Disease

It is cold and flu season and, right on schedule, I have a cold.

Last cold and flu season I asked Gary, "Why is there a season for colds and flu? Why would a virus care what the temperature is? Do they only reproduce when it's cold?" He did some research, and it turns out that it's not the heat, it's the humidity. If the air is dry, as it is in winter, viruses fly farther, are lofted higher, and can be transported directly into other people's noses. Whereas in summer, it is humid, so the viruses cannot fly and they sink in the damp air. There are just as many viruses in summer, only they are on the soles of your shoes.

This season, even though I have been wiping my workspace down with Lysol and avoiding human contact to the point of rudeness, I have caught a cold. I don't know where it could have come from. Sure, eight days ago I had a staff meeting with two people who had been out sick the day before, and then a week ago I went to a happy hour, but I have been working at home every day since that. I haven't spoken to anyone but Gary. I have received packages: perhaps the FedEx driver or even someone at Amazon is sick.

This particular cold is remarkable in that symptomatic relief seems to make it worse. You feed it Coricidin or Tylenol Cold and Flu, and it laughs at you and then it opens up the mucus valve. Disgustingly, I have been lying with my face on a tea towel all day and just letting my nose drain.

Yesterday I got out of my sickbed, just energetic enough to cook dinner. I washed my hands vigorously, fished the roast out of the sous-vide,  and made new potatoes in the new stockpot. (I thought of KC and lifted the strainer insert out slowly.) Then, I seasoned those new potatoes to taste. (Nibbles potatoes.) "Not enough garlic." (Nibbles potatoes.) "Not salty enough." I am sure if I fed those potatoes to someone with a raging head cold they would say the potatoes are delectable, but Gary does not have a head cold, and I fear he finds them over-seasoned. 

And then, this morning, at four in the morning my body decided to expel the virus via all digestive routes. Happily, the chicken soup I had for lunch seems to be staying put and rehydrating me. 

Every time I have a cold I think, “This is the worst cold I have ever had,” but people, this really IS the worst cold I have ever had.

Comments

[KC]

That sounds miserable. I hope you feel All Better soon. (also: electrolytes are your friend; salt, sugar, potassium are the big ones; some portion of post-digestive-expulsion malaise tends to be electrolyte imbalance/dehydration.)

(also: I am so glad you remembered to lift the steamer pot out slowly! Congratulations! That is especially impressive given that you were doing it while sick.) (and I'm sure the seasoned-for-a-cold potatoes were still tasty enough. There *is* a point of overseasoning where things tick over to well-nigh inedible or plain inedible, but the potatoes probably didn't quite get there, if these still tasted good to you with a cold...)(and if there are leftovers and they really *are* overseasoned, they can also be rinsed. I have done that before...)(or, if the potatoes then got mashed, they can be put on toast as a Seasoned Thing or used as a dip. I have also done that before.)(my spice shaker caps sometimes fall off, resulting in a pour of spices instead of a shake of spices. I often remember this failing when seasoning into a pot of things and shake into my hand to toss into the pot instead of directly into the pot, but... not always.)

[TheQueen]

KC - that’s good advice about the dehydration. I was drinking five times the amount I usually do, but evidently that was not enough. I am failing the pinch test. I just had half a cantaloupe, perhaps that and an apple will help.

[KC]

Five times as much as you normally drink *ought* to compensate for the expulsion unless you're missing salt/potassium/sugar/etc., but who knows. Bodies are weird. (unless you're mainlining artificial supplement vitamin C, which can be surprisingly effective as a diuretic in sufficient quantities on some people; I get a mild but observable diuretic effect with a single at-one-time dose over 400% of the RDA, but I think most people are fine higher than that - but some OTC anti-cold things have 5000% or 6000%, and I expect that has some diuretic effect on most people?)(I don't think you can generally get a diuretic effect from the vitamin C in fruit, probably just because it's legitimately *hard* to eat, say, 5000% of your RDA in fruit at one sitting.) Potassium: your potatoes should work (or banana or avocado or "low sodium salt").

And now I know about the pinch test! Thank you! Fascinating and creepy...

Anyway, I hope your body behaves itself better very, very soon.

[theQueen]

KC - I notice you say "artificial vitamin C" -- I had a friend who discovered she was allergic to vitamin C after taking supplements. If I remember her ears puffed up.

