Honey was one of the valuables buried with Egyptian royalty. Archeologists have found flasks of it in tombs, thousands of years old. It’s still edible. Now *that* is a long-term prep! (Honey will crystalize if it sits around, but that makes no functional difference, and the crystals will go away if the honey container is put in warm water for a bit.)
Many cultures treated honey as a sacred gift, so useful they thought it. This painting shows a monkey offering a gift of honey to the Buddha. Thanks ‘myself’* for the image
So having a sweetener that is shelf stable for longer than We’ll be walking this earth isn’t hard. It’s also renewable, since once one develops the skill (I haven’t, *yet*), keeping bees in easy-to-harvest hives and tracking wild bees to raid their trees are both viable options. The better news is, honey is a very useful natural remedy for multiple ailments.
How can some sweet bee spit be medically valuable?
One part of this is that honey is helpful just by being so darned sweet. There’s so much sugar in it, there’s not much room left for water. It tends to draw water out of less-concentrated solutions it contacts (a movement called osmosis). Bacterial cells and other microbes are ‘less concentrated solutions’. Bacteria therefore can’t live and grow in honey. A few can survive in their dormant, spore form (more on that later), but they can’t do anything until they’re out of the honey.
Good for many uses, and fantastically shelf-stable.
That’s only a part of the story, although the best understood part. There’s a lot of other things going on in there besides sugar. Perhaps most importantly, there are a lot of antioxidants. These are chemicals that inhibit a certain sort of chemical reactions (oxidations). The importance is that antioxidants neutralize a lot of chemical reactions, including some used by germs, some used by cancer cells, and some used by our own immune cells that cause excessive inflammation. They can also turn lots of toxic chemicals harmless.
There are also some bee-specific products that are anti-bacterial and pro-immune defense that they put into the honey — after all, the bees intend the stuff to feed their babies. Honeys also have some additions from whatever plant the bees have been visiting. These give various honeys their distinctive colors and tastes. To what degree it alters the medical effectiveness of the honeys is up for debate; but buckwheat honey and manuka honey (from Australia) are particularly well thought of. (1)
Cough suppression
Many of us have heard home remedies for cough involving honey: honey by the teaspoon, honey in tea, honey and whiskey. But do they work? First, the good news: Yes, honey is an effective cough suppressant. (1, 2, 3) . It’s thought to work primarily as a demulcent, which means it coats the lining of the throat, reducing its irritation and making it lessening the cough reflex. In fact, not only does it work, but it works better than the detromethorphan that is the standard cough suppressant in over-the-counter cough medications. (2)
It also improved sleep quality in kids who had the common upper respiratory infection coughs (and their parents!). (2) The researchers who tested this gave half a teaspoon of straight honey before bed to children 2-5 yrs; 1 tsp to 6-11 yr olds; and 2 tsp 12-18 yr olds. It wasn’t just the sugar doing the suppression of the cough, either, since one control group had a non-honey sugar syrup (formulated to look, feel, and taste like honey) and didn’t get a much relief.
Oh, the bad news? Every group of researchers was against the ‘honey with whiskey’ approach. At least officially, in print.
Wound treatment
Honey has a long history as a dressing in very many cultures worldwide. I went in thinking this couldn’t be a great idea, since sugar usually increases bacterial growth. I was wrong, according to a few good studies and a whole lot of mediocre ones.
Moore et al. (4) looked at a bunch of previous studies and concluded honey worked the best among a suite of natural remedies that included potato peels and amniotic membranes. These two also do work though; more on that here:
Honey also showed to be just as good as a standard frontline treatment for wound infections produced by the pharmaceutical industry. (5) If you’re concerned about antibiotic resistance (I am), no need to be if you’re using honey: no traces of bacteria becoming resistant have been found.
It doesn’t only work on burns, either. It’s shown effective for a wide variety of wound types (1,3,4,5,6) Even better, it can help clear infections that have started in some cases — even gangrene!
So how do you use honey for wound care?
First, you clean and debride the wound. Here’s some suggestions for that:
It takes about a 10% honey solution to get a good bactericidal effect.(3) Since wounds tend to release fluid exudates, it’s probably best to start off more concentrated than that so it doesn’t end up too dilute. I’m not a physician, so I’m not going to tell you what to do; but if I end up using honey, I plan to mix it at about 1 part honey to 4 parts good clean water. The solution is put on the dressing that will cover the wound, not the wound itself.
The dressing is cut a bit bigger than the wound and the honey solution is applied to the dressing. It was suggested (3) to put a waterproof cover over the lot so you don’t have honey oozing out. Considering what the local fly population is likely to think of such a scenario, I see the wisdom of that. No one mentioned how often to change dressings, but I’d be going by the old rule of ‘whenever they get nasty or once a day, whatever comes first’.
Are there drawbacks?
