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your cold with zinc

By Amy DiCresce

You can cut your cold in half, feel better, cough less, and sleep more--and the solution is easy. Just swallow a few doses of zinc each day, as soon as your cold symptoms begin to develop, and you will feel better much sooner than you expected. Although zinc can’t cure a cold, recent studies have shown that it can dramatically reduce the duration and severity of cold symptoms.

One of the world’s foremost authorities on zinc is Wayne State University’s own Ananda Prasad, MD, PhD, who was one of the first people to discover that dietary zinc deficiencies were responsible for causing immune problems, stunted growth and other abnormalities. He became interested in zinc in 1963 and has been testing zinc’s health effects for many years.

In recognition of his three decades of research, Dr. Prasad was recently honored with a mastership from the American College of Physicians-American Society of Internal Medicine, and is generally considered the zinc authority. Dr. Prasad received an honorary doctorate from the Claude-Bernard University in Lyon, France, in 1999, and was recently elected as a corresponding member of the European Academy of Sciences, Arts and Humanities.

In his 1985 book, Hematology, the Blossoming of a Science, Dr. Maxwell Wintrobe said, “When one thinks of minerals other than iron and copper that are related to hematopoiesis, the name Prasad comes to mind.”

Dr. Prasad’s research studies are stronger now than ever. In August 2000, he and his research team published a breakthrough study in the Annals of Internal Medicine showing that zinc lozenges cut cold duration in half. Since then, many other studies have provided consistent supporting results for zinc nasal sprays and supplements. Dietary forms of zinc don’t seem to help colds, because not enough of the mineral can be absorbed from food.

Dr. Prasad's studies have shown that zinc cuts the duration and severity of cold symptoms.

Although previous cold studies were inconclusive, this publication showed with certainty that cold symptoms could be stopped within four days, if zinc lozenges were used every 2-3 hours as soon as the cold symptoms were apparent. The average duration of cold symptoms was 4.5 days in zinc recipients and 8.1 days in placebo recipients. “Our results were good and I’m convinced that it works,” Dr. Prasad said.

This study did not determine whether zinc had an antiviral effect, but several important changes were observed. Those participants who used zinc had increased plasma levels of zinc and changes in their cytokine levels. Increases in cytokine levels are known to be associated with activation of monocytes and macrophages as a general host response to infection or inflammatory stimuli. Therefore, improvements in clinical cold symptoms may be related to the effect of zinc on immunomodulation of proinflammatory cytokines.

Many years ago, Dr. Prasad was able to prove that zinc is necessary to T cells, which battle all kinds of infections. Without zinc, T cells don’t function effectively, allowing anything from the common cold to cancer to invade the body. Dr. Prasad believes general zinc and iron deficiencies occur in more than a billion people worldwide. One of his studies has shown the local incidence to be dramatic, particularly in elderly people, estimating that one in four Detroiters is zinc deficient.