We examine the variety of health benefits of honey  – it’s antiseptic, antibiotic, good for your blood, good for digestion. Honey is too frequently used as a home remedy and in traditional medicine.

For many millennia, honey has been a notably popular cooking delicacy, as well as being an engineering medical remedy. Across the world, our forebears knew well the myriad health benefits of honey. 

The first known use as a medicinal prescription can beencoded in Sumerian clay tablets close to 4000 year old. Honey was an ingredient in nearly 30% of the Sumerians’ medical procedures. 

Honey also figures prominently in Siddha and Ayurveda, the ancient, traditional systems of medicine in India. It had an important role in the treatment of skin and eye diseases in ancient Egypt, and was also a natural bandage placed on wounds and burns. 

Other cultures have also used honey for medicinal purposes. These days, honey is the star attraction of much scientific research by the medical community, which has been studying and validating the myriad uses to which our forebearers applied honey. Let’s look at a few of these.

Health Benefits of Honey

1. Honey is best for your Blood

When you consume honey, it affects your body in various ways. When honey is dissolved in lukewarm water and drunk, it has a positive influence on the number of red blood cells (RBC) in the bloodstream. RBCs is primarily involved in the transport of oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body. 

Mixture of honey & water keep the bloods hemoglobin level in check which cures anemic conditions. Iron deficiency anemia is a clinical condition that occurs when there is a deficiency in ingestion or absorption of iron due to diet and life requires,and there is a loss of the capacity of blood to carry oxygen. 

The decreased oxygen carrying capacity causes fatigue, breathlessness, and at times depression and other issues. These problems can be avoided by honey, as honey increases the oxygen-carrying ability of the blood. 

Structure In the blood, the state of oxygenation is extremely important because oxygen is essential for the health of the body and determines the ease with which the body can return to health. Honey has also been found to positively affect hypertension and high blood pressure in preliminary studies. 

For social health, based on tradition, honey is consumed to reduce the symptoms of hypotension or low blood pressure. Some preliminary evidence suggests that honey can prevent low white blood cell (WBC) count in those undergoing chemotherapy. 

In a small study, 40% of patients at risk of low WBC count did not see a repeat of the problem if they took two teaspoons of therapeutic honey daily during chemotherapy.

2 Honey is safer than Sugar

Sugar (white) White sugar has gotten a bad rap. A more acceptable substitute is honey, which is equally sweet but also harmless to consume. 

While honey also comprises simple sugars as part of its chemical structure, it is markedly different from white sugar in containing between 30 percent of glucose and 40 percent of fructose  – both monosaccharide or simple sugars  – and 20 percent other complex sugars. 

Honey also contains dextrin, a starch-based fiber. This unique blend assists the body in controlling blood sugar levels.

3 Honey is beneficial for someone practicing Yoga

Honey also balances the blood chemistry, so it is highly advised for those undertaking yogic practices. Frequent consumption of honey adds more energy to the mechanism. Drinking lukewarm water slightly mixed with honey in the early morning prior to starting the practice can help open up the system.

4 Honey Is Antimicrobial & Antiseptic

Honey consumption boosts beneficial antioxidant agents, stimulates antibodies and prevents harmful microbial activity. 

Honey in wound treatment have also been addressed in several studies. In one study, a therapeutic honey was used that underwent a unique purification procedure, which eliminated all strains of bacteria in wounds of the participating patients. 

A separate study used unprocessed honey on wounds and leg ulcers for 59 patients, 80% of whom had failed conventional treatment. All but one patient’s wounds improved. Furthermore, the infected wounds turned sterile one week after the application of honey. 

Honey has a wide variety of health benefits, including treating one of the most common remedies in traditional medicine: respiratory infections. Issues such as too much mucus and asthma are treated by daily consuming honey. Clinical research has also demonstrated that medical-grade honey can kill food-borne illness-causing bugs like Eschetichia coli and salmonella. 

Honey has also shown promise in combating strains of bacteria that have gained resistance to antibiotics. Honey, as other studies have reported, works against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. 

