Break open the Bolly to fight the flu

"Feed a cold and starve a fever" goes the saying familiar to many of us.

Regardless whether it's true or not there is apparently a way to treat cold and flu symptoms that might - to say the very least - appear somewhat unorthodox, if not a little decadent.

With this season's number of flu cases in France now having reached the epidemic threshold as defined by the Groupe régional d'observation de la grippe (with the entirely appropriate acronym of Grog) it comes as a timely reminder perhaps that there is a way to beat the bug.

Well at least, according to the French health website Top santé.com, there's a surefire trick for dealing with the symptoms and aiding recovery.

It's a recipe, in all senses of the word, plucked from the pages of Remèdes de famille : Se soigner malin et naturel de A à Z by Henry Puget.


And it involves imbibing a glass of the fizzy stuff.

That's right, Champagne, albeit warm.

Just before bedtime apparently, you should pour one glass of bubbly into a saucepan, add two sugar lumps and bring to the boil.

Allow it to cool before drinking and drift off into the Land of Nod.

At this point you might be thinking a number of things. Firstly that Puget is something of a "Quack" out to make a quick Euro or two.

But rest assured he's a bona fide general practitioner living in Paris who, as the blurb tells us, "has been treating patients and successfully offering advice for the past 30 years by combining high tech with natural therapies."

And to cast aside any doubts you might have about the efficacy of the recipe (bearing in mind that it's not so far removed from a traditional rum-based grog) it works because "after drinking you'll sweat a lot throughout the night as the chemical action of the components of champagne mixed with sugar neutralise toxins from the cold or flu."

So if you feel a slight tickle in the throat or an aching in the joints, you know what to do.

Don't plunder the medicine cabinet for a bottle of linctus.

Instead follow the "natural" way of Dr Puget's advice and do as Ab Fab"s Edina and Patsy would without any hesitation.

Break open the Bolly!

A bottle of Bollinger (image from Wikipedia, author - Manchester2k6

Cheers.