Zinc - Does It Really Help Prevent Colds?

Zinc - Does it really help?

Currently I have many friends and relatives who are fighting the common cold or maybe even a slight touch of the flu (influenza).  Luckily no one I know is seriously ill, but still colds and flus are never pleasant experiences.  A common procedure a friend of mine takes when she feels like she may be coming down with a cold is to take Zinc supplements.  This is to either prevent the cold from settling in her body or to at least lessen the severity of symptoms. 

I have read here and there that taking zinc supplements when you first feel like you're coming down with something can help at the very least by shortening the duration of the cold or lessening the symptoms.  Therefore before I travel by plane or when others around me are sick, I take a supplement pill in the morning with breakfast and then with my daily vitamin B-12 supplement (suggested by my doctor who looked at blood work done about a year ago and suggested I take this supplement).  Both supplements are readily available at local drug stores or supermarkets.

But does zinc really help prevent colds, or is it more of a self-fulfilling prophecy that one does not get sick when taking zinc as a preventative measure when others are sick?  Since I'm trying really hard to not get sick before an October 15th performance at my old church growing up, I'd like to investigate the matter more.

First I wanted learn about zinc itself.

According to nih.gov, zinc is a mineral vital for multiple areas of the body, including enzyme functions, immune system maintenance and protein function.  It is recommended that zinc be part of our daily nutrient intake and there are many foods that are good sources of zinc if you would not like to take supplements in pill or lozenge (cough drop) form.

Oysters were the #1 source of zinc.  (I've never had oysters but like oyster sauce - I'll check the nutrition label to see if zinc is retained in the processing of sauce.  If you have any recipes that might help someone whose never tried oysters to like oysters, I am willing to try!).  Other meat sources include beef, crab, lobster, pork and chicken.  Non-meat sources include nutrient-fortified cereals, baked beans, yogurt (yay, I'm eating yogurt for lunch right now!) and oatmeal. 

It is difficult to determine zinc deficiency by symptoms alone (loss of appetite, impaired immune system weight loss, etc.) because these symptoms are found in other health issues.  It can be hard to diagnose because a deficiency is difficult to detect in most lab tests.  You can also have too much zinc.  Too much zinc can cause symptoms like nausea, vomiting, etc.  So there needs to be a careful balance of having too little or too much zinc.  It can also interfere with absorption of antibiotics, so supplements of zinc should be taken far enough away from antibiotics so as not to interfere.

So that is zinc in a nutshell (speaking of nuts, almonds also contain zinc).

The information regarding whether zinc really helps prevent colds is not very cut-and-dry, with some experts saying that zinc is helpful and others say it is not.  I was looking at Web MD on the matter, and one test had some participants take a low-dose zinc lozenge (13.3 milligrams) every few hours and their colds lasted only 4 days instead of 7 (normal cold with no zinc).

According to one researcher, zinc helps prevent rhinoviruses (culprit for the cold) from reproducing in our bodies and also prevents them from sticking to healthy cells to turn them into sick cells.

According to the Mayo Clinic, studies conducted to test the effectiveness of zinc are flawed (but they don't say how they're flawed).  They do concede by saying that in reports where zinc effectiveness are favorable, one would have to take zinc within 24 hours of symptoms to be most effective.   So to me, that means that if I only start taking zinc at the onset of cold symptoms, then I probably already have a cold but the zinc may help me overcome it faster.

Whether a scientist believes zinc is helpful or not, they all caution against taking too much zinc, as we've learned before that too much can cause severe health problems.  The zinc nasal sprays that you see at the store can also cause permanent damage to your sense of smell (so I will therefore stay away from it).

So when I get home tonight I am going to look at my zinc supplement and make sure that taking two pills in the course of a day is not overdoing it.  When I take the supplement I experience some nausea so I try not to take on an empty stomach, so it helps if I take during a meal.  And I do not want to take zinc every single day because if I do get a cold and want to boost my zinc levels to overcome it, I don't want to accidentally take too much zinc.

According to nih.gov, 40 mg per day is upper limit, so since each of my pills is 50 mg, maybe I should stick to one a day when I'm trying to overcome a cold vs. two.  I also just read that zinc gluconate lozenges were more effective than zinc acetate lozenges (apparently there are two different forms of zinc) in shortening duration of the cold, but only in subjects who were induced with a cold (not a naturally occurring cold).

So this research has left me about as confused as I was when I started!  I guess my summary is that zinc gluconate lozenges are most effective in reducing the # of days I'd have a cold (probably more so than pill because the lozenge deposits zinc directly in nose/throat area) but some research does not believe it to be true.

So maybe me taking a little extra zinc when others around me are sick will simply create some positive thinking and help me try harder to not get sick (i.e. washing hands more often, drinking more non-caffeinated fluids, etc.) because I won't be thinking, "Oh no - I'm the next to get sick!" and be lazy in my efforts to be healthy.