Contrary to popular belief, (and this column) this old saw has nothing to do with food. It dates from a time when everyone used fire for heat. You FEED a fire by giving it fuel, or STARVE a fire by withholding fuel. These were terms in everyday use.
In the Common Cold context, You Starve a Cold by staying warm by covering up, and Feed a Fever also by covering up. Before anti-biotics, fevers were used as a natural tool to kill viruses and other infectious agents by raising body heat to the point were they died. Unfortunately, there is a fine line between killing the infection and killing the patient. But as cold viruses can only exist within a narrow temperature range, this usually works just fine.
Welcome to the SDMB, Rush.
A link to the column you’re commenting on is appreciated. Providing one can be as simple as pasting the URL into your post, being sure to leave a blank space on either side of it. Like so: Is it "feed a cold, starve a fever" or vice versa? And should you? - The Straight Dope
Do you have any reliable references for this interpretation?
Wait a minute; starving and feeding are the same thing?
No, but “starving” a cold involves heat to remove the chill, and “feeding” a fever involves heat to raise the temperature further.
Powers &8^]
But that is contrary to the OP’s claim about the origin of the term:
So how is covering up withholding fuel?
Well, it’s a “cold” see, so you are starving it of the cold it needs to continue sickifying you.
Or soemthing like that.
To “starve” is to withhold something required for sustenance. But cold is not in itself “something”, it is the absence of heat. Heat is produced by fuel. You cannot withhold the absence of heat, without adding fuel. Therefore, you cannot starve a cold by withholding anything.
perhaps the old wives didn’t know that.
Silly, silly folklore!
Give a cold a bath, and ridicule a fever.
Whoosh.
Yes, also negative numbers are a fallacy of logic.
I think it has to do with food. If you’ve got the flu and a bad fever, your appetite really takes a hit. Now, I find that eating makes me feel better, but I think the saying is just proposing that it’s ok not to.
If it was just a pun telling you to stay warm, I don’t think it would’ve been repeated that often. It’s not even witty.
P.S. the ‘traditional’ phrase is to “feed a cold, and starve a fever.”
See, we can’t even seem to agree what the saying actually is.
I’m sure it is “feed a fever”, because of the aliteration.
I always assumed that this was linked to the old-fashioned meaning of the word “starve”. Like very many English words, it has shifted meaning, and many old words, like “want” and even “rape” no longer have the same meaning.
“Want” formerly meant “need”, not “desire” - so wilful waste means woeful want. The Roman Rape of the Sabine Women, or Pope’s poem “the Rape of the Lock”, implied a carrying off by force, but not necessarily sexual assault.
“Starve” used to mean “die”, rather than the modern sense of “die from not eating”. I took it that it was some meaning like “feed a cold, to kill a fever”. However, that may be stretching it.