FOOD AND HEALTH Soup's healing powers

A 2000 study shows chicken soup's benefits may be more than folklore.
By JOAN REMINICK
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
Eduardo Pabon may not have a medical degree or a pharmacist's license, but he knows just what to prescribe for customers suffering from the sniffles.
"Everybody, in the winter, when they get colds, comes in to buy chicken soup," said the owner of Mi Tierrita, a Colombian restaurant with branches in Brentwood and Hempstead on Long Island. "It's better than Dimetapp."
With flu season here, the need for a steaming bowl of chicken soup has kettles boiling all over the place.
But can chicken soup really fight the flu? Cure a cold? Research published in 2000 by Dr. Stephen Rennard of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in the medical journal Chest validates what Granny has been saying all along.
"My wife was making chicken soup for the Jewish High Holidays and told me that her grandmother said it's good for you when you have a cold," Dr. Rennard said. Right then, he decided to subject chicken soup to laboratory tests to see whether that was actually true.
"When people get symptoms from a cold, it's not from a virus, but from the inflammation that virus causes," Dr. Rennard said. "There are many types of inflammatory cells; we only tested one type, called neutrophils." These cells stimulate the formation of mucus, the culprit in stuffy noses. "We wanted to see if chicken soup would have any effect on the neutrophils' ability to migrate in response to chemical signals," Dr. Rennard said. "What we found was that soup does inhibit that process."
Dr. Rennard and his team tested a homemade soup plus several commercial varieties. The results? A third of the commercial soups were found to be more effective than, but not as enjoyable as, the homemade version. The rest, with the exception of two soups that had no effect at all, were either less or equally effective. Hot water, which was also tested, had no effect.
Deli in demand
At Second Avenue Deli in Manhattan, nobody questions the power of the chicken soup sold there. "It's Jewish penicillin," said Terry Wachtel, the office manager. Wachtel said that not only does the demand for chicken soup rise during the cold-weather flu season, but the restaurant also runs a burgeoning soup-by-mail business. Parents send containers of the golden elixir to ailing sons and daughters at college. "We've even mailed soup to Alaska," she said.
Colleen Lonergan, manager of Republic, an Asian noodle restaurant in Union Square, N.Y., said she sees a "big jump in business, especially in delivery" as the weather chills and fevers go up. "Soups go from being sold at maybe 20 percent [of total sales] to 40 or 50 percent," she said. She depends on the restaurant's spicy coconut chicken soup to get relief from a cold.
What does it?
With all the evidence about the powers of chicken soup, nobody -- not even Dr. Rennard -- has been able to isolate the curative component. "The identity of the active ingredient or ingredients present in the soup remains unknown," Dr. Rennard wrote.
"It's mother love," said Adele Puhn, a nutritionist and author of several health and diet books, among them "Carb Careful Solution" (Penguin, 2003).
"A warm liquid is comforting," Puhn said. "It goes down easily, warms your insides and is reminiscent of childhood, of being taken care of."