Luden's: Cough Medicine or Candy?

Because of the recent Noah reenactment going on in the Northeast part of the country, never ending rain topped off with a touch of 40-degree weather, I now find myself with a cold. And I'm one of these people who never gets sick; the total times I've been genuinely sick in the last ten years (not counting the times I faked it to get out of going to high school,) has to be less then five. So when I really am sick, it pisses me off. The amount of yellow/white colored snot that has been flying out of my nose has been astronomical, not to mention the incessant wet coughing.

To combat these symptoms, I picked up a box of Tylenol Cold with day and night tablets, and the essential remedy for anyone who has ever even remotely had a sore throat: Luden's Wild Cherry Cough Drops. When I pulled the bag off the shelf along with the box of Tylenol, Kristin says to me: "Oh please, like that's going to do anything. Luden's isn't medicine, it's candy." But is she right?

I can remember going to Walgreen's with my brother in Florida and buying the little boxes of Luden's with the little wax paper bag inside purely for the taste; I think it was my mother who introduced the little delicious red miracles to us.

My dad also once actually forced me to take a menthol Luden's when I had a cough on the way to a restaurant. I told him the menthol was making me feel nauseous. He told me to stop being such a little faker crybaby. I threw up when we got to the restaurant.

Asides from the evil menthol mutation, Luden's is admittedly a fantastic treat. They taste so good. You can't beat the delicious cherry flavor that seeps out of it. Most cough drops taste like grandpa; all medicine-y and unpleasant. Which is why Luden's is every sane person's choice when you have a tickle in your throat.

But do they actually work? It says the active ingredient in Luden's is pectin, which is apparently a cough suppressant. But when I checked the definition of pectin, it says:

1 : any of various water-soluble substances that bind adjacent cell walls in plant tissues and yield a gel which is the basis of fruit jellies
2 : a product containing mostly pectin obtained as a powder or syrup (as by extraction with acid of citrus peels, dried apple pomace, or dried sugar beet slices) and used chiefly in making jelly and other foods, in pharmaceutical products especially for the control of diarrhea, and in cosmetics

So pretty much, it doesn't have anything to do with a cough, unless that cough is coming out of your ass and is full of diarrhea. Plus, two of the inactive ingredients mentioned on the Luden's package are corn syrup and sucrose, which are sugar agents typically found in anything sweet.

And, to be honest, I really have never experienced any effects from using Luden's during a sore throat. I think the only reason you might feel better is because you end up eating like 40 of them and have more sugar in your blood than a gallon of Dr. Pepper.

So pretty much, Kristin caught me in my deceit: I can use my cough as an excuse to eat "medical" candy and not have to feel bad about it. Not that it will make me stop buying or eating them. They're too damn delicious.