By Paul and Ann Malkmus
You wake up in the third week of October with a scratchy throat and a nose that will not settle. By mid-morning you have sneezed eleven times. You stand at the kitchen window with something warm in your hands, looking at the leaves banked up against the fence, and you try to work out whether you are coming down with something or whether it is just the air.
The answer matters less than it feels like it should.
What is in the air in late October
Weed pollen season starts in August and runs six to ten weeks, ending with the first frost. Ragweed generally peaks by mid-September, and other weeds carry on a few weeks past that. About one in seven people in the United States react to ragweed pollen, and the first fall frost is what shuts the weeds down. As first-frost dates have moved later, that season has stretched longer than it used to be.
So where you live decides a great deal. If your part of the country has not had a hard frost yet, the weeds are still working.
Then the leaves come down. Outdoor molds live on dead organic matter — fallen leaves, dead branches — and their spores are in the air all year, rising when the weather turns damp (UPMC HealthBeat, 2023). A wet pile of leaves against the back step is a working compost heap three feet from your door.
And the house closes up. The windows go shut, the furnace comes on for the first time since spring, and the air you breathe for the next five months is mostly the same air, moving in a circle.
What usually tells a cold from an allergy
Time is the clearest one. A cold gets better gradually, usually within a week to ten days. Allergy symptoms can run for weeks, sometimes months, for as long as whatever started them is still in the air. Symptoms that sit at the same level for three weeks are not a cold.
Itch is the next one. Itchy eyes and an itchy nose go with allergies far more than with a cold.
A low-grade fever points to a cold. So do mild body aches. Allergies do not cause either.
Look around you. If your husband and the two people you sat beside on Sunday have the same thing, you have a cold.
Check the calendar. Symptoms that arrive the same week each year and leave around the same time are usually allergies. Timing on its own will not settle it, but it is worth knowing.
| Leans allergies | Leans a cold | |
|---|---|---|
| How long it lasts | Weeks, sometimes months | Usually eases in 7–10 days |
| Itchy eyes and nose | Common | Uncommon |
| Low-grade fever | No | Sometimes |
| Mild body aches | No | Sometimes |
| Others around you | Fine | Often have it too |
| Timing | Same weeks every year | Any time of year |
Drawn from Tufts Medicine, with allergist Dr. Christina Cruz, and reporting from October 2026.
Some seasons it will be both, a week apart, and you will spend the whole of November unsure which one you are in.
Both land on the same body
A cold is a virus your immune system is clearing out. An allergy is that same immune system responding hard to something that was never a threat. Either way it is the same immune system doing the work, in the same woman who has been going since August and whose plate has been thinner than she would like since the garden finished.
That is the part you can do something about this week, and it is the same thing either way.
The foods worth having on the counter this month
Quercetin is a flavonol — one of the plant compounds that gives fruit and vegetables their color and much of their character. You will find it in onions and scallions, kale, broccoli, apples, berries and teas (Linus Pauling Institute, Oregon State University).
That list is not exotic. It is a bag of red onions, a bowl of apples with the skins left on, and a head of broccoli. Most of it is already in the store you shop at.
Onions, raw where you can manage it. Sliced thin into a salad, or red onion on whatever you are already making.
Apples with the skin on. An apple cut into a salad with walnuts is a different thing from an apple peeled and stewed.
Kale, broccoli, cabbage. The brassicas earn their place on this list twice over — quercetin, and a good deal of vitamin C alongside it.
Berries. Fresh while you can get them, frozen the rest of the year.
Peppers, citrus, strawberries. Vitamin C, which has to come in every day because the body does not store it. Bell peppers hold more than most people expect.
Water, more than you are drinking. Dry indoor heat and a congested head are a poor pairing, and this is the cheapest thing on the list.
A word about how much. Most people reading this are starting from behind — years of thin eating, a stressful summer, a body that has been pulling from reserves for a long time. A serving of broccoli on Thursday is a start. Rebuilding asks for more food, more often, than simply holding steady does.
Where supplements sit in this
Supplements are tools. The food underneath them is the thing they are there to support.
Concentrated forms of this family of compounds have been studied in people — a 2009 randomized, placebo-controlled trial tested one modified form on eye symptoms in people allergic to Japanese cedar pollen. Eating onions and apples at mealtimes has not been studied that way, and a bowl of fruit was never going to behave like a capsule.
The testimony pages on this site have carried the same account for more than thirty years: somebody changed how they were eating for a different reason altogether, and a season that used to flatten them quietly stopped doing it. Those are individual experiences, and we hold them as that. They are also, year after year, what people write in to tell us.
If you want to know whether a concentrated quercetin is worth trying this season, that is a good question for a nutritionally minded health care professional who will look at the whole of your picture rather than the one symptom. The food goes in either way.
The part of this that is not food
Environment and inputs matter more than information, and this season gives you several easy ones.
Move the wet leaves away from the doors and the windows you open. Change the furnace filter before you run the heat, not in February. Take your shoes off at the door through pollen season. Wash your hair at night rather than in the morning if you have been outside, so you are not sleeping eight hours with the day’s pollen on the pillow.
All of it is free. Wipe Out Toxins is where we keep the rest of that work, room by room.
The frame underneath all of it
“And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”
— Genesis 1:29, KJV
The body was given what it needs to meet a season like this one. Onions and apples and greens were given as food. A body that is properly fed meets a season like this one differently from a body that has been running on reserves. That has been the whole of our message for thirty-four years, and October does not change it.
Whatever this turns out to be — the air, or a virus, or both in the same two weeks — the next good meal is the same meal.
Blessings,
Paul & Ann
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We offer these teachings freely to support clarity, stewardship, and responsible care. If this article was helpful, you may explore additional resources here:
MyHDiet.com — plant-based nutrition, enzymes, detox foundations
WipeOutToxins.com — toxin-free living and prevention
CleanseYourBlood.com — circulation and blood-flow support
HealthRetreat.com — Hallelujah Diet Health Retreat
AMPMForHealth.com — everyday wellness rhythms and curated toolsThank you for being part of a community committed to thoughtful, responsible care.
Sources
- Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, “Rise of Weed Pollen and Return to School Ushers in Sneezing Season”: aafa.org
- UPMC HealthBeat, “Am I Allergic to Mold? Mold Allergy Symptoms,” 7 November 2023, reviewed by Nathaniel David Hare, MD: share.upmc.com
- Tufts Medicine, “Cold or allergy? Understanding the difference could help you breathe easier,” with Christina Cruz, MD: tuftsmedicine.org
- KTVU/FOX, “Fall allergies or a cold? Here’s how to tell what’s making you miserable,” 7 October 2026: ktvu.com
- Linus Pauling Institute, Oregon State University, Micronutrient Information Center — flavonoids: lpi.oregonstate.edu
- “Preventative effect of a flavonoid, enzymatically modified isoquercitrin on ocular symptoms of Japanese cedar pollinosis,” Allergology International, 2009: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
