Hi there. This is Monica Reinagel, the nutrition diva, here with your quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous.

Cold and flu season is upon us and I have a mission. I want to keep nutrition

diva listeners healthier this year. There's a lot of urban legends out there about

what you can do to prevent cold. So I'm going to devote the next two shows to sorting out fact from fiction and showing you the most effective things you can do to prevent colds.

Today's quick and dirty tip is that Vitamin C can actually help protect you, but you need to take it on an ongoing basis.

On the other hand, the popular immune booster echinacea works best if you don't take it every day.

And now back to our show.

Singers have a pathological fear of the common cold.

I mean, for most people, a scratchy throat or a horse voice,

well it's uncomfortable and it's inconvenient, but for us it can

be a major career disaster.

I've never known a singer who didn't have an elaborate protocol for warding off colds.

Turn a singer upside down in November and some

combination of zinc lozenges, echinacea capsules, vitamin C packets, and

saline nasal spray is sure to fall out of her pockets. But do any of these things actually

reduce your risk of getting sick?

Well, over the last 10 years, a lot of researchers

have been trying to figure out what works and what doesn't.

If you'd like to review the research yourself, I'll include some links in my show notes.

Believe it or not, we still don't have definitive answers on a lot of this stuff.

But here's what we do know.

Of all the nutrients that are rumored to prevent colds,

...