By Sarah Hanratty – Registered Nutritional Therapy Practitioner
Struggling with a cold is miserable for both children and their parents. Congested noses can make foods taste different leading to your child going off their usual diet. Coughing and spluttering can also affect your child’s appetite. You recognise that nutrition is important for a healthy immune response, but what foods should you offer a child wrestling with a cold?
During a cold, fluids become crucial, especially if you child has a mild fever. Their small bodies need to be well hydrated to replace the water lost whilst raising a temperature. Fluids can also help loosen the mucus that can cause congestion. Offer your child small sips of water throughout the day to meet their thirst. If your child isn’t keen on drinking water; continue to offer it but also consider offering high water content fruit and vegetables as easy snacks to hydrate them. Oranges, watermelon and cantaloupe melons have a high water content as do cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes. Peppers contain some of the highest amounts of vitamin C too, especially the green and red varieties.
As your child’s appetite could be low it may mean they are less keen on eating full meals. Offer your child small meals or snacks instead; do this regularly to keep blood sugar levels balanced. You can keep foods simple and easy to digest; rice, noodles, crackers and other simple starchy foods are good options.
However, if your child is happy to eat soup, homemade chicken soup is a nutritionally dense ‘meal’ for times of illness. Chicken soup contains number of elements to help your child through a cold. It is easy to absorb the nutrients from soup as it requires little effort to digest. Carnosine in chicken soup is a potent antioxidant and can provide support for the respiratory system; because of this chicken soup is useful at the first signs of a cold. It also helps give some symptomatic relief by calming the inflammatory pathways that are very active during a cold. You can also add more therapeutic ingredients to your soup to increase its immune boosting power. Garlic has anti-viral properties and adding it towards the end of cooking can preserve the allicin which is the component that helps fight viruses. Ginger and turmeric are also great additions to your homemade chicken soup.
Warm liquids can be soothing for a sore throat. Consider offering a cup of freshly grated ginger tea with lemon. If your child is over one year old, consider adding a small amount of manuka honey to this. Likewise, cocoa is rich in polyphenols that support the immune system; so, a rich hot chocolate drink, sweetened lightly could be beneficial too.
Supporting your child’s immune health reduces their susceptibility to colds and flu. A key to good immunity in the winter lies in adequate sun exposure in the summer months. The stores of vitamin D from summer help to keep your child well during winter when sun exposure is minimal. Ten minutes of sun exposure can provide thousands of micrograms of vitamin D that can be stored for future use. Food is a much poorer source of vitamin D, but some can be found in eggs, butter, milk and oily fish.