Nobody enjoys the aches, cough, and stuffy nose that comes with a cold, so it's no surprise that we spend a ton of money on over-the-counter symptom relief—$3 billion a year in the US alone.
And you've probably heard all sorts of tips and tricks to keep from getting sick: drink some OJ for the vitamin C.
Or spray some zinc into your nose.
But it turns out that none of those popular cure-alls actually work.
Take vitamin C, for example.
It rose to fame as a cold-busting immuno-booster in 1970 when Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling published a book promoting what he called "megadoses" of vitamin C.
Since he was so famous, the idea that vitamin C could cure colds spread quickly, even though it wasn't backed by solid science or the medical community.
It's not hard to see why he was so enamored with vitamin C—it's involved in a ton of biological processes, including regulating how your genes are expressed.
It's so important that most animals synthesize it on their own; we humans are in the minority, because we don't have that ability and we have to get it from our diet.
Now a vitamin C deficiency does decrease your ability to fight off some infections, and the most severe form, scurvy, can be fatal.
