a few years back zinc acetate lozenges were doing the rounds and I love a good superstition so I went ahead and incorporated that into my belief system. been a while so I thought I’d check to see if the state of the science on the subject had shifted since then
afaict there hasn’t been much work on the subject in the intervening time, and nothing much to change your mind one way or the other. good work everyone, you may return to your superstition behavior.
some details:
one study¹ recently reported a null result, but based on the going theory for zinc lozenges that’s what you would expect (zinc acetate was administered by capsules). also the study was lacking in other ways.
another² has a good looking graph and is maybe positive for the concept. haven’t read the fully study yet
that’s maybe about it? my method for researching this research was to search pubmed for “(zinc) AND ((acetate) OR (gluconate)) lozenge” plus some other words instead of lozenge, as there were too many results without an additional keyword for filtering. I am sure there are other places results are published besides pubmed. feel free to catapult relevant studies into my inbox
yeah that sounds fucked up! had no idea that was the case for some people, I always thought of a cold as a 1-3 day kind of thing. but presumably if someone gets 20 day colds they’re probably very glad to cut a week off that
The third week of a cold sucks a lot less than the first week so, like, maybe only as much as a normal person’s cold, but yeah if there’s a pill for cutting that third week off, I’m interested regardless of whether it helps with the main brunt of the cold. Gonna have to look into this.
you want zinc acetate, or if that’s not available, zinc gluconate. it has to be a lozenge or otherwise dissolve in your mouth, since the theoretical method of action is coating some tissue or receptor or something with ionic zinc. preferably with as few additives as possible. if it doesn’t taste bad and feel astringent, it’s not working. in the US everyone buys the life extension ones. idk about elsewhere
it is ideal to start as soon as possible. preferably in the not-sure-if-im-actually-sick-yet phase. starting once the infection is well developed seems to be much less effective
tbh I will actually take one prophylactically if I feel like I was in a high exposure environment. this is a not the protocol the research was done on but it seems reasonable and as long I don’t do this every day it is at worst a bad tasting zinc supplement
iirc the studies mostly had a protocol along the lines of one lozenge (of varying size and type?) every 1.5-2 hours while awake until symptoms subside. that’s a lot. it seems to produce some effect in the studies. I do not know that anyone has done any real study on taking more or less to compare, so it’s unclear what the optimal amount is, or how long it is worthwhile to persist in taking them
Tags:
#conversational aglets #recs #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #the power of science #illness tw
Brinens and Things 
2 thoughts on “”