Colds and flu are not just for the winter. They are symptoms of viruses, often transmitted through contact from someone already sick to others. The most common ways they are transmitted are often through the nose and mouth. Have you ever noticed that ever since you started wearing a mask quite regularly, you didn’t get sick as much during the winter?
Regardless, you won’t always be wearing a mask, so it is better to protect yourself in the long term. There are plenty of supplements and vitamins for cold and flu that you can take, but what are the actual ingredients that help you do so? Here, we will answer that question.
Vitamins for Cold and Flu
Before we get into it, we have to understand what supplements and vitamins are. For one, supplements are not an automatic fix or a solution by themselves. They do not get rid of or cure any ailments or illnesses that we have and are only meant to strengthen the body by providing it with individual nutrients and strengthening vitamins to allow it to heal faster and work better.
Vitamin C
Getting a cold often and for longer often points toward a weakened immune system, and vitamin C is looked at as the go-to vitamin to put in any supplement that helps prevent the cold and flu. However, there is a misconception about exactly how vitamin C helps prevent the cold and flu.
You see, during winter, our immune system is significantly weaker as the cold temperature constricts the blood vessels. This means less blood flows through the passage, leading to fewer antibodies and white blood cells going through it as well, making our bodies more vulnerable to viruses and diseases.
Vitamin C is among the supplements for cold and flu because it helps reduce the length of time we get those symptoms. In fact, there is little proven evidence to support that vitamin C actively helps prevent the cold and can only help with getting shorter colds. That is not to say it is not effective, as the sources of vitamin C are naturally healthy, and getting vitamin C supplements is also often recommended to boost your immune system. Sometimes we might get cold and not even feel it due to significantly reduced and decreased severity.
Vitamin D
Vitamin D is another common nutrient touted for getting rid of colds and flu. It is a crucial nutrient for our body, involved in many processes throughout. Vitamin D helps regulate cellular processes, including the immune cells and antibodies, during infections. One can say that if you are facing a vitamin D deficiency, your immune system is weakened and you might need some supplements or vitamins for cold and flu.
Vitamin D is particularly helpful in helping your body and bones and keeping your immune system strong. In the current day and age, we tend to stay indoors a lot more, especially in the morning before we go to work. We can get vitamin D from the sun during the early morning hours of 7 am to 9 am, but our busy schedules do not allow that. In countries or regions where overcast or rainy weather is frequent, such as the UK, vitamin D deficiency can be a very real problem, and supplements help balance that out considerably for both adults and children. For children, though, it is always recommended to get vitamins from natural food sources, such as fish, rather than supplements.
Other Nutrients
The thing about symptoms like the cold is that you cannot 100% prevent it but rather mitigate its effectiveness or give yourself the best chance of getting rid of it. Even if you do everything necessary to stay healthy, sometimes you simply get the cold or flu. Faced with that, we might wonder if we should take supplements, but the answer usually is always yes, we should.
That is because they have a lot more benefits than just vitamins for cold and flu, in addition to simply being necessary in cases where you may have a deficiency.
Zinc
We hear a lot about vitamins, but what about an essential mineral called zinc? It is a mineral often present in poultry, and it has a lot of responsibility to deal with in our bodies, with the immune system being just one of the areas it benefits.
When it comes to zinc supplements and stopping colds, however, there is one very important thing to note. The safe consumption of zinc in adults has an upper limit of 40 mg/day. Well, to put this in perspective, an egg can contain about 0.6 mg of zinc, and a chicken breast contains 0.8 mg of zinc per 100g.
Knowing these details, when we look at the amount of zinc we need to consume on a regular basis is about 95 mg/day. Though there are no harmful effects, it can cause vomiting, losing your appetite, diarrhea, and more, though those symptoms also stop once you stop consuming so much zinc.
In other words, taking zinc supplements can have side effects, but those are temporary as long as you take those supplements. Once you stop, the symptoms stop as well, so it can be effective in getting rid of the cold and flu.
Elderberries
These are shown to have antioxidants and can reduce the severity and duration of cold sores as well. It is recommended that if you consume elderberries, do so as supplements that are already prepared because the elderberry plant itself is poisonous, and the berries have to be cooked before consumption, as they would otherwise be harmful to your body.
Conclusion
Vitamins for colds and flu are not some magic substances or a cure for the common cold. They are not a fix to any health problems you may have either. Most natural supplements have ingredients within them that help provide your body with the nutrients it needs to attain better health and fight off diseases and viruses that weakened immune systems may not be able to. Here, we present a few vitamins and minerals that supplements often contain, their benefits, and for some, why they are more beneficial as a supplement as compared to their natural sources in some circumstances.