Kiddos 5 and 7 are a bastion of germs. Really hoping to head to WDW sniffle-free. I plan to give daily teaspoon-fulls of elderberry syrup in the week or two prior to trip, wash hands upon returning home from school and avoid obviously sick kids, but does anyone else have trips for preventing colds? Quarantine?!?
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That and frequent hand washing (or hand sanitizer) is pretty much all you can do. All other “preventative remedies” are questionable at best at doing anything. It is more to make ourselves feel better about doing something than it actually doing anything. 
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Oh. Regarding hand sanitizer…in the month leading up to our trip, we kept hand sanitizer in every vehicle and made everyone sanitize each and every time we got back into the car. Did it help? No way to know.
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I do vitamin C and Elderberry syrup as preventative all the time. My kids hardly ever get sick. Good luck!
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We take airborne religiously prior to travel beginning about a week out.
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How much (what kind) Vit. C for the kiddos?
I wouldn’t bother with Vitamin C. The most trustworthy studies have been pretty clear that it doesn’t help prevent colds.
Elderberry is interesting. It has been shown to shorten symptoms for flu, but not necessarily to prevent the flu. It is too early to tell. So taking it might not prevent it, but if you contract the flu, it can help reduce symptoms much more quickly, so that gives some reason.
But taking Vitamin C? Yeah. If you just want to give your money away, go for it! 
Thanks, but I’ll go with my experience and evidence and doctor advice!
I use chewable and 500mg for maintenance. Certain brands may be more effective than others, but Vitamin C, from what I have read and talked to my homeopath about, is fairly uniform. When the kids are actually sick, I bump it up to 1,000 to 2,000 mg per day. I also sometimes use colloidal silver as well when they are actively sick.
Hand sanitizer before they eat snack or lunch. I would put a bottle or individual wipes for them to use in each lunch box.
I do the airborne thing too!
There is one that is gummy form now
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I do, that, too!
Beyond that, I’d suggest rest, but I’m not very good about actually doing that before going away. Sounds like it would be a good idea, though, if one figured out how to pull it off.
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You can have cold symptoms 2-3 days after infection, so don’t let your guard down at the airport or first few days at Disney if you want the whole trip to be cold free.
I personally get a flu shot, getting mine late next month as I am going to San Diego in Oct. and Disney in Dec.
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Okay. This post is long. My apologies. But I want to explain why taking vitamin C doesn’t do anything.
First of all, I do not doubt you when you say your family rarely gets sick. I can say the same thing about our family. Experience, unfortunately, is purely anecdotal and is not good evidence of anything, scientifically speaking. You taking Vitamin C and don’t get sick. We DON’T take vitamin C and don’t get sick. What does that say about Vitamin C? Nothing. Because they are individual situations that show no evidence of causation nor even correlation. It is no different than if I say, “I almost never get sick, and I go to work 5 days a week, so clearly going to work helps people not get sick.”
I also have no doubt that a doctor would say that vitamin C helps. This was common advice for a very long time based on some actual “evidence” that Vitamin C was helpful. But there were flaws in that evidence.
What IS true is that Vitamin C is important and necessary to have a healthy immune system. Without adequate vitamin C (not to mention other nutrients) the immune system cannot function as God intended and you will end up getting sick more often, saying sick longer, etc. Studies have shown this, to be sure.
But this is where a logical fallacy kind of crept in. The (invalid) assumption was that if vitamin C was needed to help the immune system (help prevent colds), then MORE vitamin C will do a BETTER job. That’s the part, however, that subsequent studies have concluded isn’t true.
When does taking Vitamin C help? When you are eating a diet that leaves you undernourished. But for a vast majority of people, their diet gives them adequate levels of vitamin C in their diet to support their immune system. Taking ADDITIONAL vitamin C, however, doesn’t have any “additive” value to the immune system. Instead, all that happens if you end up peeing out the excess vitamin C with no benefit whatsoever. No harm, but no benefit.
