Why are we told that cold weather or beverages can cause sickness when sickness is caused by bacteria or viruses.
In: Biology
In addition to what others have said, cold weather can increase the chances you get a cold or other illness because it stresses the body and depresses the immune system slightly. It used to be conventional wisdom that going out in the cold without proper protection would cause a cold—everyone’s mother said so. Then researchers around 1980s did some studies and found this wasn’t true—they exposed people to the cold for a short while and also to the cold virus, and they didn’t get any sicker than the control group. So then cold doesn’t cause colds became the rule. But then later scientists did further studies in which the person was exposed to cold in a way that was more stressful to the body, and they did find that such people got sick more than the control group.
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