Airborne Cold Remedy: Don’t Bother

The last couple of years has seen Airborne Effervescent Health Formula ascendant among “savvy” travelers. Heck, even I have bought at least one tube of the fizzing tablets packed with large percentages of one’s daily dosages of several vitamins, along with some herbs like echinacea, amino acids, and sodium—but mostly fizzing calcium carbonate. I didn’t know if it would help me avoid taking home a biological souvenir from the Aluminum Tube O’ Disease, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.

“It couldn’t hurt,” is the motivation behind almost all vitamin ingestion, though, despite there being a lot we still don’t know about the absorption of vitamins. (My guess is that the article I just linked to bolster my argument, having been written in 1963, may not contain the sum total of modern medicine’s grasp on the mechanism of vitamin absorption. Which is to say I don’t intend on bolstering every statement I make with accompanying links, because I’m just a stupid writer, not a doctor. But even a cursory Googlin’ will give you some recent examples of studies showing vitamins taken in pill form may not be all that useful at all.)

Anyway! The problem with Airborne—ignoring the possible but unlikely possibility of vitamin A poisoning—is that it is really expensive. A pack of 10 tablets has an MSRP of $8, while a name-brand tub of 250 multi-vitamins can be had from the same place for $17.

You won’t get the herbs or the fizzing with a multi-vitamin, but you’ll get quite a bit more variety for a lot less money: about 7 cents per dose of multivitamin versus about 80 cents per dose with the Airborne. For 63 cents you could wash it down each multivitamin with a can of Diet Coke.

I don’t think Airborne is especially nefarious—although plenty of people do, including Scientific American columnists—but instead just a bunch of vitamins wrapped up in a smart, folksy advertising campaign. So if you’re about to fly and haven’t been taking your multivitamin, I won’t get mad at you for buying some Airborne. Just don’t get mad at me if you still get sick.

Oh, you know what? I almost forgot my whole reason for looking into Airborne in the first place. Does anybody know how to mix up calcium carbonate to make effervescing tablets at home? (For DIY Airborne, bath bombs, etc.)