Watch it on Facebook. Watch it on YouTube.

Last time we talked about supporting zinc nutritional status. Today we talk about how to kill a cold with zinc. Believe it or not, the principles are completely different. Your oysters can help you get sick lest often. But knowing how to find the right zinc lozenge and use it correctly is your secret weapon to stop a cold dead in its tracks when it eventually comes.

Transcript

If you hate getting colds and just want to be done with them forever, then this video is for you.

Hi. I’m Dr. Chris Masterjohn of chrismasterjohnphd.com, and you’re watching Chris Masterjohn Lite where the name of the game is Details? Shmeetails.

Just tell me what works! And today we’re going to talk about how to kill a cold with zinc. Now there’s a really important distinction between what we’re talking about today and what we talked about last time. Last time we talked about how to get enough zinc in your food and why you should sometimes take a supplement. One of the things that’s a little confusing is that nutritional zinc status, the zinc in your food and supplements, does support your immune system. And if you don’t get enough zinc, you will get colds more often and your colds will probably be worse.

However, the limit to the ability of oral zinc, swallowing zinc, to prevent colds is the limit to which you need zinc to support your immune system. You can go beyond that limit and actually stop a cold dead in its tracks and kill the cold with zinc. But the zinc has to be a lozenge that slowly dissolves in your mouth. Over the course of the slow dissolving of the zinc in your mouth, zinc releases into the nasal cavity and into the throat and prevents cold viruses from attaching to your cells and infecting them. Now because it works on the initial infection stage, that stage is the first two or three days of your cold, that means that you need to start using the lozenges as soon as possible or it’s not going to be effective.

If you’ve been sick for two days, you may get some benefit from it. If you’ve been sick for three days, you’re probably not going to get any benefit at all. So you need to start using the lozenges at the first sign of a cold. They need to be big enough that they are going to take 20 to 30 minutes to dissolve in your mouth.

The only forms of zinc that are effective are zinc acetate and zinc gluconate. If it’s any other form, it’s useless. But acetate is twice as effective as gluconate, so yeah you’ll get some benefit from something like Cold-Eeze, which supplies zinc gluconate, but you’re going to get twice the benefit if you use something that supplies zinc acetate. It’s got to have a lot of zinc in the lozenge. If it’s taking 20 to 30 minutes to dissolve in your mouth, you want 15, 18, 20 milligrams of zinc in there to be able to be effective.

Finally, a lot of zinc lozenges add things to get rid of the metallic taste and to get rid of the fact that it dries out your mouth. It has to have at least a slightly
metallic taste to it. It has to at least dry out your mouth a little bit. I know that kind of sucks, but it doesn’t suck anywhere near as much as getting a cold.

And you can look at the ingredients to see whether they’re trying to manipulate the taste in that way. If you see any kind of food acids, any kind of small organic acids, such as citrate or citric acid or probably malate or malic acid or something like that. That’s to cover up the flavor and it’s going to prevent the lozenge from working. So the one that I recommend is Life Extension Enhanced Zinc Acetate Lozenges. It’s really important to note that Life Extension makes a different one.

It should say enhanced zinc lozenge, check it and make sure that it’s all zinc acetate. If you look at the ingredients you can see that it’s zinc acetate. There’s 19 milligrams of zinc in there that’s the right kind, that’s the right amount. If you look in the ingredients, you will see stearic acid and vegetable stearate. Vegetable stearate is probably code for magnesium stearate. A lot of people want to avoid that in their supplements. I’m not going to get into that debate, but it’s not going to inhibit the efficacy of the supplement. The only way, stearic acid is a fatty acid, the only way that those are going to bind to the zinc is if the lozenge is baked at high heat. And you can tell when it’s been baked at high heat because it’s going to look like a piece of candy. It’s going to be glossy.

All right so I’m going to do a test for you right here. For these lozenges to work on a theoretical level, they should take 20 to 30 minutes to dissolve in my mouth and if I had a cold, I’d have to take them every two hours. This is the lozenge. You can see that it’s not baked like candy. And you can see it’s pretty big.

So let’s see how long it takes to dissolve in my mouth. Hmm, hmm, hmm. I really don’t know what I got myself into.

So it’s almost gone and it’s been 29 minutes. Clearly this fits the bill for something that takes 20 to 30 minutes to dissolve in your mouth. It’s really important to get that contact time and to retake the lozenge every two hours or so to maintain sufficient concentrations of zinc in your nose and throat to prevent the cold virus from docking there. Now because it’s being directed towards your nose and throat, it’s not going to interfere with copper absorption in the intestines as much. However, clearly you’re swallowing some proportion of that zinc. The amount of zinc you’d take through three days of taking these lozenges every two hours to kill a cold, is going to be quite a lot. So I think that while you’re taking it, it’s not a bad idea to take 2, 4 maybe 6 milligrams of copper per day just to protect against the possibility of zinc causing a copper deficiency.

But then as soon as you’re done taking the lozenges, stop the copper supplementation as well. Now this was the details shmeetails. If you want the details details listen to my podcast, Zinc Definitely Fights Colds, But You’re Probably Using the Wrong Kind, at chrismasterjohnphd.com/30.

Alright, I hope you found this useful.

Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of chrismasterjohnphd.com. You’ve been watching Chris Masterjohn Lite. And I will see you in the next video.