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ART GIACALONE IS A CONVERT. A FEW weeks ago the 45-year-old San Francisco psychologist came down with a sore throat. He sensed the mother of all colds coming around the bend, a viral freight train bearing down on his immune system. Ordinarily Giacalone would have resigned himself to a miserable week of gargling with salt water and waiting it out. But at a friend's suggestion, he began taking lozenges containing the mineral zinc, dissolving one in his mouth every two hours or so. "My symptoms went away almost immediately," he recalled, scanning a zinc display during a recent visit to New York. "The lozenges were very effective."
Effective or not, zinc-based lozenges are the trendiest cold remedy this season. The mineral has long been touted as a cold quasher by alternative-medicine types. But when a heavily publicized study by the mainstream Cleveland Clinic reported last summer that people who took the lozenges appeared to beat colds faster, the remedy was placed squarely before the runny noses of the general public. "It took off like a rocket," says Charles Phillips, chief operating officer of the Quigley Corp., which manufactures Cold-Eeze, the brand of lozenge used in the Cleveland study. The company had sales of about $500,000 two years ago. This year it's on a pace to break $16 million. Tsewang Sherpa, general manager of the Healthy Pleasures store in New York's Greenwich Village, carries a half-dozen varieties of zinc lozenges, which cost about $5 to $7 for a box of 50. He says publicity surrounding the Cleveland study has tripled his sales. "Zinc lozenges have been popular for a while among people who are into an alternative way of treating themselves," he says. "Since these articles came out, everybody has started coming in."
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But does it really work? Not for sure. The Cleveland study found that people who began taking the zinc lozenges within 24 hours of coming down with a cold recovered about three days sooner than those who took a placebo. Past research, though, has been more equivocal, with several studies showing no effect. "I think it's still not conclusive [that zinc works]," says Dr. Dominick Iacuzio, a flu-and-cold specialist with the National Institutes of Health in Maryland. But the promise of something that just might banish the brutal virus can be hard to ignore, even for hardened scientific types. "Some people who probably wouldn't admit to it are coming up to me and saying, "You know, I'm trying that stuff'," says Iacuzio.
As long as experimenters keep their doses within reason (maybe 60 mg a day), there's probably no harm in giving zinc a shot. The mineral, which is found in protein-rich foods like meat and fish, is essential to nearly every cellular function. A zinc overload, however, can interfere with the body's ability to absorb copper, which can lead to a weakened immune system, among other woes. The medical consensus for now is that a handful of lozenges a day for a few days is probably safe but that prolonged use could throw your body out of whack. Eager gobblers should also bear in mind that some subjects of the Cleveland Clinic study reported experiencing nausea while taking zinc. So don't pour out the chicken soup just yet.
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