评论
打印
There's certainly no shortage of advice out there about what you should do when you're sick.
关于生病时该怎么做的建议有非常多。
And if you've ever asked your grandparents for their tried-and-true remedies,
如果你问祖父母他们尝试过的方法
or you've been up at 2 AM Googling "how to cure a cold," you might have stumbled upon this popular nugget of wisdom:
或是凌晨两点上网谷歌搜索‘如何治疗感冒’的话，或许你会发现这条至理名言：
You should feed a cold, but starve a fever.
伤风宜吃, 发烧宜饿。
It kinda sounds like something Ben Franklin would've said, but it's actually much older than that.
听起来像是本杰明·富兰克林那个时代会说的话，但其实比那更久远。
And even though it's an old saying that's somewhat scoffed at nowadays, there might be some truth to it.
现在这句老话听起来或许有点可笑，但是还是有些道理的。
We're not sure when the idea started, but people have associated cold symptoms with being cold for a long time.
我们不确定这种说法源于何时，但人们很早以前就将感冒症状和寒冷联系在了一起。
So over two thousand years ago when the so-called Father of Medicine, Hippocrates,
因此两千年前，所谓的医药之父希波克拉底
noted that eating raises a person's body temperature, a treatment naturally emerged.
发现进食可以增加人类身体温度，一种治疗方法自然而言衍生出来了。
Since colds were thought to be similar to or literally stem from being cold,
既然感冒被认为类似于/或源自于寒冷，
it seemed only logical that warming yourself up with some extra food would help.
那么似乎吃点东西让自己暖和起来可以帮助缓解感冒似乎符合逻辑。
And in turn, since your body is too hot during a fever, eating less could theoretically cool things down.
反过来，既然发烧的时候，体温已经太高了，那么少吃一点理论上可以降温。
And lo, an adage was born—and it's stuck around for centuries,
然后这个至理名言就诞生了—并且流传几个世纪，
perhaps because it's simple and cheap advice that doesn't require any bloodletting, leeches, or copays.
或许是因为这是个简单又便宜的建议，不需要流血、用水蛭吸血或是花钱。
You can find it in medieval medical texts, and when fevers and colds reached epidemic levels in nineteenth century England, it was the remedy of choice.
你可以在中世纪医学文献中看到这条名言，十九世纪在英格兰，当发烧和感冒达到了传染级别，这成了一种急救选择。
This advice wasn't just popular in Europe, either.
这条建议不仅在欧洲流行。
There's a similar proverb from India that also recommends fasting when you're sick.
印度也有类似的言语，建议生病时禁食。
But it seems like in all that time, nobody really tested the idea.
但似乎这么长时间以来，没人真正对这种想法进行过测验。
It wasn't until 1942 that the validity of "feeding a cold, starving a fever" was formally questioned.
直到1942年才对“伤风宜吃, 发烧宜饿”的真实性提出质疑。
And while the author of that paper didn't do any new science, he did at least ponder things deliberately to arrive at his "Ehh, sounds good to me" conclusion.
那篇论文的作者没有做任何新的科学，至少他慎重思考得出了“听起来不错”的结论。
To his credit, at the time, doctors still didn't know exactly what caused colds—
那个时候，医生仍然不知道是什么引起感冒—
rhinoviruses, the viruses responsible for the majority of colds, were first identified in the 1950s.
鼻病毒，绝大部分感冒都是由这种病毒引起的，这种说法在上世纪50年代得到证实。
And they didn't know nearly as much about fevers as we do today.
关于发烧，他们知道的也不如我们现在知道的多。
But even without all that info, he wasn't wrong. "Feed a cold" isn't terrible advice.
但是即便不知道所有信息，他也没错。“伤风宜吃”并不是条糟糕的建议。
Like all the cells in your body, your immune cells need fuel to survive, let alone fight infections.
和你身体的所有细胞一样，你的免疫细胞需要燃料生存，更别提还要对抗感染了。
And studies have found that your energy needs increase when you're ill,
研究发现生病时，需要增加能量，
so it kinda makes intuitive sense that you'd need to increase food intake to account for that.
这也是有自身道理的，你需要摄入食物才能增加能量。
And eating when you're sick might do more than provide extra fuel.
生病时吃东西或许比提供额外能量更有效。
A 2002 study tested volunteers' blood before and after a 1200 calorie liquid meal and found eating increased the production of interferon gamma.
2002年的研究让志愿者摄入1200卡路里的液体食物，并在进食前后进行验血，他们发现干扰素伽马增加了。
That's a cellular signal that boosts a kind of immune response called cell-mediated immunity,
那是一种细胞信号，促进细胞介导免疫的免疫反应，
which is especially good at attacking cells infected with pathogens, like those harboring viruses.