Furthermore, EVEN IF you were undernourished, plenty of studies have shown that the most effective way for the body to actually absorb nutrients is through food, NOT through supplements. Why? Because nutrients work in harmony with one another. Case in point: If you take Calcium, your body can’t absorb it unless it has a corresponding amount of Vitamin C. In foods, the two nutrients would be absorbed correctly, but they have found that calcium would need to be consumed WITH vitamin C in order to be beneficial. (This is why most calcium supplements now have vitamin C as well, otherwise they have no benefit whatsoever!)
So, if you were SHORT on Vitamin C, your body won’t absorb it from a supplement NEARLY as well as it does from foods that contain vitamin C. BUT, as stated before, MOST people are not short on vitamin C.
Many independent, double-blind studies have ultimately shown that taking Vitamin C supplements offer ZERO benefit in preventing colds. The previous studies that showed benefit were flawed, or were extrapolations from a little bit of truth.
You can continue to take Vitamin C. There in no harm in that (unless you have issues with your Kidneys, in which case, taking excess supplements in general might actually pose a level of stress to the system). But it is a fallacy, well-documented and “proven out” (as much as science can prove anything), that it won’t help UNLESS you are undernourished.
If you tell people to take Vitamin C, you are only telling them to spend money on something that won’t help.
Herein lies a bigger problem in “science” in general. We’ve seen for decades the recommendations, based on science, that have been completely thrown out in more recent years due to better studies. Take, for example, the issue of high fat diets. High fat diets were, at one time, fairly common place. But then “science” found a correlation to fat and heart disease, which ultimately led down a path of making recommendations that people switch to low-fat, high-carb (fiber) diets. This was seemingly due to good, justifiable, evidence-based science. But, as we’ve come to learn much more recently, this was all wrong. Of course, Dr. Atkins figured this out, but his diet was ridiculed by the medical community for years as irresponsible, etc. It wasn’t until years after his death that science is finally catching up and finding that, well, actually eating a diet rich in a variety of healthy fats is actually BENEFICIAL and could lead to LOWER instances of heart disease. It also contributes to better brain function, which has led some scientists to believe (yet to be proven out) that the rises in mental disorders could at least be partially the result of a couple generations of people AVOIDING eating fat!
Point is…because what you call “evidence” and “experience”. Also be careful that just because any given doctor says to do something that he/she is up to date on all the research. No fault of his/her own…the field changes so rapidly these days and there is no way any doctor can keep up with it all.
Well, anyhow. I’ll stop there.
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Your flaw in your argument is that you assume that new science is always more accurate than old science and that is not a true statement. Especially since a lot of new medical science is paid by companies that have an agenda and absolute scientific truth is not on that agenda. In one day 33% more Americas had high blood pressure thanks to the pharma industry.
But wouldn’t the agendum be to encourage people to buy supplements?
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Yes, and that is why I bet I can find new studies that say taking vitamin C is harmful, useless and/or beneficial. It all depends on who commissioned the study. When you have a pool as big as the human population you can usually create a study to say whatever you want it to say. I don’t know the actual truth about vitamin C, I am just saying that new scientific studies are not always more accurate than old studies.
That’s not a flaw in my argument because it isn’t a part of my argument.
Newer science isn’t better. Better science is. A lot of science is done poorly, both in the past and now. The most trustworthy studies will follow strict ideals, including double-blind experiments, attempts to find causation not just correlation, and care with who sponsors what, etc.
In the case of studies with Vitamin C, the MOST TRUSTWORTHY studies that look specifically at whether it helps reduce colds/illness have shown NO improvement.
I’m not sure what that means. But it isn’t actually the pharma industry causing high blood pressure, nor their medications. BUT, the pharma industry certain has financially benefited from the mis-application of scientific studies on the matter (flawed or otherwise) by producing medications that aren’t actually improving anything. They can reduce blood pressure, reduce cholesterol levels, etc, but they aren’t actually reducing death due to heart disease. They are treating symptoms, not causes.
My tip is to hydrate. Dry bodies are sick bodies.
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