Medicinal Food! ... Yum!

[unkunvinst]

I've had an itch in my throat for almost a week now. Although I do use medicine to overcome such things (my mom IS a nurse, after all), I like shifting my eating habits to knock out illnesses as much as possible. This typically means focusing my diet on the following

Comments

[ktron]

i'm big on the spicy, too -- at tech, i would occasionally summon my dad to take me for thai food because i trusted him to love me anyway after i got something spicy enough to make my face turn bright red and my nose run uncontrollably.

i'm also pretty likely to go nuts with zinc and vitamin C and fluids. when desperate to defeat a cold and get to a dance event last year, i drank a couple of the largest size zinc-enriched vitamin waters in a row. it worked.

if i'm already feeling lousy and just looking for something i can keep down, i tend to fall back on stuff my mom would get me as a kid... hot lemon tea, toast, sprite, sorbet, things like that.

[unkunvinst]

Zinc, huh? I'll have to remember that for next time. (I've felt better for quite awhile now, of course. Sorry for taking so long to respond.) Thanks for the advice!

[dreamriver]

I have this vague memory of reading something that says the capascin (spelling?) in hot stuff (you know, the chemical that makes your mouth burn) is a natural antibiotic.

So although they're not technically immunity boosters, they probably do help fight off the bad bugs!

[unkunvinst]

Huh, good to know. I'll have to research which specific spicy foods have the most capsaicin, and which I can handle. Thanks! And sorry for the delayed response.

[cutepurplegirl]

This isn't a food, but... well, i guess it's made out of food, but not administered as such. =) The last time i felt a cold coming on (you know the type... you start getting a dry and/or stuffy nose, and the place where the back of your nose joins the back of your throat starts to hurt when you swallow), i started giving each nostril two spritzes of saline whenever my nose got too dry. And it actually kept it from becoming a full-blown, can't-breathe-lying-down, multiple-boxes-of-kleenex, too-painful-to-swallow cold.

And dreamriver, the spelling you're looking for is "capsaicin". =)

[unkunvinst]

A saline spray -- interesting choice. I'll have to keep that in mind for next time too. Sorry my response was so slow!