Evidence-Based Tips for Preventing and Treating the Common Cold

Even though it's the middle of summer and no one cares

This is the final installment in my deep dive on why families with young children are sick so often – a series that (with the exception of the breastfeeding installment) no one seems especially interested in, especially at this time of year when colds are at an all-time low, but hey, a promise is a promise, so I am here to deliver.

I’ll be honest: I myself have kind of lost interest in this topic, not because it’s not important, but because there really doesn’t seem to be any kind of elegant or surprising solution. It’s a real problem that households with two or more children will spend 56% of the year sick (compared with households without children who spend only 7% of the year sick), but is there anything we can DO about it?

When I kicked off this series, I was kind of hoping that there would be an interesting angle on childhood illnesses related to evolutionary mismatch that might provide some insight into non-obvious solutions. In my last post on this topic, I explored areas of potential evolutionary mismatch that could potentially contribute to the higher rates of viral illnesses in contemporary society–things like the density of modern social networks, the amount of time we spend indoors, the transfer of diseases from livestock to humans, modern diets, and even weather–but although these factors do have real, measurable effects, we ALSO have high-quality evidence to suggest that, contrary to expectation, hunter-gatherers actually tend to have MORE genetic markers related to viral immunity AND evidence of higher viral exposure.

I followed up with one of my favorite academic contacts–Nikhil Chaudhary from University of Cambridge, who has spent a lot of time studying the Aka and the Agta hunter-gatherers–to ask him what his take was. He agreed that sedentarism (the act of settling down and living in one densely-settled place, as opposed to roving around like foragers do) does seem to increase the rate of viral infections, as one of his studies suggests, but he also noted that “kids [in hunter-gatherer societies] are sick very often with respiratory or gastro problems,” and they are severely ill much more frequently than kids in wealthy, Western societies.

So I think the truth is that humans have ALWAYS been locked in this long-standing battle with viruses, probably since the dawn of the species, and if anything, things have gotten a lot better for contemporary humans living in health-rich societies. There are some good reasons for romanticizing the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but lower exposure to illness is simply not one of them.

Perhaps the real issue in contemporary society is not so much that kids are sick so often (kids have always been little germ factories) but rather that we don’t really make any allowances in the contemporary US capitalist economy for parents to care for their sick children. That’s the fight we need to fight, but honestly, I am fast loosing faith in American politics…

Anyway, that was quite a whiny and unenthusiastic start to this newsletter (sorry guys, the news cycle has me really bummed out these days), but I AM hoping to deliver you some value here. There might not be a ground-breaking evolutionary angle on this, and you probably aren’t sick right now anyway, but what I can do is give you some truly evidence-based tips for preventing and treating colds the next time they come around to get you, as I’m sure they will. I’ve done the hard work of combing through the scientific literature to get a better grasp of what interventions and home remedies really do have solid scientific support to back them up. Some of these surprised me! So it was worth the research. I’ve taken that research and built you an evidence-backed protocol that will not prevent you from ever getting sick, but might at least save you a cold or two over the course of the year and maybe reduce the duration of your symptoms.

That’s gotta be worth $5, no?