Does chicken soup actually help fight a cold?

Probably: While no one has done the perfect study on this, randomizing people to groups with and without soup and blinding them as to which therapy they get, there are many anecdotal studies showing a shorter duration and reduced intensity of symptoms of cold sufferers who eat chicken soup while sick. It is not clear why this works.

No: The common cold, given its viral etiology, will resolve no matter what you do. Chicken soup, like any warm soup for that matter, helps your symptoms but does nothing for the actual infection.

Possibly....: In addition to my colleague's answers, one theory about why chicken soup seems to help with colds is not so much the soup but the steam from the soup helped with the clearing of the nasal passages. Just a theory......