这对攻击感染病原体，比如潜伏病毒的细胞尤为有效。
But more surprisingly, starving a fever might not be terrible advice, either.
更让人惊奇的是，发烧宜饿也没错。
That's because studies have found that reducing calorie intake or basically not eating at all
这是因为研究发现减少卡路里摄入或是禁食
alters the immune system in ways that might actually help you fight off fever-causing infections.
可以改变免疫系统帮助你抗击引起发烧的传染。
When people are really sick, they often don't feel like eating, and some scientists now think that loss of appetite is beneficial.
真的生病的时候，经常会没胃口，一些科学家认为食欲不振是有益的。
A review paper from 1997 concluded that fasting during an infection
1997年的综述论文终结到染病期间禁食
can actually help the body fight it off, in spite of the whole calories-needed-for-cells thing.
可以帮助身体抗击病毒，尽管有那些细胞需要卡路里的说法。
And that 2002 study found that subjects given water instead of food produced more of a different cellular signal, interleukin-4.
2002年的研究发现用喝水代替食物可以产生更多不同细胞信号—白介素-4。
It helps activate a different kind of immune response called humoral immunity,
它帮助刺激不同种类的免疫反应—体液免疫
which is especially good against pathogens that can be detected more directly, such as bacteria.
对抗病原体尤其有效，可以更加直接的检测到细菌。
Fasting has also been shown to increase the body's resistance to stress and toxins, like the ones produced by some bacteria.
禁食也可以增加身体对压力和毒素的抵抗力，比如一些细菌产生的毒素。
And ultimately, that may mean that whether you should eat more or less when sick may depend on what you're infected with—
最后，这或许意味着生病时是应该多吃还是少吃，这取决于你感染的是什么—
which kind of lines up with the whole feed colds but starve fevers thing.
伤风宜吃, 发烧宜饿，和你感染的病毒相关。
This has even been shown directly in a 2016 study in mice.
这一想法在2016年的老鼠试验中有所表现。
Researchers found that extra food helped the mice fight the flu virus, but it made a bacterial infection much worse.
研究人员发现额外食物帮助老鼠抗击流感病毒，但却使细菌感染恶化。
So if you think of "colds" as referring to viral infections and "fevers" as bacterial infections,
所以如果你认为“感冒”指的是病毒性感染，“发烧”是细菌感染，
then the whole "feed a cold, starve a fever" thing actually kind of works—at least for mice.
那么“伤风宜吃, 发烧宜饿”这种说法是有效的—至少对老鼠是有用的。
Similar studies would need to be done in people and on lots of different viruses and bacteria to see if the pattern holds.
需要对人类进行类似研究，也应对更多不同病毒和细菌进行测试已确认这种说法是否站得住脚。
And there's another catch: a high fever is a classic symptom of the flu virus,
还有一种：高烧是流感病毒典型的症状，
and you can even sometimes get fevers from cold viruses, which kind of muddies things up a bit.
甚至有时会因感冒病毒而导致发烧，这使得这种说法更加混乱了。
"Feed a cold, starve a fever, unless it's from a cold," starts to get confusing real fast.
“伤风宜吃, 发烧宜饿，除非是感冒病毒，”，让人晕头转向。
And good advice is even tougher to make pithy because no matter what you're sick with, doctors say you need to stay hydrated.
好消息是即便提炼好建议很难，但不论你是哪种感染，医生都会说你需要保持身体的水份。
So maybe it should be "Feed a cold, starve a fever, unless it's from a cold, and drink lots of fluids either way."
所以或许应该说是“伤风宜吃, 发烧宜饿，除非是感冒病毒，还有不管怎样，都要多喝水”。
But that just doesn't roll off the tongue the same way.
但是这样也很拗口。
Unfortunately, it seems like there isn't really a simple saying that covers the complexities of the human body.
不幸的是，似乎没有一种简单的说法能够涵盖人体的复杂性。
But the fact that eating more or less may both be helpful at times does explain why "feed a cold, starve a fever" has stood the test of time—
但事实上，吃多吃少或许都有帮助，这种说法可以解释为什么“伤风宜吃, 发烧宜饿”经受住了时间的考验—
even if it's not the most perfect medical advice.
即便这并非最完美的医学建议。
Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow! If you liked learning about how this old saying might actually be right,
感谢收看本期《科学秀》！如果你想了解这种老话到底对不对，
you might like our episode about 6 popular home remedies that aren't all that awesome for you.
你应该会喜欢我们的节目《6种并没啥效果的流行家庭疗法》。
