Chicken soup is good for treating colds, according to data from the Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha (NE, USA). Testing this long-held ‘old wives’ tale’, researchers demonstrated that a traditional chicken soup was capable of inhibiting neutrophil migration in a concentration-dependent manner. The symptoms of a ‘cold’ are in part attributable to a shared inflammatory response in the upper respiratory tract, so a mild anti-inflammatory response may be a result of chicken soup-stimulated neutrophil inhibition. In fact, all of the vegetable ingredients of the soup individually had neutrophil inhibitory activity, but only the chicken was not cytotoxic. Interestingly, the complete soup was not cytotoxic, indicating that chicken soup contains a number of ingredients that – when combined – can pick you up when you're poorly. AR