well, I'm sick
And have been since Sunday. I should've known something was up when the smoke at the Black Cat and Sommer's party started to bother me. I'm usually of at least average hardiness when it comes to friends' cigarette fumes, but this time I was dying.
For once, I recognized my symptoms for what they were and immediately took countermeasures. My mom favors echinacea, but the male side of my family demands rigorous pseudo-scientific analyses that have been published in a respected journal, or at least on the back of an authoritative-looking cardboard box. So I started consuming zinc lozenges at a prodigious rate.
If you start taking it quickly enough, zinc gluconate is supposed to decrease the length of colds by, I don't know, ramping up your white blood cell production, or galvanizing them or something. They say they've got studies proving it works, but of course it's hard to judge from first-hand experience.
The initial results weren't promising. I was laid pretty low; my body shut down all non-essential processes — alertness, cleverness, interest in the Britney Spears divorce — leaving only those biological systems necessary for maintaining a steady stream of whining. But I think I'm getting better, or at least trading old symptoms for new ones — and by my standards it's happening relatively quickly, too. I don't think this is going to become my annual epic month-long illness (tentative arrival date: February).
Anyway, I'll heartily recommend the zinc drops, if only because they let you feel like you're doing something to improve things, instead of just wallowing in phlegm and misery. But there is a downside: you're supposed to suck on them, not swallow them. They don't taste particularly great, but they're bearable, particularly if you buy the brand-name version. But that's just priming you for the real unpleasantness, which comes when you eat anything else.
It's a little hard to describe the taste that results. The best I've been able to come up with is "hollandaise sauce made with rotten eggs and 9-volt batteries". It's like the experience a vulture must have when eating a cyborg's carcass.
Why the sudden, food-triggered onset? I have no idea. Maybe the change in flavor wakes up neurons that have grown inured to the original zinc drop. Maybe the acid in the food makes the zinc rust out of solution, producing a different and worse-tasting compound (chemistry nerds, help me out here). Whatever it is, it seems to be unavoidable, regardless of how much water and time you place between the lozenge and the food. It's the taste of wellness, and it's terrible.
Comments
"hollandaise sauce made with rotten eggs and 9-volt batteries". It's like the experience a vulture must have when eating a cyborg's carcass.
Smells like Futurism! A restaurant in Milan (I believe?) treats aesthetes/zinc fans with a menu based on concepts in the Futurist cookbook, featuring dishes such as chicken stuffed with steel ball bearings.
Oh, um, get well, too.
This is hardly a comprehensive literature search, but I quickly found an article that might interest you from the American Journal of Rhinology this summer. Quoting the abstract:
"BACKGROUND: The most frequent causes of upper respiratory infections are human rhinoviruses. The nasopharyngeal area, which includes the respiratory epithelium, mucosa, and the olfactory neuroepithelium (ONe), is a first-line of defense against airborne viruses and allergens, some of which manage to penetrate the nasal mucosa and invade the tissues of the nasal respiratory epithelium. Biochemical evidence from several studies suggests that zinc is an effective cold treatment and that over-the-counter (OTC) zinc-gluconate compounds may provide the high pharmacologic doses of zinc needed to act as an effective means of treating and reducing the duration and severity of symptoms of the common cold. METHODS: A series of male Sprague-Dawley rats were fed an oral preparation of zinc-gluconate trihydrate or received the equivalent through drinking water to investigate the potential cytotoxic and/or neurotoxic insult to the olfactory receptor cells and other tissue in the ONe and afferent neuronal pathways. RESULTS: Coronal sections of the rat ONe and corresponding olfactory bulbs showed consistent cellular and tissue damage of increasing severity that correlated with the duration of treatment with the zinc compound when compared with the control group animals. CONCLUSION: The results of this analysis indicate that the repeated oral administration of such zinc-containing compounds have neurotoxic effects on the ONe and to the mitral cells in the olfactory bulbs of treated rats. These findings point toward the need for increased investigation into the potential deleterious effects of zinc-containing compounds to humans as well.
Carboni et al., Am J Rhinol. 2006 May-Jun;20(3):262-8.
Well crap. You know, I know that anecdotal evidence shouldn't count for much, but my sense of smell *does* seem to be a little weak at the moment. I was complaining about the taste of the water in our new office watercooler the other day, and my coworker Tina agreed saying "yeah, it also smells pretty bad". I said I couldn't smell it because I was stuffed up from my cold.
But you know, I wasn't actually all that stuffed-up. And some simple sniffs of things around me seem to reveal a dampened sense of odor.
Still, I'm not too worried. I've taken zinc before and managed to get my sense of smell back. And I believe that cells in the olfactory system turn over at a pretty frequent rate (including the neurons in the olfactory bulb).
(of course, if the neurotoxic effects extend beyond the olfactory bulb that'd be, um, bad)
You do seem just *little* dumber every time I go home. Hmm...
So I shouldn't be trying zinc recreationally? One more legal, perception-altering drug down.