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There’s nothing like a shitty cold to make you feel terrible for a week and turn you into a disgusting walking bag of mucous: mucous that makes a frequent and dramatic exit via two small portals on your face. If there were a medication I could take to stop me from getting a cold for the rest of my life, I’d pay a lot for it, take it happily and skip home clicking my heels.

Enter “immune boosters”: the pills, potions and powders that claim to strengthen your immune system and help prevent the common cold by making your body too damn tough for those snotty little arsehole viruses to get in.

However, there is a problem: boosting your immune system is the last thing you want to do to prevent colds. There are over 200 different viruses that cause the common cold, most of which are harmless. The unpleasant symptoms we experience with a cold are the result of your immune system going haywire over nothing. If “boosting” medications did anything, they would only be encouraging your melodramatic immune system. Medication to relieve symptoms, such as antihistamines, pain-killers and anti-inflammatories, works by suppressing your immune system’s response to the virus, not “boosting” it. Once you have been infected by a particular virus, it can’t infect you again; you become immune to it. This is the reason why older people get fewer colds than teenagers: they’ve been exposed to more cold-causing viruses over the course of their life.

I looked at some immune boosters at a local pharmacy to see what they claimed to do. Most pussyfooted around the folk-myth that colds are the result of an attack on a weak immune system while not actually mentioning either colds or flus. For example, Echimax™’s product claimed to be “for optimal winter wellness”, while Viralex®’s “Supports the body’s daily defence.” Comvita™ Coldclear was the only one touting “immune boosting action which helps relieve symptoms of colds and flus.”
This claim is supposedly backed by “traditional and scientific studies,” but I couldn’t find any reference to what these studies were on their website. I emailed them. I ended my research after their polite but evasive reply: “Our full evidence list consists of some proprietary information and unfortunately I am unable to share this with you.”