Cold & flu Prevention tactics
Wednesday, December 8, 2010 at 3:16PM 
Prevention tactics
Why suffer during the Christmas season? Especially when a few wise moves could see you through the cold snap. Here are some of the best cold war-winning tips we could find.
Immune-boosting breakfast
Studies from the Netherlands found that eating big and eating early increased blood levels of antiviral agents, by 450 percent! Aim for 1,200 calories every morning until your cold symptoms disappear by tucking into cereal with milk, orange juice, toasted muffins with peanut butter and a fruit smoothie.
Put the kettle on
Swap your afternoon coffee for a caffeine-toting cold buster: green tea. When Canadian researchers added green tea to lab samples of the adenovirus (one of the bugs responsible for colds), they found that it stopped the virus from replicating.
Get some of shut-eye
US research shows that, if the amount of sleep you have drops by 40 percent or more (for instance, you sleep 4 hours instead of the usual 7), the effectiveness of your immune system will decline by 50 percent.
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