Puzzled by this for many years since I was young, I decided to finally ask this. My mother never allowed me to drink milk when I had colds, which was quite an annoying restriction since I love eating cereal for breakfast and we all know we need milk with cereal. When I asked her why, she said milk aids in the production of mucus. Not wishing to go against my mother’s beliefs, I agreed and avoided dairy products for a week.
But now, I’m curious when, watching my local news station some time ago, they were speaking about home remedy myths and everyone thought dairy = bad for colds. They didn’t explain why. So I’m asking this to you fellow Dopers to see if you heard about this too, and why I could never have good cereal and milk when I had colds
Just my (and my husband’s) experience, but I didn’t have the milk-mucus thing when I was a kid. I could drink milk without ever getting a slimy throat.
That changed in my late twenties. Now most dairy gives me an unpleasant coating of the throat. If I have a cold, I have an irritated throat anyway, and an additional irrating coating of mucus is then something to avoid.
Skimmed milk doesn’t pose nearly as much of a problem. I hated skimmed milk as a kid, thought it was a sad substitute for people on a diet. But now it’s the only dairy I like.
I’ve found that the off taste that milk gets when it’s been out of the fridge for a little while is more noticeable when I have a cold. I’m normally more sensitive than I think most people are to this taste (I can’t stand milk that’s been sitting out on the table for more than a couple of minutes), but I get sensitive to it on a molecular level when I have a cold.
I read it usually takes fifteen hours for an allergic reaction to dairy to take place so keep that in mind if you decide to gorge on concentrated dairy products to test its ability for mucous forming. I wouldn’t want you to die from suffocation.
Some are endemic in society and are almost impossible to eradicate (“They say…” and “Everyone knows that…”.
Some are endemic in families and are almost impossible to eradicate (“My mom told me…”). Many are begun inadvertently in schools. At the risk of starting something dangerous, I’ll list a few common misconceptions that have no significant evidentiary support:
Eating sugar causes people, and children in particular, to be hyperactive
Summer is warmer than winter partly because the earth is positioned slightly closer to the sun in the summer
The blood in our veins is blue; the blood in our arteries is red (remember the diagrams in our science books?)
A bathroom scale would be useless on the moon, since there is no gravity there.
We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.
Reading in dim light will ruin your eyes.
You need 8 glasses of water to stay healthy
shaving your legs causes the hair to grow back faster and coarser
eating turkey makes your drowsy
-getting your hair wet and sitting in a draft causes a person to catch a cold
The presence of this item in your list puzzles me, as in contrast to the others it seems quite obviously true.
The more accurate version would be that (setting water vapor to one side) we breathe in a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide and other trace gases, and breathe out much the same, with the percentage of oxygen a bit lower and that of carbon dioxide a bit higher.
Yes. The statement as it is, and as it is believed by most people, is so much a partial truth that it doesn’t qualify as truth at all. We breathe in air and we breathe out air. The air we breathe in has a bit less oxygen when we breathe it out, and a bit more carbon dioxide. But it’s air. Most people, when asked, “If it’s true that we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, why do we give mouth to mouth breathing to someone who’s collapsed?” stare in wonder.
Lots of replies. Thanks for all the info, although it’s sort of contradictory?
Well, not really. I believe telecommunications does have the upper hand. Coming from quite an allergic family, my sister has a horrid thing every cold: she gets mass mucus production, to the point where she’ll start suffocating. Sometimes, she has to carry around an inhaler and once, she choked for a few seconds. Guessing none of us should really drink milk with colds after all.
Darn, I thought I could start eating cereal with colds again
Tangentially related is the old wives’ tale that you shouldn’t drink milk when you have a fever. I never knew my spouse believed this until a few weeks ago when he wasn’t letting our feverish preschooler have any. Supposedly it will curdle in your stomach due to that extra few degrees F.
A different angle on why you shouldn’t drink milk if you have a cold: Should you be the type (like me) to drink directly from the jug, you’ll spread it to everyone else in the house…
Milk is supposed to curdle in your stomach. The acid in your stomach makes it curdle. In addition, protein-cleaving enzymes produced by the stomach aid this process. The curdling is a sign that the protein chains unfold, which makes them more susceptible to digestion.
Rennin, an enzyme from calf stomachs is traditionally used to make the milk curdle in cheese production (nowadays, it may be substituted by similar enzymes produced by microorganisms or recombinant rennin.
Oh no! If the fever curdles the milk, you’ll never digest it and it will sit in there for seven years along with that Bubble Yum you swallowed back in 2003.
