Zinc Nutrition for an Ear Infection - Fact or Fiction?
An ear infection can be very painful; it affects the middle year, the space between the ear drum and the inner ear in children, and it can be very common. You just need to type in "ear infection" into Google, to be inundated with information about dozens of home remedies and unlikely-sounding supplements and examples of preventive care. What else would you expect for an affliction that is said to affect three of four children at one time or another. It's garlic juice and colloidal silver all over the place. If you keep searching, you're bound to find that there is one thing that all home remedy websites agree on - that a good level of zinc nutrition, is a great way to prevent an ear infection. Now unlike the other "remedies", the recommendation that zinc could be the culprit, has an authentic ring to it. It even sounds scientific. Could your body's supply of zinc nutrition really have anything to do with recurrent ear infections? Let's look at what real scientists say.
There is a reason why zinc seems to show up as a remedy. It is a well known micronutrient, and as a way to fight the common cold, it has enjoyed a pretty long history with home remedy makers. Zinc nutrition has always been believed to help shore up the body's immune system, and if you do get a cold, with proper zinc nutrition, they say you'll probably see it off really easily. But that was then and this is now; modern scientific studies show that while zinc nutrition can simply not hurt you, there is little it can do for an ear infection, or any infection at all for that matter.
The research in question was put out in a scientific publication called the Cochrane Database. They say the study held 10 different kinds of research trials with children; one group was given a placebo of make-believe zinc nutrition supplements once a week for a whole month; the other group was given the actual stuff. And all said, they found that the group of children that got the real zinc never seemed any better off than the group that was playing around with the sugar pill placebos.
However there was one group of children that actually did see some ear infection benefits from zinc nutrition supplements - children who suffered from poor nutrition. When they got their zinc supplements, their middle your infection risk dramatically reduced. It's just that, in regular children, there is always enough zinc in their diets, and any more never does anything worthwhile. So what do doctors recommend anyway? Almost all ear infections that come from bacterial action, just don't need any particular treatment course; they just go away on their own. For most children, the best thing to do would be to just give them a touch of pain medicine, and see how it goes. If the infection doesn't seem to clear up in a couple of days, you'll probably be better off with the doctor and antibiotics, then with zinc nutrition supplements. The doctors just don't feel that it does anything worthwhile enough that you could need to test it on your poor child, suffering from an ear ache.