Medihoneys are honeys that have been gamma-irradiated to kill the bacterial spores. The irradiation doesn’t harm the effectiveness of the honey
Medihoney, sold in squeeze tubes or as impregnated wound covers, is sterile but not free.
. Does the presence of bacterial spores in honey constitute a danger, given the antibacterial properties of the honey? I couldn’t find any reports of infections they thought came from non-medical honey, so I don’t know how important that is. (My guess, given how widely used it is in so many cultures, is ‘not very important’.)
Sources seemed agreement that the risks are about as minor as you could hope for. People with pollen allergies to the species the bees were feeding from might react to pollen in the honey. Kids fed honey before bed occasionally had some hyperactivity issues, such as insomnia. No one thought really big doses to diabetics were a good idea, given that honey is mostly sugar. That’s about the sum of the reports.
Other uses?
One can find reports of people using honey as a remedy for all kinds of things, from boils to measles to digestive issues to preventing tooth decay. I couldn’t find research worth reporting on about how well those remedies actually worked. Sometimes folk remedies are great, sometimes useless, so I just don’t know with the other claims, so I’ll just let them lie there. But honey in my tea when I get a cough? I’m IN!
1) Kwakman, P. H. S. and Zaat, S. A. J. (2012), Antibacterial components of honey. IUBMB Life, 64: 48–55. doi:10.1002/iub.578
2) Paul IM, Beiler J, McMonagle A, Shaffer ML, Duda L, Berlin CM. Effect of Honey, Dextromethorphan, and No Treatment on Nocturnal Cough and Sleep Quality for Coughing Children and Their Parents. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2007;161(12):1140–1146. doi:10.1001/archpedi.161.12.1140
3) Eteraf-Oskouei, T., & Najafi, M. (2013). Traditional and Modern Uses of Natural Honey in Human Diseases: A Review. Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences, 16(6), 731–742.
4) Moore, O. A.,Smith, L. A.,Campbell, F.,Seers, K.,McQuay, H. J., et al. ( 2001) Systematic review of the use of honey as a wound dressing. BMC. Complement Altern. Med. 1, 2.
5) Johnson, D. W.,van Eps, C.,Mudge, D. W.,Wiggins, K. J.,Armstrong, et al. ( 2005) Randomized, controlled trial of topical exit-site application of honey (Medihoney) versus mupirocin for the prevention of catheter-associated infections in hemodialysis patients. J. Am. Soc. Nephrol. 16, 1456–1462.
6) Lee, David S., et al. “Honey and wound healing: an overview.” American Journal of Clinical Dermatology, vol. 12, no. 3, 2011, p. 181+. Academic OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A254313283/AONE?u=north1010&sid=AONE&xid=5f2b7e2c. Accessed 12 Feb. 2018.
*By myself (Picture of a wallpainting in a monastery in Laos) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
good article on one of natures miracles! I drink 2 tbs of honey with tea every day. To me its natures energy drink.
I question your theory ” sugar usually increases bacterial growth”
Don’t know where this got started, Sugar has many of the same properties as honey for the same reasons. Typically items with very high sugar content stay good for quite a while. Think hard candy, maple syrup even ketchup and barbeque sauce. Those condiments are typically left on tables with no refrigeration. If sugar increased bacteria growth this would not be possible.
I have used sugar many times to treat cuts, most recently a gash on my face I got working. Clean the wound thoroughly, then pour liberal amount plain white sugar on it. Makes kind of a gel when it mixes with the blood, helping the wound to congeal. Then bandage as necessary. The sugar, like honey, creates environment bacteria cant live.
Try it next time you cut yourself, you’ll swear by it too.
its worth mentioning because not everyone has honey (although they should), but everyone has sugar.
I just meant that bacteria like to use sugars as their own fuel source. More is not better though: Just as honey doesn’t grow bacteria because it’s got too much sugar for the amount of water (it actually dries out any bacteria in the area as a result), pure sugar and hard candy won’t either, for the same reason.
I hadn’t thought of using sugar as a wound treatment, but I see why it would work. Thanks for the tip. Might slow healing though, as it’s hard on your own cells in the area too. That’s why they say to put the honey on the dressing, not the wound. Slower healing is better than infection, but there are options that don’t cause either.
My experience is it actually speeds healing. Was cut across the bridge of my nose when a steel hurricane panel fell. My wife helped me clean the cut, put sugar on it and bandaid. Bandaid across my nose is really annoying since I wear glasses, but within 2 hours I was able to remove the bandaid with no oozing. By morning had scabbed over. Imagine honey would work just as well
I am not a french model 😉
Good article, I knew honey was neatually resistant to bacteria but had never considered using it as an “antibiotic ointment”.
Very interesting, my mother used honey in comfrey leaves tea and added lemon for cough suppressant. Thanks for the research.