Honey

I have just the thing for that cold … Honey and Vinegar

Rachel’s hair stylist, Jeff, swears that a mixture of hot vinegar and honey will cure any cold or soothe any sore throat. Once, Rachel had the misfortune of going to get her hair cut when she had entirely lost her voice due to a bad cold. While she sat captive in the styling chair, Jeff whipped up a mixture of his hot vinegar and honey cold remedy, and Rachel was strongly encouraged to drink the noxious mixture. Willing to try almost anything once, Rachel forced down the concoction (with only a little gagging) and was grateful that her sense of taste was dulled by her cold. It tasted terrible, and she was left wondering how much it helped.

Jeff is not the only one to recommend honey for a cold or cough. The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests that honey may be a useful treatment for children with colds because it might soothe the throat and provide some cough relief. However, these 2001 guidelines from the WHO recognized that there was no scientific evidence to support that honey actually worked.

Honey might be helpful for a cough or cold for several reasons. Honey is a demulcent, a substance that forms a film or coating over your throat. It is common for cough medicines to contain something that forms this kind of film in your throat because it is thought to be soothing, potentially relieving minor pain and inflammation or irritation of your throat. Honey has also been found to have some antioxidant properties and to stimulate the release of cytokines, chemicals that can cause inflammation but also help your body fight infections.

One good study has been done to look at how honey impacts nighttime coughing and the ability to sleep for coughing children with colds. This study compared honey to a common cough medicine (dextromethorphan), which was flavored and mixed up to look, taste, smell, and feel like honey. As we have mentioned before, studies have shown that dextromethorphan does not help children’s coughs. This was also an important comparison because the parents, children, and investigators were blinded to what the children were receiving; they did not know if they were getting real honey or fake honey. The children were also compared to a group of coughing children who did not receive honey or dextromethorphan. This was a well-designed study. Depending on their age, children received one half to two teaspoons of buckwheat honey or fake honey or no treatment at all before they were supposed to go to bed. In the end, the parents of the children who had honey reported less coughing and fewer symptoms of their colds compared to children who received no treatment. The fake honey was not better than receiving no treatment for any of the outcomes. However, comparing the honey directly with the fake treatment did not show any significant differences. The summary of this study is that, when you compare honey, fake honey (regular dextromethorphan cough medicine), and no treatment, parents rate the honey as the best to help get rid of their children’s nighttime coughs and help the child and parent sleep. It may not work much better than a fake honey, and it may not help for many other cold symptoms, but honey does seem to help with children’s coughs.

Clearly, honey ought to be studied a bit more, but honey may be worth a try when you or your child are coughing and hacking and not sleeping. The one caution is that honey should not be given to children who are under the age of one. There is a small but real risk that infants can get botulism from honey. Botulism is a rare disease that causes paralysis and leads to death if it is not treated. Eating honey in the first year of life has been shown to be a risk factor for infants to develop this serious condition. If your child is older, you should feel free to give honey a chance to help with that cold.

Jeff may have been on the right track about the honey, but the foul vinegar in his cold remedy concoction is a different story. Jeff is in good company with the idea of using vinegar for colds; back around 400 B.C., Hippocrates prescribed vinegar for curing persistent coughs. Many advocates of home remedies suggest that honey and apple cider vinegar is a natural cough remedy. While vinegar can help as an antibacterial agent to clean counters or tiles, there is absolutely no evidence that vinegar helps with coughs or cold symptoms. What is good for the bathroom floor is not necessarily good for your throat. There is no evidence that vinegar helps clinically with coughs or other infections. A lack of evidence is just that—a lack. It is possible that someone could still prove that vinegar and honey works for colds, but there is no reason to believe that it will.

The next time Rachel gets a haircut, she may have to be extra careful to emphasize how great honey can be for coughs. After all, it is never good to offend someone wielding a sharp scissors near your hair (or any other part of your body). She will just keep in mind the limitations to honey’s benefits and the good reasons for avoiding terrible-tasting vinegar.

Eating local honey will prevent allergies

Allergies can be debilitating. They can make you feel terrible, and they can interfere with your quality of life. Moreover, many of the medications for allergies, which are all aimed at interfering with how your immune system responds to allergens, can make you feel sleepy. So it’s no wonder that people are looking for other options to fight allergies.

That’s where honey comes in. There is a theory that honey, made by bees, could be a vaccine for allergies.

Let’s back up a step and talk about vaccines first, so you can understand the rationale for why this might work. Vaccines work by giving our body a “taste” of a dangerous infection. Maybe it’s something that looks an awful lot like a dangerous bug. Maybe it’s a virus that has been inactivated or killed. Either way, the body reacts by creating antibodies to what is in the vaccine so that later, when the body comes into contact with the actual pathogen (the real and dangerous germ), those antibodies are primed and ready to kill the virus or bacterium.

The theory with local honey is that it contains the same pollen that may be causing your allergies, but in much smaller amounts. Therefore, your body gets practice, much like it would with a vaccine, to get ready to fight off the allergen. Later, when you are exposed to the actual pollen, your body is ready to go and your allergies will disappear.

No. It doesn’t work.

First of all, many people remove the “local” from the chapter’s title and just think that store-bought honey prevents allergies. That doesn’t even make sense. Store-bought honey wouldn’t contain the local pollens needed to make this possible. And most store-bought honey is sterilized before being packaged so it might not even contain the bad stuff you would need to induce a response.

Even if you get local honey, there are a few problems with this. First of all, the honey wouldn’t contain inactivated pollen. It would contain actual pollen, which could induce an allergic reaction. You could make the same argument that just by staying indoors, you would be exposed to small amounts of allergens from outside and get the same effectiveness. That doesn’t happen. On the other hand, experts tell us that swallowing some things we are allergic to sometimes helps our immune system react more tolerably to those things that cause our allergies. Other experts have wondered if honey might contain some sort of antihistamine, acting like the medicines that treat allergies. Neither seems to be the case for honey. Honey has been studied for allergies, and it does not seem to help. In a study of allergy sufferers who routinely had runny noses and irritated eyes from common outdoor allergies, neither local, unfiltered, unpasteurized honey, nor commercially available, filtered, pasteurized honey, improved their allergy symptoms any more than a placebo honey.

Honey is a lovely sweetener, but it is not going to make your allergies go away.