Health and evidence
Honey and coughs, sore throats, skin and sugar — sorted by how strong the evidence actually is.
Before anything else
Honey must never be given to infants under twelve months old, in any form — raw, pasteurised, or cooked into food. It can contain Clostridium botulinum spores, which an infant's immature gut may not suppress, and the spores survive heat. This is consistent guidance from national food safety agencies worldwide.
Nothing on this site is medical advice. It describes what the evidence supports and where it stops.
How claims are handled here
Every substantive claim carries a tier — established evidence, emerging research, traditional use, cultural belief, or commonly claimed but not supported — and the top two tiers must also state what they are notclaiming. That last field does the most work: "honey reduces cough frequency in children over one" is supportable, and "honey treats coughs" is what a reader takes away. See the editorial policy.
- Honey, coughs and sore throatsThe best-supported thing anyone claims about honey, and still narrower than the way it is usually stated.
- Honey compared with sugarHoney is a free sugar. Everything else about the comparison is real but small, and the gap between 'better' and 'good for you' is where most of the confusion lives.
- Honey, skin and woundsThere is a real clinical use of honey on wounds. It involves a sterilised, regulated product — not the jar in your cupboard, and the distinction is the whole point.
- What is actually in honeyA full compositional breakdown, with an honest account of which components matter nutritionally and which are present in quantities too small to do anything.
- Local honey and hay fever: what the evidence saysThe theory is that eating local honey desensitises you to local pollen. The problem is that the pollen causing hay fever is almost never the pollen that ends up in honey — and that is before you get to the trials.
- What is the healthiest honey?The honest answer is that no honey is a health food, the differences between types are small, and the question people are actually asking usually has a better answer than the one they are looking for.