Does Zinc Actually Work to Fight the Flu and Cold?

Your body only needs tiny amounts, but it can still have big impacts on your health. Zinc is involved in hundreds of essential biological reactions in the body. It also aids in very important cellular processes like DNA replication, RNA transcription, and cell division. The human body doesn’t make zinc so we need to get it from our diets, particularly from foods like oysters, red meat, poultry, and beans, or from supplements.

According to the U.S. Food and Nutrition Board, the daily recommended dietary allowance of zinc is 11 mg for men and 8 mg for women. When we don’t have these minute amounts of zinc, our bodies don’t work properly, so people who are zinc deficient are often treated with supplements. But the benefits for people with normal zinc levels has remained unclear. The efficacy of zinc supplements for treating the common cold has been debated as far back as the 70s, when researchers observed that zinc also inhibited viral replication. Armed with a better understanding of its role in immune function, people began to acknowledge zinc as an essential mineral for human health during this time. Interest grew even more after a 1984 study found that zinc lozenges may be useful for treating colds, but trials since then have yielded mixed results.

But a meta-analysis submitted in November of 2020 might help close the gap of understanding zinc’s potential benefits. Researchers looked at 28 randomized controlled trials involving over 5,000 participants. They found that when zinc was taken to prevent respiratory infections, participants had a 28% lower risk of developing mild symptoms such those you’d get with the common cold—sneezes, sniffles, scratchy throat—and an 87% lower risk of developing moderately severe, flu-like symptoms, like a fever and all those aches and pains that make us feel lousy. If you already have a cold, using zinc to treat it was found to clear up symptoms two days earlier and reduce their severity at the peak of illness, but overall, you’re not in the clear, as they found that the day-to-day symptom severity remained the same.

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