Yes, We Do Eat More Soup When We’re Sick
Grandma always told you that chicken soup would cure your cold. You listened.
Analysts for the online food delivery service Grubhub noticed that soup orders seemed to be spiking at odd intervals during the winter. Upon further examination, the soup surge couldn’t be explained just by cold weather.
Acting on a hunch, Grubhub turned to another rhymingly-named online ordering system, ZocDoc. ZocDoc allows people to book doctor’s visits online. When the two companies matched their data, they found that people ordered the most soup when the most people were sick.
Specifically, about 80 percent of the variation in soup ordering matched the variation in the percentage of doctor’s visits for cold and flu symptoms.
We can’t be sure that the synchronization of illness and soup orders means that the ill are ordering soup — you could say that soups somehow cause colds, or it could be pure coincidence. But we feel pretty confident that the relationship can be explained by people seeking a home remedy for their illness.
The soup-as-medicine myth has been around probably as long as there have been grandmothers and soup. But unlike a lot of prehistoric medical advice, it actually seems to hold up. There aren’t as many randomized controlled trials of soup and other remedies as medical experts might prefer, but there are a few studies that suggest that soup — particularly the homemade variety — does seem to reduce cold symptoms and boost the immune system more than cold water or hot water alone.
One 2000 study in the journal Chest even included a chicken soup recipe. My colleague Aaron Carroll and his co-author Rachel Vreeman have written two books about medical myths. The soup cure was one of the only ones that checked out, he said.
Even if soup doesn’t directly fight illness, doctors have some good reasons for recommending it. Steam can help relieve sinus inflammation and soothe the throat. Salty liquids can help with hydration.
I spoke to a couple of self-identified foodie doctors. All of them started with the usual caveats that soup isn’t a proven medicine. But they quickly moved on to suggesting their favorite recipes. Michelle Hauser, a researcher and primary care doctor in California who is also a Cordon Bleu-trained chef, said sickness is a great excuse to eat something salty and delicious. She recommends spicy soup if you can stand it, the better to clear your sinuses. And if you’re feeling too weak to stand for long, she has a recipe for a garlic herb broth that even the ill can make themselves. “I like that kind of broth if you’re feeling really bad,” she said. “It’s really nourishing and soothing.”
Kathy Hughes, a surgeon in Massachusetts, loves the usual chicken noodle soup (she boils the leftover bones and skins from a rotisserie chicken for a roasted flavor) and strains her broth using sterile laparotomy cloths. Robert Smalley, a medical student, thinks the sick need the energy from easily digestible carbohydrates in noodles: He suggests takeout ramen or pho.
We asked the team at Grubhub to measure the correlations between doctor’s visits and individual types of soups. The biggest winners were the chicken varieties — chicken noodle, chicken rice, even chicken tortilla. People also order a lot of gumbo, wonton and lentil soups, but apparently not when they are sick.
If all this talk of soup and its virtues makes you crave some, our colleagues in Cooking are here to help. Takeout isn’t the only way to get yourself a hot bowl of soup when you’re under the weather. Here are a few of their suggested recipes if you’d like to soothe a sick friend or stock up for the next cold.
