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Sneeze Brigade
16. Eat a container of yogurt every day. A study from the University of California-Davis found that people who ate one cup of yogurt -- whether live culture or pasteurized -- had 25 percent fewer colds than non-yogurt eaters. Start your yogurt eating in the summer to build up your immunity before cold and flu season starts.17. Once a day, sit in a quiet, dim room, close your eyes, and focus on one word. You're meditating, a proven way to reduce stress. And stress, studies find, increases your susceptibility to colds. In fact, stressed people have up to twice the number of colds as non-stressed people.
18. Scrub under your fingernails every night. They're a great hiding place for germs.
19. Change or wash your hand towels every three or four days during cold and flu season. When you wash them, use hot water in order to kill the germs.
20. At the very first hint of a cold, launch the following preventive blitz. Here's how:
- Suck on a zinc lozenge until it melts away. Then suck another every two waking hours. Or use a zinc-based nasal spray such as Zicam.
- Take one 250-milligram capsule of the herb astragalus twice a day until you are better.
- Cook up a pot of chicken soup.
- Roast garlic in the oven (drizzle whole clove with olive oil, wrap in tinfoil, roast for an hour at 400°F), then spread the soft garlic on toast and eat.
Studies find that all either reduce the length of time you suffer with a cold or help prevent a full-blown cold from occurring.
21. Wipe your nose -- don't blow. Your cold won't hang around as long, according to a University of Virginia study. Turns out that the force of blowing not only sends the gunk out of your nose into a tissue, but propels some back into your sinuses. And, in case you're curious, they discovered this using dye and X rays. If you need to blow, blow gently, and blow one nostril at a time.
22. Sneeze and cough into your arm or a tissue. Whoever taught us to cover our mouths when we cough or sneeze got it wrong. That just puts the germs right on our hands, where you can spread them to objects -- and other people. Instead, hold the crook of your elbow over your mouth and nose when you sneeze or cough if a tissue isn't handy. It's pretty rare that you shake someone's elbow or scratch your eye with an elbow, after all.
23. Don't pressure your doctor for antibiotics. Colds and flu (along with most common infections) are caused by viruses, so antibiotics -- designed to kill bacteria -- won't do a thing. They can hurt, however, by killing off the friendly bacteria that are part of our immune defenses. If you've used antibiotics a lot lately, consider a course of probiotics -- replacement troops for friendly bacteria.
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