Onions, onions the magical flu food
Colorado Springs — "Onions are the answer" is the birdshot splattered around the world via the modern carrier pigeons of e-mail. The story goes, at e-mail IQ level, that a country doctor in 1918 was amazed by the health of his patients, as well as their old wives, including their old wives' tales.
The tale in question is that during the Great Pandemic of 1918-1919 people placed sliced onions near ill patients, and the patients recovered! The poor onion turned black, but the sick were cured. The country doctor examined the onion beneath his handy microcope, and lo and behold, his eyes filled with tears, not because onions make you cry, but because the onion was chock full of the flu virus!
Isn't that an amazing story? The sober reality, however, is that in 1918-1919, people didn't really know about viruses, let alone country doctors. Okay, people knew about country doctors, but sadly country doctors didn't know about flu viruses. Not even city-slicker doctors knew a lick about 'em.
The notion that influenza was caused by a filterable virus was a new thought, twinkling in the minds of only a few upper-echelon scientists. It would be many years after the last sputtering deaths of 1918-1919 passed into a memory most people would actively choose to forget, that scientists would return to the possibility of a virus as the instigator of influenza.
All the great minds of the times were looking for a special bacteria, a mysterious bacteria they called "bacillus influenzae," or "Pfeiffer's bacillus," after Dr. Richard Pfeiffer who discovered, via the simple microscope of the time, a sneaky little bacteria that seemed to be present whenever the killer flu was diagnosed.
Time told the tale differently of course, as the flu is not caused by bacteria, even though it would almost appear that the influenza virus purposefully opens the door and rings the come-and-get-it triangle for all good little bacteria to line up and enter the human host. Human, it's what's for dinner.
Another simple fact that unravels the twisted tangles of the magical onion ring myth is that the microscopes of the day in 1918 were in no way powerful enough to even see a virus.
As most sensational Internet e-mails prove (remember the classic booby prize attempting to prove that butter is healthier than margarine?), most are sent out as gags, or at best as the well-intentioned produce of relatives and office associates (pass this along to seven people and Microsoft will send you a crate of onions that cures the flu).
But onions, a flu cure?
There might be a little glimmer of truth in the Magical Onions (not to be confused with Magic Mushrooms) stories and tall tales; however, it is not the sliced onion standing in the room (right next to that ever-silent elephant wearing the pig mask) that will prove beneficial, but the onions that you consume. Get them inside of you.
Onions are rich in sulfides, sulfoxides and thiosulfinates which have antimicrobial properties, and are full of Vitamin C and provide healthy fiber. In short, onions are good for you. Add raw onions to salads, including yellow sweet onions and bioflavonoid-rich red onions, and extra-acidic white onions, or boil them into onion soups. Onions are delicious and healthy and one of the best defenses against influenza-induced asthmatic complications.
Asthma sufferers may also benefit from a hearty dose of onions. Researchers discovered a sulfur compound contained in onions that can prevent the biochemical chain reaction that leads to asthma attacks.
Onions, along with garlic, ginger, oregano, and elderberries, have been used by country doctors, wise women, early physicians, and far back into the folklore of the ages, to treat asthma, cold, flu, and other respiratory ailments. Think about it, that is why ginger is hugely popular around Christmas. Those gingerbread boys could be your first line of defense.
Chances are, grandma and great grandma knew a lot more about onions and the benefits of eating onions than do us modern fast-food, fast-medicine space-age wise guys.
The Sulfurous Miasma.
Possibly there is more to the onion folklore than first thought. At least more than I first gave the folk tale credit. Sure, the 1918-1919 Onion E-mail was a hoax, simply because no country doctor would scrutinize an onion with a microscope and discover flu viruses; however, this hoax could in fact be based on the very real sulfurous content of onions, and the fragrance onions produce when sliced or crushed.
Most of the folklore, such as that cited at Snopes.com, imagines the onion sucking in the viruses and bacteria, or filtering the very air. There is no evidence that points that this could be a real phenomenon involving sliced onions; however, there is usually some truth buried in the most cherished old wives' tales.
Perhaps it is not what the onions pulls in, but what it puts out.
Sulfur.
There very well could be truth in the folklore that in 1918-1919 farm folk sliced onions and distributed plates of the sulfur-producing vegetables throughout their homes, and perhaps this induced miasma is not a complementary atmosphere for influenza virus. And most likely the farmer folk would not have understood how it was happening, this miraculous curative, only that it was happening, and the phenomenon was real.
Try it yourself. Place plates of sliced onions around your house. It is not hard to guess what happens. And it is not an expensive experiment. Your house very soon smells like onions.
Studies have proven that humidity inhibits the flu, as airborne travel is influenza's primary route of infection. The combination of sliced onions and hot-steam vaporizers could prove to be a very inexpensive way of inhibiting the passage and transfer of the h1n1 Swine Flu virus.
Try this with your hot-steam vaporizer. In the small dish beneath the steam spout, where normally you would tuck a wad of Vicks Vaporub, instead pack in several pieces of diced onion. Stack them up, ensuring that the steam touches the diced onions.
In the morning, you will discover that the diced onions, plump and juicy the night before, are now with the depletion of the water stored in the hot-steam vaporizer, tiny, shirveled dry bits that look more like clipped fingernails than any form of vegetable.
Citizens of rural outbacks especially found themselves relying on folk remedies to fend off or cure the flu. Tales abounded of mothers insisting that their children stuff salt up their noses and wear goose grease poultices or bags of garlic-scented gum around their necks. For some, onions were looked upon as a potential savior. A Pennsylvania woman boasted of serving up onion omelets, onion salads, and onion soup with every meal. Not one of her eight children contracted the flu. Meanwhile, a four-year-old girl from Portland, Oregon was said to have recovered fully from the flu after her mother dosed her with onion syrup and buried her from head-to-toe for three days in glistening raw onions. Those with an aversion to onions swore by a shoveful of hot coals sprinkled with sulfur or brown sugar, which enveloped every room in a noxious blue-green smoke. While evidence that any of these measures had any positive effect was anecdotal, they were in keeping with the belief that doing anything to fend off influenza was better than sitting idly by, waiting to become a statistic.
Note, there is no cure for the flu virus, to any flu virus, there is no magic bullet (and note, as well, that the hyped h1n1 flu vaccine is not a magic bullet, either, and there is absolutely no proof that the government-vaunted flu innoculation will protect you or your family from the Swine Flu).
Perhaps those old wives knew more than we are willing to give them credit.
Onions, eat 'em up, yum.
