Effectiveness of honey for symptomatic relief in respiratory tract infections | Hacker News Reader

Effectiveness of honey for symptomatic relief in respiratory tract infections

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45 pointsbookofjoe39 comments

My family recipe for colds has been a hot honey and lemon.

Cover the bottom of the cup with a layer of honey. Put as much lemon as you think they can take. Pour boiling hot water in. Stir, and drink.

I have no idea how well it works for sickness. But it works amazingly well for symptom relief.

You’ll notice a common thing in all cold remedies (tea, hot honey tea, hot lemon tea, hot honey and lemon, hot chicken soup, hot broth, etc): they are all hot liquids that you consume over a few minutes (instead of a pill that you just swallow). The secret is the hot liquid melts the mucus and opens up your airways.

Plain hot water works just as well as any other remedy, and doesn’t have any extra sugar or caffeine that you might not want.

Do you have a reference for that?

Because I'm posting this in response to a metastudy that indicates that honey works better than a placebo. And anecdotally I've found that other hot drinks, such as coffee, do not work as well as a hot honey and lemon. And yet your theory indicates that coffee should be equivalent.

The heat also might have an anti-viral effect, as cold viruses tend to flourish in the colder than internal body temperatures of the airways. It can act like a localized brief fever, but even hotter.

You need to back that up with heavy duty studies if you want it taken seriously on HN.

I have done a metric fuck ton of home remedies for respiratory stuff. I don't think that is remotely accurate.

I’m not saying anything that requires extraordinary evidence, even basic medical sites say this:

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/common-cold/i...

I don't readily see any mention in your first link. Your second link says:

Sip warm liquids. A cold remedy used in many cultures, taking in warm liquids, such as chicken soup, tea or warm apple juice, might be soothing and might ease congestion by increasing mucus flow.

I'm not disputing that warm liquids help. The thing I take issue with is your claim that the warm liquid is all that really matters and you can just use hot water and it's superior to consuming stuff with sugar etc.

Ironically, right below the above quote of your source, it says as a separate suggestion:

Try honey. Honey may help coughs in adults and children who are older than age 1. Try it in hot tea.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/common-cold/i...

It's the very first point in the first link:

Stay hydrated: ... drinking warm liquids can be soothing, prevent dehydration and ease congestion.

The honey thing in the second link is not at all ironic. "Try honey in your hot beverage" is pretty straightforward. Honey tastes good, so try it in your hot beverage. Again it follows the common theme.

I have super bad eyesight and a serious medical condition. I sometimes have trouble finding things that other people think are pretty obvious. I stated explicitly I didn't readily see it. The implicit message there is that I don't doubt that it's there, but I, personally, can't find it quickly enough for me to feel it is worth pursuing to have some fairly trivial argument on the internet.

We seem to be failing to communicate on my main point.

I agree that warm liquids help. I'm not disputing that.

But showing that doesn't actually show that the hot liquid is the only "active ingredient" and nothing else matters such that just drinking hot water is an adequate substitute for a variety of home remedies where the theme is hot liquids. You aren't providing any support for that point.

I am disputing that specific point. I don't think it is true and I don't think you have provided any support for it.

Mine has always been this plus whiskey. Maybe an Irish thing. Certainly useful to help fall asleep.

sub the lemon for orange peel, dash of bitters and you've got damn good an old fashioned right there.

Another data point on it being an Irish thing. My parents treated my sore throats with this as a young child. Presumably just a wee bit of whiskey.

Enough symptom relief and pretty soon you are actually well.

Doctors routinely treat symptoms when they don't have better answers because it actually works fairly well to just do that.

Isn't honey greatly affected by the flowers used to make it, eg manuka, clover, etc.?[0] So it may not be "honey" but a particular type of honey(s) that have beneficial effects.

Could be. Different honey also has differing flavor, consistency, etc. As an example, our local honey supplier suggested one type for sore throats - tarweed honey. It was thicker and had a much stronger flavor. Theory was it would stick longer (have yet to try).

Flavor wise it was not what I’d want to use for regular consumption, but if it works better when sick? Sure.

Does the fact that this was a meta-analysis of multiple studies maybe account for differences in particular types of honey?

The crux of the reproducibility crisis.

Beyond the flower, there's also general environmental allergens that affect the honey and might have some part in helping any allergy-related inflammation and infection response.

This might be the rare circumstance where this is helpful to mention. Costco has a very affordable (relatively) offering of Manuka honey right now. This is the strain that in several studies has shown powerful antibiotic properties to combat MRSA.

I´m surprised seeing it popping up in mass retail because it was always advertised as something rather rare and special and only available in low volumes via speciality stores.

edit: Ah yes, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81nuka_honey#Adulteration

I share your skepticism, but I believe it's the real deal in this instance at least. https://www.costco.com/manuka-health-20%2b-raw-manuka-honey%...

Thx, I've seen that already and wondered why no Kirkland :-)

I’m not a doctor so please correct me if I’m interpreting this incorrectly. It seems the TLDR is:

1. There are few effective treatments for upper respiratory tract infection.

2. The authors combined all studies currently done on the efficacy of honey to estimate how it compares to conventional treatment (antibiotics).

3. Honey appears to help slightly more than conventional treatment (just at managing symptoms?).

4. They recommend further studies with placebo control to learn more.

That’s interesting and kind of surprising to me. How does one use honey as a treatment? Just eat some? How much? How often? Etc.

It's a part of traditional medicine in Russia. As a personal anecdote, I didn't find it particularly effective on me, but it's good to see a proper study conducted.

Anyway, the way to take honey is usually with hot tea. Drink from a cup and use a special spoon [1] for honey. It tastes well together.