[KC]

I don't actually know if the vitamin-c-tablet version is perfectly chemically equivalent to the fruits-and-veggies kind, but whether it is or not, the refined/isolated form is easy to overdose on, whereas "vitamin rich" whole foods are incredibly wimpy in comparison, so that's why I specify. :-) I have had all sorts of weird effects from eating "whole foods" (my body is one of those medical "huh, I've never seen that happen before" weirdness generators that curious doctors find fascinating and the rest of the doctors loathe), but I've never gotten vitamin-c-diuretic effects out of any whole foods...

That is fascinating, re: ears puffing up. Are the small amounts present in regular foods still okay for her? If not, how does she prevent scurvy? (also: I react to some "fillers" in some medications/supplements, so that's also a Fun Option to rule out.)

I wish they made supplements that actually tracked with nutritional research, rather than just Media Fad Stuff and Gotta Outdo The Other Labels. There is basically no point in having iron and calcium in the same pill; they interfere with each others' absorption, so you're not getting much of anything out of it except numbers on the label and a bigger pill. There is no point to maxing out things past where they're helpful and pushing them into the harmful category (I'm looking at you, biotin "for healthy hair and nails"... which does work if someone is biotin deficient. If not biotin deficient - and most of the population isn't biotin deficient - then supplementation increases hair loss!).

Really, I'd like to see a twice-a-day petite supplement; iron and trace elements and most of the vitamins in the morning (in not over 100% RDA quantities, and with the vitamin C in there to help with the iron absorption), calcium and magnesium and zinc and vitamin D at night. But consumers are not adequately educated on nutrition research, apparently, to want/buy things that aren't maximized? I don't know. Harrumph. (I mean, then there's also the issue that specific people need different amounts of things, so there can't really be a One Multivitamin Fits All perfectly. But still. We could do better than this!)

[theQueen]

KC - Hair LOSS? Well, no more 10,000 units of biotin a day for me!
Vitamin C lady took a big dose of C to ward off a cold: I think usually she's fine.
The people I know who take vitamins other than a One-a-day do take them in a customized pick-your-own cafeteria fashion, at different times of the day.
Interesting about iron and calcium.

[KC]

I went looking for the biotin study... and I can't find it, so there's a very good chance it doesn't exist. Sorry! But I did find https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5315033/ - which includes the line "Over-supplementation of certain nutrients, including selenium, Vitamin A, and Vitamin E, has actually been linked to hair loss. It is therefore surprising that the best-selling hair supplement on Amazon.com contains both vitamin A and vitamin E, while the next contains selenium, vitamin A, and vitamin E." - so it is possible that I mentally munged that in with biotin when I was last digging through that set of research. (again, sorry about that; brain has a few holes in its pockets out of which things leak sometimes.)

Oh, good. Yes, the doses people take for theoretical cold prevention are substantially larger than those necessary to prevent scurvy. :-)

Biotin does give some people acne or other side effects at various doses, but presumably you would have noticed if that had been a problem. :-) Anyway: I can't find anything about biotin supplementation causing hair loss on the NIH website (nor did I see anything about biotin supplementation reducing hair loss except in the case of [rare in the population] deficiencies), and there were a couple of references to there not being a definite toxicity limit (unlike a lot of vitamins!), so it's probably fine for you to take! Sorry for the false alarm. (and if I find out to the contrary, I'll re-comment.)

One of the studies on iron+calcium (focusing on iron absorption): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/1984334/ - but there are tons of them, probably partly because it's such a nutritional-advice-confounding finding and they want to pin down exactly what's going on so that it can be gotten around, because anemia is a Problem but we also don't want osteoporosis. I suppose that putting them both in a vitamin is not *totally* useless - out of a supplement with 40% RDA of iron and 40% RDA calcium you would still get *some* of each - it just seems silly to parcel them together given the absorption thing and them both being vitamin size-limiters (also, it frustrates me that most people would assume that a supplement that has 40% of the RDA of iron in it would mean they only need to get 60% of the RDA elsewhere, which is not how it works with calcium in the picture). (I should perhaps note that the Dairy Farmers of Canada flatly oppose the idea of calcium interfering with iron absorption... which may or may not be related to a number of independent researchers recommending that milk intake should be limited to one or two meals per day for women and children instead of at all three, so as to increase iron absorption and reduce anemia.)

I'm definitely *not* a nutritionist, but I have talked with a number of nutritionists, and I ended up reading a lot of supplementation studies when I was trying to figure out vitamin/mineral supplementation for specific chronic illnesses. Out of which, I mostly got: 1. bodies are bonkers (but we knew that), 2. some oversupplementation can have serious side-effects, and 3. nutrients (forms, absorption, effects, side-effects) are a lot more complex than press releases, webzines, and vitamin companies normally indicate.

[theQueen]

KC- no worries about the biotin study! Thanks for all the info.