Common Cold - Part I

It is so common to experience the cold, then why it is irritating to experience common cold?

Usually in rainy or winter season it is easy to accept that children or even adults may have upper respiratory tract infection i.e. mild or moderate fever and running nose/ chocked nasal cavity, headaches and cough and throat pain etc.

Etiology of URI is mostly viral or many times bacterial and sometimes allergic or even psychological.

Nobody succumbs to any illness even as mild as URI unless there is some underlying cause like collection of ‘toxins’ (waste materials e.g. undigested food end-products) over a period of time. URI is also secondary to some physical and rarely psychological collection of such ‘wastes’.

During rainy season your taste buds are excited to taste oily, spicy, cheesy food and your digestive system is relatively sluggish. This state is explicitly described in Ayurvedic texts and most of the Indian grand parents know it by experience.

So if you are dumping such food items frequently in your tummy even when you are not feeling hungry, then mind you, such food needs extra energy to get digested within your digestive system.

In this course of time if at all your body faces a viral attack- where your immune system needs more energy, it faces acute lack of the same because the energy is already been used by digestive system in excess. Hence you succumb to URI.

Hence during URI consume easily digestible carbohydrates, proteins and less fat, less fibers, sufficient vitamins and minerals to ensure early recovery and no complications like lower respiratory tract infection.

This is a golden rule justifiable in many diseased conditions. We would share some more tips to recover form common cold in next part of the series.