Note to Parents: Most ‘Home Remedies’ for Children’s Colds Don’t Work

Survey shows at least half of parents try vitamin C, zinc, and other methods that don’t have much impact on colds.

What’s better prevention for keeping your kids from catching a cold?

Vitamin C tablets or regular hand-washing?

And is echinacea a better cold treatment than a tall glass of water?

More than half of parents may be using non-evidence–based methods of helping prevent or treat their children’s colds, a new survey from the University of Michigan suggests.

Those methods included vitamin C supplements, echinacea, supplements marketed as “immune system boosters,” and zinc, among others, according to the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health shows.

The problem is that these methods don’t work.

“Zinc and vitamin C are the two items people most commonly seek out in the pharmacy area, but neither has solid, conclusive evidence that they prevent or reduce the severity of the common cold,” Brady McNulty, PharmD, an affiliate faculty member at Oregon Health Sciences University, told Healthline.

“Zinc, especially if taken in doses above the daily recommended allowance, has the chance to cause flu-like symptoms and alter someone’s ability to taste.”

In addition to these methods, around 70 percent of parents used “folklore strategies” to try to prevent their children from catching a cold.

That included everything from preventing their kids from going outside in winter with wet hair (52 percent) as well as keeping them indoors (48 percent) to stave off a bug.

“It’s important for parents to understand which cold prevention strategies are evidence-based,” Dr. Gary Freed, MPH, co-director of the poll and a pediatrician at Mott, wrote in a university press release. “While some methods are very effective in preventing children from catching the cold, others have not been shown to actually make any difference.”