedies, both the time-honored - such as chicken soup and vitamin C - and the trendy, such as the herb echinacea or the latest “magic bullet,” zinc lozenges.

How well do they work? Even doctors disagree about that. But there’s enough evidence to make many alternative treatments at least worth a try to see what works for you.

Here are some of the latest dispatches from the cold front:

Vitamin C

While the idea has been around since at least the 1940s, taking large doses of vitamin C to ward off colds was popularized by Linus Pauling in his 1970 book “Vitamin C and the Common Cold.”

The Nobel Prize-winning scientist regularly took 18 grams of vitamin C 300 times the government’s recommended daily allowance. And at the first sign of a cold, he recommended taking 2 grams immediately, and another 2 grams every hour after that until the symptoms disappeared.

More than 20 controlled studies since Pauling published his book have failed to prove that vitamin C can prevent colds, although they show that taking more than 1 gram per day after you’re sick can reduce the severity of symptoms.

Just be careful: vitamin C is a natural laxative. Everyone has their own tolerance level, and you’ll eventually discover yours.

And if you take large doses of C for extended periods, “you risk having some of it come out in the urine and form stones in the kidneys,” says Daniel Baker, professor of pharmacy practice at Washington State University-Spokane.

Although vitamin C has received the most attention when it comes to colds, there’s more to the vitamin world than just C. In a Tufts University study reported last year, senior citizens who took daily vitamin E supplements (200 international units) saw their cold and flu cases cut by about a third.

Echinacea

With its reputation for nipping colds in the bud if taken early enough, echinacea has become one of the top-selling herbs on the American market.

It has a long tradition in this country, with frontier doctors learning of it from Native Americans.

But while echinacea has been studied scientifically in Europe, particularly Germany, there have been few studies in the United States. One of the first, funded by a German supplement manufacturer, is nearing completion at the naturopathic Bastyr University Research Institute in Seattle.

“There is some evidence that supports echinacea,” says WSU’s Baker. “Unless you have a point-blank allergy to it, there’s probably no harm.”

Along with capsules (at least 900 milligrams per day), Group Health’s Ream recommends applying echinacea directly to the throat in the beginning by gargling with a liquid tincture or sucking on freeze-dried tablets. (The odd, tingly taste means it’s working.) If taken at the first sign of symptoms, she says, “Your cold will last two to three days at most, rather than five to six days.”

While it packs an initial punch, echinacea is less effective over longer periods. And people with chronic diseases, such as diabetes or arthritis, should check with their doctor before using it.

Garlic

As well as giving food a flavor boost, garlic can enhance the immune system and help counteract viruses and bacteria - particularly in its raw form - its advocates claim.

“The best home remedy I have found for colds is to eat several cloves of raw garlic at the first onset of symptoms,” Dr. Andrew Weil, a leading authority on alternative medicine, writes in “Natural Healing, Natural Medicine” (Houghton Mifflin, 1990). (At least that might keep people far enough away from you that they won’t catch your cold themselves.)

Letitia Watrous, a Spokane naturopath, likes to make a tea by chopping up garlic cloves and steeping them in boiling water.

“It’s very warming internally,” she says. “If you have a cold, Chinese medicine says you’ve let the cold, damp air enter your body, and you need to warm it up.”

Chicken soup

Remember the adage about starving a cold? Fasting can help, Watrous says.

“If you’re not hungry, don’t eat,” she says. “You’re just putting more fuel in your system that the body can’t use, creating more toxins for the virus to live on.

“If you fast, you’ll get over a cold much quicker.”

But if you feel like eating, Watrous says, it’s best to choose something easy to digest, such as chicken soup.

Like garlic tea, she says, it’s warming, and it also provides such minerals as calcium, particularly if the stock is made with chicken bones.

“If you’ve had a fever, you’re depleted in calcium,” she says.

Recent studies suggest something in chicken soup keeps white blood cells from clumping together and causing inflammation and congestion, according to “The Medical Advisor” (Time-Life Books, 1996).

And it might not hurt to toss a little chili powder in that chicken soup. Spicy foods also help by promoting drainage from the nose, the book says.

Zinc Zinc lozenges are the current darling of the cold world, with more and more brands hitting drugstore shelves.

They need to be sucked slowly instead of swallowed, to release zinc into the mouth. Researchers suspect zinc may block viruses from attaching to tissues and stop them from reproducing.

“I believe in them,” says Jennifer Dailey, pharmacist at Spokane’s Sixth Avenue Medical Pharmacy. “I use them, and a lot of people I talk to feel they help.”

Still, the results of various clinical studies on adults have been split. And a study of Cleveland schoolchildren published last summer in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed no evidence that zinc lozenges shortened the duration of colds.

Adding to the confusion, the original Cold-Eeze lozenges, which use zinc gluconate, have been joined by brands containing zinc acetate. There’s debate over which is superior, although the acetate lozenges tend to taste better.

And some studies suggest zinc lozenges containing vitamin C may be less effective.

Whatever you choose, it’s important not to exceed the recommended dosage. Too much zinc can depress the immune system.

Of course, the best defense of all is not catching a cold to begin with, which has more to do with lifestyle than lozenges.

General recommendations for reducing stress and staying healthy include eating a balanced diet, getting plenty of sleep, moderate exercise and maintaining a support network of family and friends.

A 1997 Carnegie Mellon University study showed people with more social ties were less likely to catch colds.

During cold season, be sure to wash your hands frequently; it’s easy to pick up germs from doorknobs and other surfaces and give them a fast trip to ground zero when you touch your nose or mouth.

If you still get sick, says Ream, “The biggest thing with a cold is to really stop, go home and go to bed, slow down for the day.”

Use a humidifier to moisten the air (moist tissues can better battle infection) and drink lots of fluids, to flush your system and replace lost moisture. Petroleum jelly can soothe the raw skin under a nose blown too many times.

To protect other people, cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze to prevent viruses from spreading through the air. And blow your nose on paper tissues and throw them away. Viruses can survive on handkerchiefs.

Coughs can hang on for weeks following a cold. If your cough is producing phlegm, don’t try to stop it with cough medicines, Baker says; it’s helping your body get rid of the virus.

“If it’s just an annoying cough and nothing is coming out of the lungs, that’s what the drugs are for,” he says.

If you’re not starting to feel better in three days or you’re coughing up greenish phlegm, see your doctor. You may have a bacterial infection and need antibiotics.

Doctors soon may have another weapon against viral infections as well. An experimental medication that fights common cold and flu viruses could be available by prescription as soon as next year in both pills and nasal spray.

In the meantime, you might come to appreciate this “popular physician witticism” cited in a recent HealthPlus newsletter: “The symptoms of the common cold, if treated vigorously, will go away in seven days. If left alone, they will disappear over the course of a week.”

War is hell.