Hi Kids, Tracy posted this honey info on his alternative health list and I feel it is worth passing on. I don't recall if anyone has mentioned honey as part of a CS ointment................
David __________________ Is Honey Really a healthful food? The popular idea that whereas white sugar is bad for health, honey is good, and whereas white sugar injures the teeth, honey does not, is quite erroneous.. Honey is a product of nectar from flowers which has been acted on by formic acid from a beers organism, and is relatively poor in minerals in comparison with the acid-forming tendency of its high sugar content, being a much more mineral-poor, acid-forming and decalcifying sweetening agent then unfiltered maple syrup: The writer has known of cases where misguided persons, giving up sugar, commenced to use honey liberally, believing that since it was a "natural"sweet, it was good for them, and could be eaten freely, even excessively, without ill effects. The result was that their teeth became decalcified even at a faster rats than when they used white sugar, which., knowing that it was bad, they would tend to use more sparingly. In a certain instance the members of a family of vegetarians who produced honey and earned their living selling it, and who, consequently, used it in quantity, found that their teeth gradually wore away to their roots, which became abscessed and had to be removed. Honey, being very acid-forming forms large quantities of carbonic acid in the blood, without sufficient alkaline minerals to balance it and hold it in cheek, from attacking the teeth and robbing them of calcium. Page 149 For this reason, the free use of honey, like of other mineral-poor concentrated sweets, gradually destroys the teeth, especially if used excessively together with an otherwise acid forming diet. Use of honey by vegetarians is an anomaly, since honey is an animal food in the true sense of the word, just as cow's milk is. The cow eats grass and from it produces a mannary secretion called milk. The bee takes nectar from a flower and by adding to it formic acid produced by glands of its body (this formic acid being a sort of "insect milk" forms the product known an honey. In addition to formic acid, honey contains manite acid, which interacts with protein, forming alcohol, ammonia and carbonic acid. Thus honey introduces three acids into the body - formic, manite and carbonic. This produces acid fermentation in the stomach, leading in some casts to milder or severer nervous intoxication and systemic poison. The old Norse, by soaking malt grain in solution of honey, made an alcoholic beverage named "nyod (mead ). Many honeys are toxic due to bees going to flowers with toxic elements in their nectar. This is especially true when bees are in the vicinity of trees or plants that have been sprayed with poisonous insecticides. In East Nepaul, bees turn pollen of the Rhododendron flower intro a honey that produces a state of stupor similar to that produced by opium. Combined with starches, the sugar of honey sets up fermentation and gas production. The laxative virtue ascribed to honey has its basis in this very fermentation, since the body, as an act of self-preservation, eliminates through the bowels the toxins and ptomaine's generated by the mixture of honey with food. Dr. A. E. Gibson writes: "It is a common popular belief that honey is a legitimate sweet, and can be used with dietetic safety where other kinds of sugar are regarded as dangerous. Honey in combination with other food-stuffs is even move dangerous than ordinary white sugar." Healthful Alkaline Sources of Natural Fruit Sugar There are several excellent substitutes for honey and cane sugar which have been imported from the Near East. One of these is carob or St. John's bread. This is a long, dry fruit which is available in powdered form or, as a thick syrup resembling molasses. In either case there is present levulose, or fruit sugar, in combination with an abundance of alkaline minerals. This is one of the finest sweeting agents, since it is sufficiently rich in minerals to prevent its highly digestible fruit sugar content from having any acid-forming or decalcifying effect. Another sweetening agent now available is Grape Nectar and Butter imported from Turkey. These are made entirely from the juice of organically grown Turkish grapes, which has been concentrated down to a syrup or a butter consistency. These products supply pure grape sugar, one of the best of all sugars, in combination with iron and alkaline minerals, so that when used as a sweetening agent, there is no harmful, acid-forming or decalcifying effect, but rather, in addition to sugar, valuable minerals and vitamins of the grape are supplied in concentrated form. (Super-Health thru Organic Super-Food, Bernard, pgs148,149) HONEY POSSIBLE THERAPEUTIC BENEFITS: . Kills bacteria . Disinfects wounds and sores . Reduces perception of pain . Alleviates asthma . Soothes sore throats . Calms the nerves, induces sleep . Relieves diarrhea FOLKLORE Honey was to the ancient Egyptians what aspirin is to modem medicine: the most popular among drugs. Honey is mentioned 500 times in 900 remedies in the Smith Papyrus, an Egyptian medical text dating between 2600 and 2200 B.C. The nectar is universally hailed as an ointment to heal wounds, sores, and skin ulcers. Honey during wartime has been smeared on wounds as an antiseptic by ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Assyrians, and Chinese as well as by Germans In World War I. Hippocrates advised mixing honey, water, and other various medicinal substances to treat fever. According to the 1811 edition of The Edinburgh New Dispensatory "From the earliest ages, honey has been employed as a medicine . . . it forms an excellent gargle and facilitates the expectoration of viscid 216 HONEY 217 phlegm; and it is sometimes employed as an emollient application to abscesses, and as a detergent to ulcers." Honey is often mixed with lemon juice or vinegar as a soothing cough syrup. Vermont folk physician D. C. Jarvis in his best-selling book, Folk