It's a sobering thing to realize, as the years pass, that everything your mother told you was actually true.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have shown that one of the best ways to keep from catching a cold is to get more sleep. And you thought you were so smart with your Echinacea and your Airborne and your sanitized hands.

This on top of the studies that showed chicken soup really is good for clearing up a cold you've already caught, ginger (as seen in ginger ale) really does help settle an upset stomach, and that if you cross your eyes and stick out your tongue, your face will get stuck that way.

OK, that last one isn't true. But didn't you wonder as a kid what happened to the people whose faces got stuck that way? You never saw any. There must be a special hospital for them somewhere, with wards for the daredevils who broke their necks climbing on porch railings, the one-eyed victims of kids who ran with sticks and the youngsters who cried so hard they made themselves sick.

The sleep study found that people who sleep less than seven hours a night are almost three times more likely to catch cold when they have cold virus sprayed up their noses and are sequestered in a hotel for five days and paid $800.

I know what you're thinking: Nice work if you can get it. You've probably taken vacations where you snorked up a snootful of microbes in an airplane, spent five rainy days staring out the window at the hotel pool and had to PAY $800.

With unemployment hovering around 7 percent, it's reassuring to see there are still career opportunities in the field of professional guinea pig. I had friends in college who kept themselves in beer and CDs by popping down to the med school every few weeks to have something sucked out of their lungs or injected into their butts. It never did them any harm, though Erik used to have mild short-term memory problems if he got near magnets.

The nasal sprayers at CMU aren't the only ones vindicating folklore. The Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University in Wales has released study after study with the same basic finding: Listen to your mother. The CCC has established that a hot mug of fruit cordial relieves runny nose, cough, sore throat, sneezing, fatigue and chills, tastes better than Nyquil and doesn't make your tongue green.

Also, getting a chill does make you more susceptible to catching cold. They determined this by making subjects sit with their bare feet in frigid water. If some Welsh labcoat made me do that, I'd beat him senseless with my own frozen feet.

There's evidence that garlic helps prevent colds and is even effective against MRSA, but that research is suspect because it was done by the Garlic Centre. Really.

Would you put on your Match.com profile that you work at the Garlic Centre? Not unless you were afraid a lot of alleged single people online were actually vampires.

I bet announcing that you work at the Common Cold Centre doesn't make you the life of the party, either. What does their automated voice mail system sound like? "Hello, you've reached the Common Cold Centre. Your infection is very important to us. For rhinovirus, press 1. For sore throat, press 2. For a kind of sinus thing that migrated down into your lungs and settled there for like six weeks, stay on the line and try to cough something up."

However folksy, you have to trust the CCC's findings. They're not measuring results by the unreliable reports of feverish test subjects who will say anything just to be allowed to get the feeling back in their feet. They have developed scientific instruments, according to BBC News, like "a sound level meter to measure cough, and an acoustic rhinometer to measure nasal blockage."

And you wanted an iPhone.

The Common Cold Centre is run by a Professor Ron Eccles, who claims to come down with only a couple of mild colds a year despite being surrounded by pestilence. He doesn't compromise his immune system with stress.

"We have a very relaxed atmosphere at the centre. We try not to stress each other too much." They're too busy knocking back fruit cordial.

How about a toast to Mom? Think of all the suffering you could have avoided if you'd listened to her. Remember what she said about that good-looking passive-aggressive you dated?

Of course not. You weren't listening.