Allergies are a nightmare for those that suffer through them--the coughing; the sneezing; the miserable, sleepless nights. The medications currently offered for allergy relief are expensive and have some pretty bad side effects. But good news is coming to those people presently swallowing pills or receiving shots to alleviate the feelings, there is a much sweeter remedy: local honey.
How can liquefied sugar possibly prove beneficial to fighting something like allergies? The same way modern science prevents other conditions like chicken pox. Dead phages of the viruses are released into the body, which allows the body to build up a resistance to the pathogen for the next time that the body is exposed to it. The same idea is the driving factor behind using honey as an anti-allergen. The key to using honey to fight allergies is in the fact that the bees, as they go about their business of visiting flowers and making honey, happen to brush against a lot of pollen. Then, in the making of honey, some of that pollen that stuck to their bodies gets mixed into the honey. So, when that honey is scooped out and sold, it provides a low dosage of the pollen that so adeptly makes people miserable. The low dosage that is ingested is easily conquered by the immune system, causing (usually) no reaction in the ingesting party. What does happen presumably happens at the cellular level. The immune system, in conquering the pollen, creates antibodies that know how to battle the bad guys. When the body is further exposed to pollen in the air, it is easier for the body to fight it than before, because the mechanisms for fighting the pollen are already in place.
Why local? Fighting pollen from western Peru is not likely to help you. Unless you live in western Peru. A scientific review of this can be found on the University of Connecticut's website, specifically at: http://advance.uconn.edu/1999/990405/04059903.htm
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14 years ago
Wow... never thought of honey as an anti-allergen. I guess it makes sense - if nature gives you a disease, there has got to be a cure in nature waiting to be found.
ReplyDeleteQuite a bummer about the limitation of the benefits with honey as an anti-allergen when the honey is from Peru. However that's just one more piece of evidence to supporting how much industrialization has stripped the benefits of local produce.
ReplyDeleteHuh! Really interesting! Honey as nature's vaccine....who'd have thunk?
ReplyDeleteSo is there any way to get honey from Georgia? I definitely have the worst ongoing allergies ever! So where can I get anything that's actually made in the U.S.??
ReplyDeleteI found a couple more tidbits about the properties of honey:
ReplyDelete-It seems that does exert ant-allergic effect (source: http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/jmf.2006.163) but honey does not seem to work in the case of eye allergies (http://www.aaaai.org/professionals/ask-the-expert/view.asp?id=6671)
-Honey may also be used to treat burns (http://newswise.com/articles/view/544590/)
I find this amazing and hope that it is true.
ReplyDeleteI have suffered through allergies my whole life. Although it's not life-threatening, it is a hassle going through weeks with a somewhat congested nose.
I love honey, so if I can use it to help keep my allergy symptoms down, I would be ecstatic. Obviously my allergies will never go away, but it would be great to be able to control them a bit for once without taking Claritin every day for weeks on end.
Hah the same flowers that cause my allergies are harvested by the bees that cure it? Ironic. I'll certainly be eating a lot more foods with honey in them, especially come spring. Very good find!
ReplyDelete