Occasional reminder that Cold-Eeze was produced by the father of my best friend across the street’s company that my dad did legal stuff for, and as a result I’ve read a bunch of Cleveland Clinic studies (before the internet, I had to read whatever was around) and by all impressions it does prophylactically prevent colds and if taken at the initial appearance of symptoms will make them milder

The discoverer thought it was some woo-woo New Age thing but as far as we could figure zinc ions bind to sites on the mucus membrane that cold viruses would otherwise use to penetrate

With the caveats that

• Zinc tastes terrible and it was only their patented “ZIGG” formulation – zinc gluconate glycine – that would bind to flavorings but then come loose as ions
• The obvious next step was zinc nasal sprays but those will permanently destroy like 3% of users’ senses of smell