old wives will put hair on your chest
My old boss stopped in front of my office door this afternoon. I looked up and greeted him with a "Hi." He looked more intensely at me, and said: "You have a cold, too." I had actually just realized that this was why I had been feeling so sluggish all day, and it was obviously physically apparent to others at this point as well
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The essence of my answer is that adequate nutrition and hydration are good enough and that excessive amounts of various substances (be it vitamin C, sodium, zinc, echinacea, L. acidophilus, etc) have yet to be shown to be of benefit.
To expound a bit: Firstly, do I mean to imply that just because those things have yet to be proven helpful, they are therefore never going to be proven to be helpful? No, that's not my intention. There may come a day when an echinacea/vitamin C cocktail is shown to do the trick, but until that day I think it's little more than specious to riddle oneself with such things.
Second, do I mean to imply that it's potentially harmful to do some of those things? Well, generally speaking no, it's not dangerous. Excessive amounts of vitamin C are simply filtered into the urine (most Americans get so many vitamins/minerals from their regular diet that their urine could be used as a vitamin supplement in developing countries. Really, I'm not kidding.)
Third, I think it's interesting that so many people are so keen on taking 'natural' supplements to boost their immune response, kill viruses, etc, etc, when their immune system is really the culprit, by which I mean that without an immune system you wouldn't get a fever, a runny nose, a cough, a sore throat, achy muscles, etc. It's the immune response to the pathogen that generates all of those symptoms, not the pathogen itself. So a more robust immune response would presumably lead to more severe symptoms, which is precisely why a person with an invasive bacterial infections is 'sicker' (i.e., their immune systems are working at full blast) and why a person without a functioning immune system (e.g., undergoing chemotherapy) may have surprisingly few symptoms even when they have a life-threatening infection. Now, there's the argument that the goal of an 'immune booster' it to shorten the length of symptoms, but again, the symptoms are due to the immune response, so it's couter-intuitive to argue that boosting the cause of symptoms will shorten the length of symptoms.
Interestingly, one aspect of the immune response that IS well-proven to inhibit viral replication (and thus shorten duration of illness) is elevated temperature, i.e., fever. It turns out that the viruses that commonly cause 'colds' don't do so well at temperatures above 98.6 degrees fahrenheit. And yet we go crazy treating ourselves with acetaminophen and ibuprofen to keep our fevers down. Stupid us...
Lastly, one caveat: if it's not just a 'common cold', then all bets are off and the appropriate diagnosis/treatment remain up in the air.
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