Honey combats infections on multiple levels, which makes it tough for pathogens to gain resistance to it. Antibiotics, by contrast, usually take aim at bacteria while they are growing, providing them an opportunity to evolve defenses. 

Honey is also found to interfere with something called quorum sensing, that reduces the virulence of bacterial pathogens and lets antibiotics hit their target.

5 Honey is an Energy Food

Honey is one of the important foods used in traditional medicine, which has its important role to play in providing an instant energy boost. As noted above, honey consists of numerous varieties of sugar molecules, particularly glucose and fructose. 

But in honey, the two sugars (fructose and glucose) are completely separate (white sugar is sucrose, so you have to digest it into individual parts). This is why the glucose serves as an immediate energy source.

The United States National Honey Board suggests that we eat honey, just in small amounts, because it boasts an abundance of vitamins and minerals. These include: niacin, riboflavin, pantothenic acid, calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium and zinc.

6 Honey helps with Digestion

Honey is a mild laxative that helps relieve constipation, bloating and gas. Honey is also a source of probiotic or “friendly” bacteria, like bifido bacteria and lactobacilli, that assist with digestion, enhance that immune system, and help in decreasing allergies. Substituting honey for table sugar has been shown to lessen the toxic effects in the gut of mycotoxins produced by fungi.

7 Honey Fights Skin and Scalp Diseases

Honey can also yield many health benefits to skin and scalp wellbeing. In a small study with 30 patients that examined the effects of honey on treating seborrheic dermatitis and dandruff, participants applied either diluted crude honey every other day through massaging the affected areas for 2-3 minutes. Then after three hours it washed home with add up warm water. 

All patients improved following treatment. Itching improved and scaling resolved in 1 week, and lesions improved in 2 weeks. The patients’ hair loss situation also got better. And importantly, patients who continued the treatment for another six months, by applying honey once weekly, didn’t relapse.

8 Honey Aids Kids In Getting A Good Night’s Sleep

Multiple studies have shown that honey has the ability to enhance sleep quality in children as per preliminary data. According to parents’ reports, the studies concluded, honey produced less cough in children at night and improved sounder sleep.

Honey for Siddha and Ayurveda

No one, perhaps, has delved into the benefits of honey more than people in India. Honey could be followed by a rest in nature’s heavens and required its place as an necessary constituent of each kitchen. For anyone older than 12 months, it was considered an important part of the diet. Honey was seen as a predigested food that went down easily for humans. 

In the perspectives of both Ayurvedic and Siddha, honey has been used as a carrier for medicines. Medicines mixed with honey are absorbed by the body easily and quickly and spread across the systems through blood circulation. It is also claimed that honey preserves a medicine and extends the useful life. 

In Siddha texts, honey is prescribed in the treatment of issues relating to ushna (roughly translated as heat), excess mucous, vomiting, gas problems and impurities in the blood. 

The orange honey you get from the flowers of the jujube tree is classified in the Siddha texts as the least medicinal in value while malaithen, or mountain honey, which is collected from the raw honeycombs found in dense mountainous forests, is said to be the most powerful of the seven kinds of honey classified. This type of honey is said to hold within it the properties of many medicinal plants from which the bees gather nectar.

Points To Note

Dark-colored honeys are thought to have higher antioxidant levels. Honey will not decompose and can remain stored for long periods, if executed properly. In fact, archaeologists have discovered sealed jars of honey in the tombs of pharaohs in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes as well as in the tomb of Tutankhamen. 

There are no details on what the archaeologists did with all that honey! We should not feed honey to anyone under the age of 1yr because the honey may have spores for the botulism bacteria which can cause infant botulism. 

These spores, which are present in dust and soil, can enter honey. A newborn’s system is still not primed to protect itself against this type of infection. One more thing to keep in mind is, honey is not too different from white sugar for diabetics. The blood sugar goes up with both products and the same care is needed to be exercised by diabetic patients.