Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: JanetCarol on 29/05/2010 01:30:03
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Janet Hamilton asked the Naked Scientists:
Good Morning!
I was listening to an old podcast at work on traditional medicine.
Recently I've been catching cold rather often and my mom said I should start taking sulfur and honey for two weeks.
She told me, when we were young she would give us 1/8tsp sulfur with 1 tbsp raw honey for the first fourteen days of spring to prevent illness.
Apparently it's something my family has been doing for generations.
I tried to google the reasoning behind this and found nothing other than detox jibber jabber.
I remember reading at some point though, taking sulfur gave your immune system a boost.
Over all.... What would the science behind taking sulfur and honey be?
Thank you!
Janet Hamilton
What do you think?
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I don't know about sulfur, but honey has many uses as a therapeutic tool. They use it regularly in some countries to enhace wound healing (see this (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2845359/?tool=pubmed) article for example).
Honey has well documented antibacterial proparties too (see this (http://www.funpecrp.com.br/gmr/year2009/vol8-2/pdf/kerr023.pdf) article for deetailed analisys). And it's a natural antioxidant too (see it here (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf0114637))
I didn't found any data on prevention, but study from Iran reports: "symptoms of the common cold decreased significantly with the use of honey." (I can't provide you a link to the publication, but you can find it if you have access to Elsevier articles. The citation: Pourahmad M, & Sobhanian S. (2009) Effect of Honey on the Common Cold. Archives of Medical Research 40(3), 224-225)