1. https://www.google.com/search?q=honey+spoon

My grandmother would put it for a day in a hole, cut in a black radish, and then feed me a spoon every once in a while. The modern hip way is to use lemons, honey and ginger to make a brew. After COVID broke out lemons and ginger in Moscow tripled in price at some point.

Granny style remedy: mix honey with lemon juice and eat it with tea spoons. Don't eat or drink anything for the next half hour.

The aim is to coat your throat with it.

> Some studies used comparators that attempted to replicate the look and consistency of honey. If the effect of honey is mediated through forming a soothing mechanical barrier, then these comparators could have a similar effect to honey, biasing the results towards the null.

This is the only mention of that particular mechanism of action. I've always heard that coating the throat is the aim as well, but I'm skeptical.

Hot lemon and honey (hot water with lemon and honey dissolved in, sometimes with soluble paracetamol) was my mum's standard treatment for sore throat / cough / runny nose type ailments. Maybe there was something to that.

>How does one use honey as a treatment? Just eat some? How much? How often? Etc.

Depends on the use case, for wounds you can apply it to dressings, but generally yes just eat it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3758027/

Just to add to the other comments of honey as a "folk remedy" for cough and sore throat: there's a Chinese version of it too that's based on honey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nin_Jiom_Pei_Pa_Koa

It's interesting that multiple cultures have the same remedy. Be curious to see if it was independently discovered or disseminated through trade.

What bit about it surprises you? Honey is a natural antibacterial (it never goes off - archaeologists have been known to get kicks out of tasting ancient roman honey) it also is also nice and sticky which helps coat the treatment area, protecting it from further irritation.

Nature is full of wonders (like the tensile strength of spiders web)

I guess the surprising bit is that they would find evidence that Honey may be more effective than conventional antibiotics. Why would germs not evolve resistance to honey? I'm not stunned, as you say nature is full of wonders, I just find it interesting.

Honey doesn’t go bad for the same reason that a bag of sugar or bag of salt doesn’t — it’s an environment that’s unsuitable for life. Sugar is hygroscopic, so it sucks all the water out of cells so they die. If you diluted honey in water, it would go bad just as quickly as any other sugary drink.

Honey is not some magical potion, it was just engineered by bees to have specific properties.

A cursory google about honey's antimicrobial properties suggest it's really not as trivial as the hygroscopic properties of sugar although I am comfortable agreeing that will be a contributing factor. So unless you're an expert in the field, I'd be curious to know where your certainty comes from.

I never asserted it was a magical potion but after studying biochemistry, pharmacology and medicinal chemistry, I was pretty humbled by how little we humans think we know, and how primitive our methods are when compared against nature at problem solving.

Our physiology is exquisitely sensitive, the fact that nature has found ways to exploit even things like kinetic isotope effects to good use undermines all kinds of naive assumptions we like to model over like "the chemistry elements express is the same across its isotopes". Modern medicine is still a woefully blunt tool in the face of the future of possibilities.

So when the bees "engineered" honey to be a certain way, I like it as a product because it's been through an iterative design process and "clinical trials" for the course of millennia, if you will...

Tea with honey, milk with honey, camomile tea with honey. In all cases, it's likely the hot liquid does the most part.

But as kids, my parents also often gave us a teaspoon of honey when we had a strong cough, suckling on it would help a bit, at least psychologically.

Camomile has known antibiotic effects, as do many teas. The hot liquid helps, but it's not the only "active ingredient" nor the biggest detail in many cases. Though heat treatments absolutely are a thing and do, per se, help kill stuff.

> That’s interesting and kind of surprising to me. How does one use honey as a treatment? Just eat some? How much? How often? Etc.

This is what I do when I notice the first signs of a dry or sore throat / have cough / or other types of infections in the mouth or throat:

I buy forest-originating honey (it is usually darker color and in my country it usually has the slight aroma of pine trees), but I have also used other types. I take 1-2 teaspoons honey, but I do not swallow it. I let it slowly dissolve it in my mouth, so that it can slowly go down the throat and have the eventual effect last longer.

After that, I take a cup of hot mint tea.

I am a scientist, I understand that I might be misleading myself, I know that there might not be any effect and that I might be imagining everything, but it really feels better after this.I certainly feel an immediate effect -- it is alleviating the pain or the burning sensation in the throat, but this effect does not last long. So every couple of hours I repeat the procedure.

In fact, I should say that having a spoonful of honey, slowly melting it in the mouth, and then drinking a cup of tea, should not be considered as just a procedure or a medication, but as enjoyment and one way to make you feel better in an otherwise miserable day.

If it really helps to speed up recovery - then why not? It is not harmful, unless you have diabetes or alergy.

Anyway, the point is not to dilute the honey in hot tea. Supposedly, all beneficial substance is lost in high temperatures.

In addition, I once watched a German documentary about a clinic that experiments with different types of honey and use it for treating open wounds that take much longer to heal otherwise. They used special honey, put it on bandage and put it on the wounds.

Finally, one should not forget that feeding some microorganisms with sugars might not be a good idea and can increase their growth and reproduction, so it's best that you consult a medical doctor for every illness especially if it's severe.

Granny style remedy that I haven't seen mentioned here:

cut thin slices of onion, coat top of slice with honey, possibly put another layer of onion slices and another layer of honey or more. Put all of this in a closed container, in room-or-slightly colder temperature (but not fridge) for a few hours.

Fumes from the onion melt the honey making it much more liquidy. Honey sips into onion and makes it less sharp.

Eat onion and/or drink honey/onion liquid (or take with a spoon - it is quite intense). Put in fridge if you don't use all at once. Also nice as a condiment for some foods.

Possibly placebo, but tends to help with cold and headaches.

Not a placebo at all. I use onion as lung support. I have serious respiratory problems.

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