Chicken Soup

I have just the thing for that cold … Chicken Soup—TRUE

As myth busters, it’s sort of our job to dispel a lot of the “wisdom” that your mother and grandmother swore by. But one of Grandma’s best remedies may actually have something to offer when it comes to treating your cold. Yes, chicken soup might actually help relieve your cold symptoms.

We have to start off by saying that chicken soup has not been tested in rigorous, clinical studies. The evidence for or against chicken soup is not up to the standards of the studies that show us that medicines like antihistamines do not work for colds. However, experts have proposed several ways that chicken soup might work to help your body fight a cold or feel better during a cold. Chicken soup is a source of hydration and may improve your nutritional status: both good boosts when you are sick. The warm liquid may also help you better clear mucus from your body, especially from your nose. In a study that compared the impact of drinking hot water, cold water, and chicken soup, both hot water and chicken soup increased how fast the nose was running or helped to clear out the nose, but the chicken soup worked even better than the hot water alone.

It is also possible that chicken soup could have some special ability to kill cells involved with infections. And some experts have proposed that chicken soup might make you feel better by lessening your body’s inflammatory response to an infection, so that you don’t have as much mucus or as many aches and pains.

As mentioned, chicken soup has not been studied very rigorously in groups of sick or healthy people, but one group of researchers did carefully investigate the impact of chicken soup on the specific cells of the immune system that increase inflammation when you have an infection. When you have an infection, immune cells called neutrophils migrate to the area to help fight the infection. One of the things those neutrophils do is release chemicals that increase the amount of inflammation going on in your body. This inflammation is part of why you develop more mucus and phlegm when you have a cold. Though some of the inflammation response helps to fight off infection, other aspects of inflammation make you feel lousy.

Scientists studied whether chicken soup had an impact on the inflammation response. The scientists studied a homemade chicken soup, as well as commercially prepared soups, to determine whether chicken soup prevented the inflammatory cells from migrating or moving to the source of infection. Amazingly enough, chicken soup worked! Various dilutions of the homemade soup and the majority of the store-bought soups inhibited the movement of the neutrophil cells, which might give chicken soup anti-inflammatory properties.

Chicken soup is not proven to be an effective cold remedy, but it does have some properties that might help you feel a bit better. You may also experience the best kind of placebo effect from chicken soup. Having soup prepared for you by a loved one, or associating chicken soup with memories of someone taking good care of you, may play a powerful role in how much better chicken soup helps you to feel. Chicken soup is not the cure for the common cold, but the science suggests that it may be worthwhile to listen to Grandma on this one. You just might feel a bit better.