How to get over a cold fast

I have been at home all day with that lurgy, the one that makes you cough like a consumptive old cigar smoker.  As a freelance journalist I can’t take time off or call in sick so have to get over these things super-quickly, like in a day.  So, desperate colds called for desperate recovery measures.

‘Sneezing, sore throat, cough and runny nose are signs that your immune system is working to rid the body of the cold,’ immunologist Dr Serene Foster told me for a piece for Psychologies a few months back.

Here’s my recipe for rapid cold recovery:

1.  DON’T WORKOUT

That ‘sweat it out at the gym’ thing? It’s a myth.  Each time I have stoically tried to plod away at my exercise regime while ill, I always end up with worse symptoms by the end.  Not the purpose of a workout.  For Type-A like yours truly this feels like huge waste of time but a day’s rest is better.  Trust me.

2. EAT SPICY SOUP

Drink warm tea and soups made with chilli, garlic and ginger which all contain anti-inflammatory properties, Dr Foster advised as such warming foods and drinks give the body the raised temperature it needs to help fight off infection.  ‘Causing a temperature by raising heat in the body helps the immune system overcome viruses,’ she says.

Last year Indian superfood chef Gupareet Bains did an unofficial trial on fenugreek in particular and found that people with colds who took a teaspoon of fenugreek seeds in a curry twice a week saw fast and sustained relief from symptoms of runny nose, cough, sneezing, sore throat and tiredness.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1348818/Curry-fenugreek-help-winter-cold-bay.html#ixzz1psaQBJYj

Now, I live in this fantastic part of East London called Green Street.  As well as being home to Upton Park Football Stadium where my dearest West Ham Football Club (experiencing a renaiisannce of trendiness in itself right now – Keira Knightley, Russell Brand, Ray Winstone are among  fans spotted in the stands), it also makes Brick Lane look positively lightweight in terms of supermarkets, restaurants and massess of residents from the sub-continent.  It means I have the best spices in the world available to me, providing I am prepared to fight through the  determined men and women who are serious about the quality of their ginger, garlic, coriander and curry leaves.  And it’s oh-so-cheap.  I stocked up on plenty of strange sounding ingredients after falling in love with Indian cuisine on a trip to South India last year.  Here’s my little larder.

I used to be so intimidated by Indian spices and cooking but then discovered the books of Monisha Bharadwaj.  She makes it so easy and explains what the main staples of the cuisine are – green and red chillies, garlic, ginger, curry leaves, black and brown mustard seeds, yes fenugreek and some stranger ones such as asoefoetida (a seasoning), dried pomegranate seeds and mango powder and of course every kind of lentil (red, black, brown, yellow and green).  It’s all as easy to find as a carton of milk in Green Street and once you have the main spices at home you only need  get the fresh veggies and meat you fancy on the day. My favourite book of hers is Healthy Indian In Minutes that eliminates the acres of fat that comes with some Indian dishes without skimping on taste.

Today I made her  Methi Dal: lentil soup with fenugreek and tomato to zap my cold and Oh. My. God.  It was amazing.

Here is how I made it – had to adapt it a bit to what I had

Ingredients

220g spilt red lentils (handy as they don’t need soaking)

2 peppers, one red, one yellow, chopped into rough squares

4 onions, roughly chopped

1 head of garlic (about ten cloves)

2 tbsp grated ginger (Indian people tell me you grate it with the skin on as the skin contains nutrients)

t tbsp ghee (you can replace with sunflower oil)

1 tsp brown mustard seeds

1 tsp fenugreek seeds

1 tbsp veggie stock powder

large pinch asafoetida

1 tsp hot chilli powder1 teaspoon turmeric

4 ripe tomatoes chunkily chopped

salt to taste

handful fresh coriander chopped

1.  Start by putting the lentils, chopped onions, peppers, ginger, garlic and stock powder in a large deep pot and cover with boiled water.  Once it’s come to the boil, simmer it for 25 minutes.

2.  In another pan, heat the ghee or oil on a high heat, add the mustard seeds and wait for them to pop then add the fenugreek seeds, asafoetida, chilli powder and fry until the fenugreek seeds go a bit darker brown.

3.  Add the turmeric and tomatoes, season with salt and then cook, stirring for another 3-4 minutes until the tomatoes go soft.

4.  Pour the cooked lentil mixture into this and stir, add extra water if you want a soupier texture and season if it needs it.  Garnish with the fresh coriander.

Enjoy!

3.  REST

stuff the mess, the deadlines, the phone calls. Get thee to a sofa.

As the immune system kicks into action it releases substances called cytokines which cause the symptoms we experience when we catch colds – one of which is to feel sorry for ourselves.  It’s an evolutionary, survival thing; our bodies’ way of making us take care of ourselves and forcing us back to our caves to get better.  Another hard one for Type As to digest.  But what would you prefer, one day’s non-productivity or five, when you get sicker (now I just sound like your mum, right?)

4. TEA

No reason, it just makes me feel better.  Nothing fancy, just a good Builder’s brew – or ten.

5.  MIND-NUMBING DAYTIME TELLY

Forget the news, quiz shows or anything that exercises the mind.  Oprah or even TOWIE re-runs – the more mindless the better.  My guilty pleasure is old Jezza.

at the end of the day, yeh...

