Warm Your Body to Fight Your Cold

It is January, and therefore we are in the midst of the cold and flu season.  Viruses travel around the workplace, spread through homes and gyms.  Some are better at taking the proper hygienic precautions than others.  Wash your hands frequently, don't touch other objects and then touch your face, keep a safe distance from others who are infected.  Yet, as careful as many of us think we are, we can forget ourselves in the midst of performing our daily tasks, and one mistake can result in infecting ourselves with a rhinovirus, which will cost us 7-10 days of comfort.

A diagram of the human rhinovirus, the cause of the common cold.  Author FuturePharmD518.  Under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

There is still no cure for the common cold, both one of the oldest and most common human sicknesses.  Your immune system will eventually kill the rhinovirus, however it has to run its course.  However, there are things you can do to lessen the symptoms, as well as cut down the time your cold will fester in your body before it is killed.  Zinc supplements, Vitamin C supplements, chicken soup, netti pots, and cold medicine.  There is one remedy that is often forgotten.  Dressing warm.

According to Bloomberg, a research trial was conducted at Yale, finding that cold cells replicated faster at colder temperatrues than at warmer temperatures.  This would be a good reason that summer colds are both rarer than winter colds, and usually last for a short period of time.

This revelation should actually not come as a surprise.  In the world of science, whether it be physics, chemistry, or biology, temperature has a strong bearing on molecular and cellular behavior.  More often than not, solubility increase with temperature.  The same goes for reactivity.  Temperature affects the very state of matter, as well as its volume.  Biologically, various organisms thrive at different temperatures.  Most humans prefer warmer weather, while polar bears like polar temperatures.  It should only stand to reason that the same thing might just go for viruses as well.  The human body in many cases will produce a fever in an attempt to kill various viruses and bacteria.

So, the next time you feel a cold coming on, warm your body, if you haven't done so already.  Dress warm.  Set the heat a couple degrees higher.  Avoid going out in the cold whenever possible, and if you have to, bundle yourself with layers.