ELI5. Why is honey and lemon a popular cure for cold like symptoms. What makes lemon more effective than say an orange or lime?
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The question is really about why one thing is arbitrarily more popular than another, and the simple answer is that nobody knows. In the last chapter of “The Selfish Gene,” Richard Dawkins introduces the idea of the “meme” which he likened to a gene, and he proposed the idea that memes vary in their characteristics, and that they compete with each other for limited mental terrain in their human hosts. Successful memes survive and reproduce by being remembered and spreading from one mind to another, while unsuccessful memes don’t reproduce and die out (by being forgotten).
I’ll use this evolutionary lens to address OP’s question, but first I’ll state that I assume that it doesn’t matter which citrus you use, this cure doesn’t work IRL. So why do people think the lemon-based cure works, but we never hear about similar alternatives substituting another citrus? I would expect that the belief the cure works comes from (possibly skeptical) people who try it, feel better (which would have happened anyway), and misattribute it to the “cure.” Lemon would be the citrus because people probably have lemon in the house more often than other citrus. This would be simply because lemon is often added to tea and other beverages, and it’s a more common garnish for food. So people believe in the lemon cure simply because they are more likely to have tried it.
If we take a step back and get a little abstract, maybe the deeper answer is that the lemon cure is more universal, so maybe memes with a “universal” quality have a survival advantage over memes with a more idiosyncratic quality.
Fun question.
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