Can Honey Cure Your Hay Fever?

Hay fever season is not fun for many people all over the world. Your skin gets itchy, your eyes water, you can’t stop sneezing, your throat is sore from a postnasal drip that also causes a consistent cough, and your sinuses can get blocked, causing headaches. It gets to the point where some people even dread the coming of spring because the seasons don’t change – they attack.

So, what can you do about this kind of hay fever? It’s easy to treat or avoid if there is one particular item that you are allergic to. For example, a specific type of flower or the fur from a cat or a dog. However, when it’s a general reaction to the increase in pollen in the air, it can be a lot harder to treat and impossible to avoid.

How Could Honey Cure Allergies?

For those looking for a more natural cure to their general allergies brought on by spring, honey has often been bandied about as a way to treat it. However, you can’t just get any old honey to the job. It needs to be raw, untreated honey that was made from pollen in your immediate neighborhood.

The theory behind this is similar to that of getting allergy shots from your doctor. The longer you ingest the honey, the more your body is exposed to the pollen in your area and the more desensitized your body will become to it. Over time, your body will stop reacting to the pollen each spring.

This is why you need to ensure that it is honey made in your area, close to your home where you enjoy Bingo Australia games. If the bees are collecting pollen that is too far away from where you live, you won’t be ingesting the pollen that you are exposed to each spring. It also needs to be unprocessed honey because the treatment can cause the pollen to degrade.

Major Skepticism From Doctors

The theory may seem sound, but it has been met with heavy skepticism from the medical world. A study done back in 2002 by the University of Connecticut showed that local honey has no impact on the symptoms of hay fever.

Their study was done on a double-blind method, giving some participants local honey and others filtered, national honey, and another group corn syrup that was honey flavored. All participants registered no change to their symptoms.

The two key problems with the local honey theory are that there is no way to guarantee that you are getting enough pollen in each batch, and that you are getting the right type of pollen. Bees only collect a very small amount of pollen for their honey, and that pollen can vary widely in terms of the type that they collect. Additionally, not all of the honey produced contains any pollen.

It’s also been shown that the pollen that bees collect is not the same pollen that most people are actually allergic to. Bees tend to get flower pollen, which is heavy and tends to not cause seasonal allergies. It’s far more common for people to be allergic to grass pollen.