Can you eat yogurt when you have cold?

When people get sick, they tend to reach for certain foods and cold remedies. Typically, these remedies and cold fighting foods are focused on delivering a healthy dose of vitamin C. Increasing your intake of vitamin C is a good first step towards fighting off colds and flu. Vitamin C is known to bolster your immune system and has lots of antioxidants that help to ward off sickness and disease. But there is another remedy that you might not have considered – yogurt.

Utilizing yogurt as a cold remedy may seem strange to you at first; It may even seem downright wrong. After all, yogurt is a dairy product, and dairy has been known to increase mucus production, which is something you typically want to avoid when you’re sick (dealing with a stuffy or runny nose is annoying enough without having to add to it). But it turns out that yogurt might actually be the perfect thing for you to eat to ward off sickness:

Yogurt contains probiotics.

It’s actually one of the best sources of probiotics available. Probiotics are helpful bacteria that actually improve your body’s health, especially your gut health.

Yogurt is a natural source of zinc

Zinc is an immune booster that has already been proven to reduce the duration of cold and flu symptoms.

Yogurt contains carbohydrates
Carbs are something you absolutely need when you’re sick because they provide your body with energy. It also reduces inflammation which is responsible for the symptoms you experience from a cold.

Although yogurt provides all of these nutrients, it may not provide a big enough dose to fully benefit from them. That means yogurt shouldn’t be your primary cold fighting solution, but used more as a supplement to bolster other treatments.