Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
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Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. There's Chuck and I'm Josh and Jerry's here too, sitting in for Dave. So this is short stuff.
That's right. Call it old wives tale edition because this is about feeding a cold and starving a fever, which is the old wives tale that when you have a cold, you should, and originally started out as stuff a cold, like eat as much as you can. And then if you have a fever, you should try and not eat very much at all.
Yeah, I think most people have heard that, right? That's a pretty widespread adage. Sure, yeah. Our friends at the Cleveland Clinic, not normally known for their etymology resources, but they traced this back, at least half of it, to 1574. There's a dictionary that was compiled by a guy named John Withalls. And Withell said that fasting is a great remedy of fever. So you've got the second part right there, starve a fever, right? It's as far back as anyone's traced it. Although, if you kind of want to expand your definition of what's being discussed here, you can trace it all the way back to Hippocrates, right?
Yeah, I'm not sure about this one. He said the most exquisitely slender diet you should have when the disease is very sharp. So I'm not quite sure what disease he's talking about there. So I'm not sure if that counts.
No, but I mean just that phrase, most exquisitely slender diet, sounds awesome. So I thought it was worth putting in there.
Yeah, for sure. If you look at the current use of the term, as we know and love it, it came about in the 18th century, pretty late in 18, well, I guess kind of mid. In 1853, that's when they were talking about feed and starve as far as cold and fever go.
What's weird, Chuck, is I saw that it was this whole adage that we that is like basically encouragement is taken as an encouragement or advice today was originally taken as like a warning that if you feed a cold, that cold will turn into a fever and then you'll have to starve the fever. Like and that the reason that it was ambiguous is because of that comma in the middle.
Yeah. You know, that is proof to me that people back then were dumb. Yeah.
A little bit.
I don't get that one, but sure.
OK. But well, what was the whole point? I mean, like if what was the idea that it was based on, I guess, then?
Yeah, I guess they were basing it on if you have a fever, then you don't want to eat hot food. I guess they didn't eat a lot of cold foods back then.
I guess not.
And if you're cold, you want to warm yourself up because there was only hot food available.
Sure. That was, I think, what they think the whole thing was based on. And regardless of how you slice it, though, how you take it as a warning or anything like that, it's pretty much... generally viewed as not good advice by the medical community today. I say we take a break and come back and talk about how this is not really good advice. How about that?
All right, let's do it.
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