WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER STARVE A COLD OR A FEVER!

A BAD bout of flu or a cold can see the pounds melt away. Indeed, reality TV star Kim Kardashian tweeted ‘The flu can be an amazing diet,’ having lost 6lb during a recent illness.

But experts say this is one time when you should try to avoid losing weight.

Your energy requirements increase by between 200 and 500 calories when you have a cold or flu says Professor John Oxford, a virologist at Queen Mary, University of London.

‘That’s because your immune system goes into overdrive, producing white blood cells to fight infection,’ he says. ‘Immune system cells are everywhere — under the skin, in the brain — so this all requires a lot of energy. If you don’t have enough energy, your immune system is at a disadvantage.’

So, not eating enough could slow your recovery. However, when you get ill you go off food, partly due to cytokines — molecules that send signals to immune cells to move towards sites of infection. ‘Cytokines act on the brain to cause loss of appetite and depressed mood,’ says Ron Eccles, emeritus professor in the school of Biological Sciences at Cardiff University.

‘This is to encourage us to conserve energy to fight the infection.’

Meanwhile, toxins produced by viral and bacterial infections in the throat can make everything taste horrible. Hence the weight can start to drop off. But don’t resume a diet as soon as you start to recover.

‘The last thing you need is to put your body under further pressure by going on a strict calorie-controlled diet,’ says Professor Oxford.

For the first weeks of recovery, fill up on protein such as meat, fish or lentils for tissue repair and cholesterol (for example, eggs) for the immune system to replenish itself, says Clare Thornton Wood, a registered dietitian and spokeswoman for the British Dietetic Association.