How to Prevent & Treat Colds & Flu

I'll tell you that you have a problem, and that problem is that you tend to touch your eyes very often. In fact, you tend to touch your eyes most often after you shook somebody else's hand.

It's very clear that consuming 2-4 servings of low-sugar fermented foods per day is among the best ways to promote health of the gut microbiome. And the gut microbiome is so, so important for keeping the innate immune system thriving such that it can combat the colds or flus that are trying to bombard your system.

Studies have shown that getting the flu shot reduces one's risk of contracting the particular flu that is most abundant that season by about 40-60% ... Studies have also shown that taking the flu shot can reduce the severity of one's symptoms if they in fact get the flu anyway.

This is where I get to make a strong push for being a nasal breather. Certainly in sleep, you want to be a nasal breather, but also throughout the day ... Being a nasal breather is known to provide the right milieu, the right environment, to keep that nasal microbiome at its healthiest and to promote the diversity of microbiota in the nasal passages that can best protect you against colds and flus.

Mouth-breathing children and mouth-breathing adults, meaning children and adults that default to mouth breathing, tend to get more infections of the upper respiratory tract, including colds and flus. Consciously focusing on nasal breathing is one of the best things that we can all do to combat any colds or flus that we might encounter.

We know that if you push into bouts of intense activity, or even just push yourself to engage in activity when you're feeling run down at that sort of whole-body level, maybe a little tickle in your throat, you are going to compromise the function of your innate immune system, and it's very likely that you're going to get more sick than you would otherwise.

That cold virus will not infect you unless it can get inside of your body, and one of the primary entry points of it getting inside your body is via the eyes—by wiping that cold virus on your eyes.

We know that exercise that's of 60 minutes in duration or less and that is intense but not all-out effort... If you do that sort of exercise for about 60 minutes or less, you promote the exchange of components between the blood and the lymphatic system that increases the circulation of those cells and chemicals within the innate immune system such that not just during exercise but for many, many hours afterwards... your innate immune system level of baseline activity is ramped up...

I can tell you that in almost every single case where I've gotten a bad flu or cold, there are two things that have preceded that bad flu or cold. One is sleep deprivation ... The second thing is anytime that I really pushed it with exercise...

If you're already sick and you have the symptoms of a cold or flu, you want to limit the amount of stress to your body. You want to get into bed and sleep. If you can't sleep, you want to relax. You do not want to exercise. You should not exercise...

It's been shown that if you take less than 75 milligrams of zinc in supplement form to try and impact the probability of getting or shortening a common cold, it's not going to work. You need to take 100 milligrams or more. 100 milligrams or more of zinc, for some people, is going to cause some gastric distress if you take it on an empty stomach.

One of the more interesting aspects of supplementing with zinc that I was able to find in the literature is a three times faster recovery rate for people that already contracted a cold... They were taking 90 milligrams per day of zinc acetate...

The cold virus is a pretty stable virus in that it can survive on surfaces, non-human or human surfaces, meaning skin or on a table or on glass or on a door handle, for up to 24 hours.

Another thing to understand about the cold virus is that you're generally most contagious to other people when you feel at your worst ... About 5-6 days after you hit your peak of worst symptoms... you are probably exiting the phase in which you're contagious.

The flu virus, unlike the cold virus, can only exist on surfaces for about 2 hours. After about 2 hours, it tends to die off. So, the flu virus is most typically passed by human-human contact or coming into contact —that is, walking into a cloud of somebody's sneeze that contains flu virus or somebody's cough that contains flu virus.

We know, for instance, that if you're sleep-deprived—so especially if you stay up all night, but certainly even if you only get 50% or 75% of your sleep requirement—that your innate immune system is going to suffer; it's not going to be as effective at combating flus or colds.

It is clear that people who are vitamin D deficient... oftentimes have diminished immune system function and are more prone to acute respiratory tract infections.

The diabolical thing about the flu virus is that... you start shedding virus—that is, you are contagious—about 24 hours prior to the onset of first symptoms for you, so that means that you can be a flu viral vector even when you aren't having symptoms.

There are data to show that exercise of sufficient intensity and duration but not excessive intensity and duration can recruit the lymphatic system and recruit or increase the activity of the innate immune system, even in the absence of an infection, such that if you go to that party and you encounter that person with a cold or flu, you can defeat that cold or flu virus at the outset...

If we are in a caloric deficit, for instance, if we're trying to diet through the winter months, which many people try to do, that can place our innate immune system in a bit of a compromised state.

Sauna is an effective way of increasing the activity of the innate immune system. It increases leukocyte levels. Yes, it increases cortisol levels—but in a way that promote the activity of the innate immune system.

It does not seem that that taking high-doses of vitamin C... is going to be effective for treating or preventing colds and flus ... Vitamin C is probably not a very good investment if you're taking it solely for the purpose of enhancing your immune system function and staving off colds and flus.

One compound that... I've taken before and that I stock in my supplement cabinet in case I feel like I'm coming down with something is n-acetyl cysteine, or NAC. What is NAC? NAC is a precursor to glutathione. What is glutathione? Glutathione is the master antioxidant.

In this study, they looked at people were taking 600 milligrams of n-acetyl cysteine twice per day for six months, and what they observed is that the people who took n-acetyl cysteine at a significantly lower probability of contracting influenza.

...This myth that the cold temperatures themselves are the cause of catching a cold virus, and that's simply not true. The virus that we call the cold virus is spread by breathing or by sneezing or by people sneezing or coughing or breathing onto their hands and then touching surfaces and then other people touching those surfaces and then touching, most likely, their eyes in order to self-infect.

If people are going to be infected by the cold virus, they tend to develop symptoms 1-2 days after they were exposed to the virus. Now, the good news is, if you are exposed to the cold virus, that doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to catch that cold virus. That is, if your immune system can fight off that cold, even if you've never been exposed to that serotype before, then you won't actually have that cold and you won't transmit it.

Ingesting carbohydrates after exercise can help attenuate some of the inflammation that exercise induces. When we talk about carbohydrates, we're talking about rice, oatmeal, pasta—those sorts of things, so complex carbohydrates. And fruit post exercise has been shown to attenuate, to reduce, some of the markers of inflammation by about 30-40% when contrasted with water-only intake.