Raw Honey - Health Benefits?

I had never heard of raw honey until this weekend, when I was over at a friend's house for a Memorial Day barbecue.  When he brought out a little jar of honey to glaze the salmon, I was intrigued by its cloudy color and extra-thick texture.

 I picked up the bottle, only to find that it was printed with densely packed text, and rather odd stuff to boot.  One bit says "The last frontier WILDERNESS Fresh, Clean, Friendly, Alive, Bio-Eco System."  It reminded me of a bottle of Dr. Bronner's soap!

Honey, as I'm sure you know, is bee vomit.  Bees eat the nectar from flowers, then barf it up into their wax honeycombs for storage.  It's not very appealing, but it's the truth.  The bees store the honey against the winter, and for when the weather is too bad to fly.  

Honey has a lot of interesting properties.  Although it is full of water, sugars, and yeasts, it doesn't go bad because the bees use their wings to fan away the moisture, thus dehydrating it.  By dehydrating the honey, they raise the sugar content, and apparently when something is high enough in sugar, it won't ferment.  

Aside from being delicious, this ability to be kept preserved has made honey valuable throughout the ages.  In fact, if you apply honey to something, it won't rot, either.  Which is why the ancient Egyptians used honey to embalm their dead before wrapping them in mummy fabric.

Chemically, I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that honey is mostly sugar.  It contains trace amounts of other nutrients, including several antioxidants which have piqued scientific interest as of late.  Raw honey also contains yeasts, which will be destroyed by most pasteurization.  (Commercial honey, what you would find in a plastic squeeze bottle shaped like a bear, has been pasteurized.)  And since it is unstrained, it may contain bits of wax from the honey combs, as well as fragments of pollen left behind by the bees as they worked.

Honey has some interesting antibacterial properties, as well.  The FDA has approved wound gels containing honey for treating wounds where other antibiotics are not appropriate.  This makes it an effective topical treatment for MRSA infections, and for diabetic ulcers.

Honey is also the basis of thousands of folk remedies, from upset stomach to sore throat.  It's difficult to sort out fact from lore in most of these cases, particularly since there have been very few proper scientific studies of honey's effectiveness.  

Another component of raw honey's supposed health benefits is propolis.  This is a form of resinous sap, which bees collect when they're out foraging.  They bring it back and use it throughout their hive as a structural component.  Propolis has a lot of flavonoids and antibacterial properties, and small amounts of propolis end up in the honeycombs.

Unfortunately for anyone attempting to study propolis under controlled conditions, its chemistry is highly variable. The specific ingredients depend on the kind of tree it was gathered from, and even samples from the same tree can vary widely from one month to the next.  Furthermore, it's hard to say how much propolis actually gets into the honey.

Is honey a miracle cure?  Probably not.  But it's delicious, and buying fresh local honey helps support local agriculture!

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user vincentgallegos