Zicam – revisited

One of my most popular posts in the last few years was a critical, scientific look at Zicam. I wanted to revisit a few things in this short update to the article, and based on information gathered by a commenter revisit the question: by how much is Zicam overcharging for zinc?

Zicam, a zinc supplement, is marketed as “homeopathic” – this allows Zicam to avoid the rules that normally have to be obeyed by actual medical products, since it’s not technically sold as “medicine.” That’s odd, because the company that makes it claims it helps shorten the common cold.

Homeopathy is the process of using (often) extreme dilutions of an original, many times dangerous, substance. The original amount of ingredient is never known to the consumer; only the amount of dilution is reported. You probably should never take a substance whose actual amount isn’t known, just as a matter of good living.

My old post on the subject, “Fake Medicine: Zicam,” [1] garnered a lot of comments. Many were anecdotal, about how people took Zicam and it helped them. The plural of anecdote is not data, and since on a person-by-person basis it’s impossible to control for all factors (e.g. hand-washing, immune response, mis-diagnosis, etc.), it’s not possible for a person to claim “I did X and Y happened” when it comes to disease. However, other comments were more useful. One commenter, Bob, said he was able to get the parent company that makes Zicam to email him the actual zinc content, in grams!

So, assuming that data are reliable, let’s have a look:

• Zicam Ultra Cold Remedy RapidMelts-cherry and orange cream: 1 tablet = 14.5mg of ionized zinc
• Zicam Cold Remedy RapidMelts-cherry, citrus, echinacea: 1 tablet, 11.0mg of ionized zinc
• Zicam Cold Remedy RapidMelts-cool mint: 1 tablet, 10.8mg of ionized zinc

Looking at the Zicam product line, specifically the price at which these are sold on Walmart.com or Amazon.com, we can get a picture of the cost per mg of zinc.

1. Zicam Ultra Cold Remedy RapidMelts-cherry and orange cream:
   1. Walmart.com: $0.534 per tablet
   2. Amazon.com: $0.54 per tablet
   3. Average price per mg of ionized zinc: $0.0368/mg
2. Zicam Cold Remedy Rapidmelts – cherry
   1. Walmart.com: $0.385 per melt
   2. Amazon.com: $0.44 per melt
   3. Average price per mg of ionized zinc: $0.0375/mg
3. Zicam Cold Remedy Rapidmelts – cool mint
   1. Amazon.com: $0.39/count
   2. Walmart.com: not available
   3. Price per mg of ionized zinc: $0.0361/mg

So, the product Zicam is basically costing you $0.0368/mg of ionized zinc.

What about just buying a zinc supplement that doesn’t use the nonsense of “homeopathy” to skirt medical labeling laws, but instead actually uses scientific information like “mass” to label the zinc content of their product?

Well, on the Walmart.com website one can search for “zinc supplement” and find the following:

• Spring Valley Zinc 50 Mg 200Ct: $0.02/tablet at 50mg of zinc per tablet, which means $0.0004/mg
• Spring Valley Natural Immune Health 50mg Zinc Caplets, 100ct: $0.025/tablet, 50mg/tablet, which means $0.0005/mg.

What about on Amazon.com?

• Nature’s Bounty Chelated Zinc (Zinc Gluconate) 50mg, 100 Caplets: $0.05/capsule, 50mg/capsule, which means $0.001/mg.

What about zinc lozenges that aren’t marketed as “homeopathic”?

• Walmart.com sells Zinc Lozenges Nature’s Plus, 90 Lozenges at 15mg/lozenge, for $8.06. That brings us to $0.089/lozenge, or $0.00597/mg of zinc.
• Amazon.com sells Nature’s Way Zinc Lozenges, 60 count, for $0.10/count at 23mg of zinc per lozenge. That brings us to $0.00435/mg.

So shopping just two sites and a few brands, we learn very quickly the following:

• The parent company that makes Zicam is, indeed, vastly overcharging for a mineral element that can be cheaply purchased in supplements or merely obtained by eating an already-recommended balanced diet. In fact, it appears that the company that makes Zicam overcharges for zinc by a large factor, depending on the zinc delivery mechanism. Per milligram, Zicam costs you 74 times more than just buying a properly labeled zinc supplement, and about 6 times more than buying a properly labeled zinc lozenge (lozenges contain other ingredients than just zinc, such as sweeteners, and so they cost more than just zinc by itself).

There is some decent evidence that taking zinc can help shorten the duration of a cold. You should always consult your doctor, a licensed M.D., before supplementing your diet or making any additions or other changes to medications. If you’re going to take zinc, take properly labeled, scientifically measured quantities of it. While it’s nice that, once prodded, the parent company of Zicam will tell you the milligrams of zinc in their product, you could save yourself the detective work and just buy a bottle of zinc capsules that actually tell you their content.

P.S. What the heck is “ionized zinc”? This is what Zicam claims to contain… but it’s very hard to locate any scientific information on what it means to manufacture and package zinc that remains ionized in some ingestable form. A quick internet search finds references to this substance only on quack and pseudoscience websites, and references in the medical literature refer only to experiments where cold viruses were exposed to ionized zinc. While it’s plausible that zinc ions could result from the body processing zinc compounds, this sounds like an immense series of assumptions. Again, why pay 6 times more for wishful thinking?

[1] http://steve.cooleysekula.net/blog/2013/01/06/fake-medicine-zicam/

[2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/skampy/