6.  DRUGS

Ok, not novocaine or heroin or even weed, we’re not in need of that kind of medicinal help.  But though docs have told me to let my symptoms out, I do need to take some of the OTC’s finest for the time I am not on the sofa, lest my coughing turn me into a miserable mess that makes other  people wish I would just go away.  For me, it used to be Lemsip all the way but I have this week discovered Beecham’s All-in-One cough medicine, it tastes like, well cough medicine – with a slight hint of white spirits actually – but by George it works (NOT on payroll, paid full price).

Oh and Berooca at OD levels.

Get well soon peeps.

Showing off now: Green tea’s CV just gets bigger and bigger

If ever there were an over-achieving drink, green tea must be it.  Its nutritional CV reads like a cure-all from the Merck manual: increases metabolism, might help fight heart disease, masses of antioxidants that help prevent free radical damage as you age and in one study, a general lowering of risk of death from all causes.

Now, a study released today in the Archives of Oral Biology  has found that the polyphenols (they’re the antioxidants) in green tea might not only help fight bad breath it might help stop healthy cells from transforming to cancer cells in the mouth (cases of oral cancer are on the rise in the UK).

I find green tea awfully bitter, with the eeky aftertaste increasing the cruder and cheaper the tea.  So not all green teas created equal.  My all-time favourite is Clipper Organic Fair Trade Green Tea with Lemon.  I promise I am not on the payroll but this is the only one I can fathom drinking enough of to make any difference to my health, which appears to be at least three but preferably five cups a day.

You on Twitter, Facebook et al

I love social media as much as the next woman but I have to admit that since becoming a moderate user, my brain has developed this weird head ping-pong. Every time I try and focus on say, writing a piece (or even a paragraph), something is pulling at my attention. Facebook. Twitter.  Email.  So I check it and check it and check it again, wasting ever more time and basically spend the day interrupting myself so I am often writing way into the night to meet my deadlines. What the bejaysus is happening?

Looking oh-so-productive but probably just nosing friends' photos on FB

In the last year Twitter’s users have increased by a gob-smacking 56 per cent to  (depending on who you believe) 175 million worldwide.   Anyone who currently tweets will admit, once you start, sharing your life in 140 characters is compulsive – so far so obvious.  But according to neurologist, Professor Gary Small, author of iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Human Mind  that’s the brain chemical dopamine at work.  ‘Dopamine governs the reward system in the brain,’ he says.   ‘It comes from the primitive part of the brain involved in any kind of addiction including cocaine.’  Each time you get someone mention, retweet, follow or friend you, your brain gets a little burst of reward – dopamine – that makes you want to post more and more.  The same principle, says Professor Small, is behind you checking your email every few seconds for something interesting.  ‘Take typical emails, FB posts or Tweets – nine out of ten are boring – but every tenth is interesting and gives you a quick buzz,’ he says.  ‘That stimulates dopamine which fires up the brain’s seeking system, one of its strongest, primal urges to go back for more and more.’  Fascinating, non?

That cringey Social Media Over-Sharing thing

Everyone knows that real-life wallflower who is a star in the Twittersphere. Researchers have found that shy, awkward people often become more socially adept through social media because they can refine and edit their profiles and how the world sees them, says Sherry Turkle, Professor of Social Studies of Science and technology at the University of Massachusetts and author of Alone Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from eachother.  [An aside, what is interesting about Turkle is that unlike other Twitter critics like Baroness Susan Greenfield who hardly use the medium, Turkle not only uses it she has written other books on the psychology of the net advocating it such as Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet  ]

Anyway – back to refining and editing our profiles which she says, can cause the rest of us to feel a pang of anxious jealousy at other people’s seemingly perfect on-line lives, something Turkle has coined ‘Fear of Missing Out’ or FOMO.  ‘It’s the increased anxiety resulting from constantly measuring ourselves against other people’s online lives,’ says Professor Turkle.  ‘It’s a hyped up version of keeping up with the Jones’s; that feeling that other people are living better and more interesting lives than us.  But it’s all performance.  They’re editing out the vulnerabilities and weaknesses that real friendships expose.  They’re not being themselves, they’re being their brand.’

‘High digital social media users are losing their face to face skills,’ says psychologist Dr Aric Sigman who published a paper called Well Connected in The Biologist claiming that for every hour spent online  we lose 30 minutes in face to face contact with family and friends.  ‘As a result, Britons spend just 50 minutes a day interacting socially with other people face-to-face and the number of people reporting they have no one to discuss important, deep issues with has tripled.’ Just yesterday, a drinking expert, Professor Jane McGregor at Nottinham University said that there is a theory going around public health circles about the rise in ‘preloading’ – that’s when you drink loads at home before going out – corresponding with the the rise in social media use and some researchers believe it’s because we all have so much more anxiety about the idea of facing one another in living, breathing forms that we need to get that little bit tipsy to handle it.

But then there is –  perversely –  this massive rise in over-sharing on line (am I wrong?). Think of those car-crash chronicles of friends’ breakdowns and divorces via long, stream-of-consciousness Facebook feeds posted at 3am (or is this just my friends?).  When I put this to Aric Sigman he said it’s because people now expect more support and connection from the on line world than it can ever possibly provide.  ‘That trivializes serious experiences and can lead to more isolation and anger because people need real warmth and face to face support not ‘likes’, he explains.  ‘When we see eachother and hug our friends, bonding chemicals such as oxytocin are produced that make us feel good,’ he says. It’s why your whole body feels like it’s smiling (despite a hangover) after a real-life – not virtual – night out with friends.  ‘People with more face to face social contact have stronger immune systems and live longer than others.’