To treat flu, try chicken soup but skip the bread

Resistance breathing — where you use a device, a bit like an inhaler, to improve your lung strength by making it harder to breathe in and out — is something that singers do and i’m now thinking of joining them. in a recent review, researchers at the University of colorado Boulder in the U.s. showed that doing resistance breathing exercise for a few minutes daily for six weeks led to a drop in blood pressure which was similar to that seen with medication. Resistance breathing promotes the release of nitric oxide in the blood, which makes your blood vessels expand, lowering your blood pressure.

THE idea that you ‘feed a cold and starve a fever’ might seem something of an old wives’ tale and certainly most doctors these days will tell you that when you’re ill it’s important to keep your strength up by eating plenty of nutritious food.

But new research, published in the journal Nature, suggests that cutting down on carb-rich food may help your body fight off infections such as flu.

Typically when we’re ill, we lose our appetite. This can have its advantages because when we eat less our bodies switch from burning sugar to burning fat, turning fat stores into energy-rich molecules called ketone bodies. These can help us fight viral infections by fuelling killer T-cells and other parts of our immune system.

Researchers have now found that when patients had flu, most of them produced large amounts of ketone bodies, which helped their recovery — but in people who got Covid and became severely ill this did not happen, leading to what the researchers described as an ‘exhausted’ immune response. Animal studies by the same team at the University of Bonn in Germany have also

shown you can boost the immune system and reduce lung damage with a ketogenic diet (which is very low in carbs) or by administering ketone bodies directly.

If you come down with a respiratory infection this winter, drink plenty of fluid and try some chicken soup (studies show it really can help) — but perhaps cut back on bread.