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Humans have been consuming honey for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks used it as a sweetener, but also a treatment for burns. Hippocrates, often referred to as the “father of medicine”, championed the sticky stuff – mistakenly – for purposes as varied as contraception and baldness.
Today, honey is often described as a superfood with a laundry list of promised benefits: a treatment for coughs, an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory, a potential solution to combat drug-resistant superbugs. Antiviral has previously debunked claims about hay fever and honey, finding there is little evidence that raw honey can reduce symptoms of allergic rhinitis.
When it comes to the substance’s claimed benefits, what sticks, and what’s just unfounded buzz?
What are the benefits of honey?
Honey produced by the western honeybee, Apis mellifera, contains predominantly sugar – about 80%. That level of sugar does not leave enough water for bacteria to survive in, says Liz Harry, an emeritus professor at the University of Technology Sydney.
“It basically never goes off,” says Dr Kenya Fernandes of the University of Sydney. The high sugar concentration is partly why honey has been found intact in ancient pots dating back thousands of years.
But honey also contains components with antimicrobial properties, such as hydrogen peroxide – the same compound used as a disinfectant. A 2024 study Fernandes co-authored found that dozens of Australian honey samples retained some antimicrobial properties even after 15 to 17 years of storage.
Honey also has traces of vitamins and minerals, with nutrients varying depending on the location and type of nectar harvested.
Manuka honeys, produced from the nectar of the manuka tree, “as far as we know, are unique in containing a chemical called methylglyoxal,” Harry says. That compound also has antibacterial properties, as do other proteins and peptides that have been identified in honey.
“It’s really about a complex mixture of different things, all working together, that are more than the sum of their individual parts – which is one of the reasons that we’re interested in using whole honey potentially as topical treatments, rather than trying to fractionate out those individual components,” Fernandes says.
Some evidence suggests honey can help with wound healing, but the substance isn’t widely employed in healthcare, says Prof Deshan Sebaratnam, a dermatologist at the Skin Hospital in Sydney. “There is some evidence that honey might be better than certain conventional antiseptics, but most of the studies in this area are not good quality,” he adds.
Despite its antimicrobial properties, raw honey can contain bacterial spores including those that cause botulism. For this reason, it should not be given to infants under 12 months, and medical-grade honey used for wound dressings is sterilised using gamma radiation.
Because honey contains a mixture of active compounds that can differ from one pot to another, standardising non-manuka honeys for clinical use is a challenge.
A recent study led by Fernandes has found that bees that collected nectar from a variety of Australian native plants (excluding the manuka tree) made honey with stronger antimicrobial effects than honey made from a single source. Currently, she says, scientists “lack the apparatus to be able to predict which honeys are going to be very consistently good [against bacteria] … that’s part of the reason for doing this research”.
Is honey an antibiotic?
Unfortunately, bee juice might not be the solution to the global antibiotic resistance crisis. There is evidence for honey’s effectiveness as an antiseptic, something applied externally to the skin – but not as an antibiotic, a substance that acts against bacteria inside the body.
“It’s totally inappropriate to use an antibiotic by eating it,” Harry says. “It’s not like a drug that gets into the bloodstream and reaches the right area.” Other antiseptics (applied to living tissues) and disinfectants (which are applied to inanimate surfaces) such as ethanol – drinking alcohol – work well externally, but do not have the same effects when imbibed.
“There’s no reason why manuka would be better to eat than any other honey,” Harry says.
There is some evidence, however, suggesting that honey has gut microbiome effects. Honey contains indigestible carbohydrates known as oligosaccharides, which act as prebiotics – substances that promote the growth of good bacteria in the gut.
Because of its high sugar content, “I don’t think honey would necessarily be a product that you sold for gut health,” Harry says. But possible prebiotic compounds in honey are an avenue for further study.
Research has also linked honey to better sleep and less severe coughs in children with an upper respiratory tract infection, with the notable caveat that such coughs generally don’t require treatment. And, as Prof Clare Collins at the University of Newcastle has pointed out, the amount and type of honey given varies across studies, “with no certainty about which components are present. So the results need to be interpreted with caution.”
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Donna Lu is an assistant editor, climate, environment and science at Guardian Australia
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Antiviral is a fortnightly column that interrogates the evidence behind the health headlines and factchecks popular wellness claims
