To help the body heal upper respiratory infections along a more natural path, our mothers and grandmothers have always made us feel better with chicken soup. Naturopathic doctors as well tout the benefits of natural supplements containing andrographis, bovine colostrum, vitamin C, echinacea, elderberry, olive leaf, and mushroom extracts. Even the probiotics in yogurt are being praised as effective kids’ cold-fighting snacks. Herbal tea remedies include garlic, ginger, honey, lemon, and peppermint. Medicine cabinets contain mentholated salves, warming vapors, and even zinc lozenges to help decongest stuffy noses and get rid of the sniffles.
Chicken Soup
Eight hundred years ago, rabbi and physician Moshe Ben Maimonides prescribed chicken soup for an Egyptian caliph suffering from cold symptoms. His research on respiratory tract symptoms are said to be based ancient Greek writings.
In 1978, Dr. Marvin Sackner, a retired pulmonary physician, conducted research at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami, Florida. He tested the effects of what has come to be known as “Jewish penicillin.” He found that chicken soup, its steam more readily so, did open up clogged nasal passages and let the patient breathe more easily, albeit only temporarily.
Wondering whether it was really just the steam emanating from hot chicken soup that made this Jewish penicillin so popular, Dr. Stephen Rennard, a physician and former chief of the Pulmonary and Critical Care Section of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, took his chicken soup theory to the lab. He theorized that since inflammation is caused by upper respiratory infection, which contributes to cold symptoms, reducing such inflammation would in turn help stop sneezing, sniffling, and snuffling.
His lab results, which were published in 2000 in the journal of the American College of Chest Physicians, Chest, revealed that while chicken broth alone did not reduce the movement of neutrophils (infection-fighting white blood cells), the blended ingredients in the soup did. Dr. Rennard concludes that that there is “evidence that chicken soup might have an anti-inflammatory activity, namely the inhibition of neutrophil migration.” Although store-bought, canned soup may be just as effective, his Lithuanian mother-in-law’s recipe tops his list of tried and true remedies.