Medicine (1958), recommends honey for coughs, muscle cramps, burns, stuffy nose, sinusitis, hay fever, bed wetting in children, and insomnia. "A tablespoon of honey at the evening meal," he says, makes you look forward to bedtime. FACTS Folk medicine is entirely right in dubbing honey a potent killer of bacteria, an antiseptic, and a disinfectant. Numerous modern scientists have watched honey-touched bacteria disintegrate. In one interesting experiment, surgeon and medical historian Guido Manjo, author of The Healing Hand, tested the formula of a wound salve from the ancient Egyptian Smith Papyrus; it called for one-third honey, or byt, mixed with two-thirds fat. He was apprehensive: "I thought at first that this would be dreadful stuff to put on an open wound .... Instead, the bacteria in the fat tended to disappear and when pathogenic bacteria were added, like Escherichia coli or Staphylococcus aureus, they were killed just as fast." HONEY IN THE WOUND Physicians, especially in developing countries, routinely smear honey on wounds and sores as a disinfectant ointment, according to Dr. P. J. Armon, a physician in South Africa. Writing in a medical journal, he related excellent success in using honey to treat infected wounds at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center. The honey, he says, hastens healing and keeps the wound sterile, eliminating the need for conventional antibiotics. Indeed, in 1970 a prominent British surgeon surprised colleagues by announcing that he regularly used honey on open wounds after vulvectomies (cancer surgery). He found that the honey-covered wounds healed faster and had less bacterial colonization than wounds treated with ordinary antibiotics. As confirmation, he and his colleagues put honey in test tubes with a wide range of infectious organisms. The honey killed them all. 218 THE FOODS: A MODERN PHARMACOPOEIA DIARRHEA CURE Additionally, South African researchers found that honey squelched the growth of such germs as Salmonella. Shigella, E. Coli, and V. cholerae, which cause diarrhea, a deadly curse in the third world. Most important, the honey when eaten retained its power against bacteria in the intestinal tract, and helped curb diarrhea. As an experiment, Drs. I. E. Haffejee and A. Moosa, at the Department of Pediatrics and Child Health at the University of Natal, Durban, South Africa, fed one group of youngsters with acute gastroenteritis fluids with sugar and another group fluids with honey. Those with bacteria-caused diarrhea who got the honey recovered forty percent faster. The researchers' inescapable conclusion: honey's antibacterial activity in the intestinal tract helped cure the diarrhea. How honey disables bacteria is not agreed upon. Some experts say the sugar in honey sucks moisture out of bacteria, causing them to die. But that's not the entire answer, In one test of honey's antibiotic activity, the sugar was removed. The remaining sugarless distillate of honey still killed a broad range of bacteria as effectively as streptomycin did. Additionally, the germs did not develop a resistance to honey as they did to the streptomycin. ASTHMA RATIONALE It may seem ludicrous that honey could ward off asthma, as the ancients claimed. Still, one theory might account for it. Ingesting traces of pollen found in honey could desensitize you to allergies the same way pollen injections (allergy slots) do. But until recently it seemed doubtful that the pollen in honey would survive digestion to reach the blood stream. However, a physician, Dr. U. Wahn of the Heidelberg University Children's Clinic, found that children who drank a pollen solution showed fewer signs of hay fever and allergy-related asthma. Seventy allergyprone children drank a solution containing pollen daily during hay fever season and three times a week in the winter. Eighty-four percent had fewer allergic symptoms than usual. Signs of watery eyes and conjunctivitis dropped by seventy percent and bouts of runny, irritated nose fell by fifty percent. Researchers concluded that the pollen did survive digestion and get into the blood stream, somewhat desensitizing the children to their allergies and asthma. Thus, eating pollen-laden honey could produce a similar kind of desensitization to allergies and allergy induced asthma. HONEY 219 And is there truth to the folk remedy that honey soothes a sore throat? Dr. Robert I. Henkin, a specialist in taste and smell disorders at the Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., says yes. For one thing, he notes that sweets can trigger brain chemicals that dull your perception of pain. SLEEPING POTION Honey does tend to calm you down and put you to sleep. In the body honey is metabolized like table sugar; and it is well established that sugar leads to more serotonin in the brain, a chemical that calms down brain activity, inducing relaxation and sleep, according to experiments at MIT. CAUTION Don't feed honey to infants under one year of age, cautions the Centers for Disease Control. Honey can carry bacterial botulism spores that germinate in a baby's immature intestine, colonize, and make a deadly toxin. Although infant botulism cases are rare-about one hundred were reported in the world in 1986, possibly one third involving honey-authorities say giving honey to infants is not worth the risk. WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION'S RECIPE FOR TRAVELER'S DIARRHEA Fill one glass with eight ounces orange juice, a pinch of table salt, and 1/2 teaspoon honey. Fill another glass with eight ounces distilled water and 1/4 teaspoon baking soda. Alternate drinking from each glass. (The Food Pharmacy, Carper, pgs 216-219) -- E-mail: broompi...@netzero.net Fax to: 1-253-681-1133 ICQ#... 44960928 ____________NetZero Free Internet Access and Email_________ Download Now http://www.netzero.net/download/index.html Request a CDROM 1-800-333-3633 ___________________________________________________________ -- The silver-list is a moderated forum for discussion of colloidal silver. 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