Revision as of 05:58, 26 March 2018

By the crude definition of vegan, honey isn't vegan because it's an animal product. However, in spirit this is complicated somewhat by the legitimate and necessary use of bees to pollinate many crops (see Bees in Agriculture), and while most commercial operations over-harvest honey and replace it with sugar or corn syrup, honey can potentially be a legitimate byproduct of strictly pollination-focused operations (see here).

Nutrition

Honey is not a healthy food product. Nutritionally, it is essentially sugar.

The difference is that it's often contaminated with potentially dangerous bacterial spores which can cause a botulism infectinon, and is not safe for young children and the immunocompromised.

Medical Uses

If honey had legitimate medical uses, it would arguably be vegan when so used due to medical exceptions.

Commonly, it is used as folk medicine for allergies and cough, and some also believe it has antibiotic properties.

Antibacterial

In-vitro, honey does have significant antimicrobial activity due its hypertonic nature (it dries out and kills cells because it draws water away from them). It may have had some limited use in ancient times where more effective topical treatments were unavailable. In-vivo, orally, it has virtually no effect because dilution with water or stomach fluids negate the hypertonic properties.

Topical use in the modern era is more suspect, but certain kinds of honey are occasionally used for wound healing and may have modest evidence. If FDA approved "Medi Honey" which comes from a specific kind of nectar (from which its medically active component originates; not the bees), is specially sterilized and is prescribed by a doctor for a burn or post-surgical infection, it is of course vegan by way of medical exception.

Allergies

Scientific investigation has consistently shown that honey does not improve allergies.

While in theory very small exposures to an allergen can work as therapy (this is how allergy shots work), there's not even a mechanistic possibility for honey to affect common allergies due to the pollen honey typically contains traces of (remember, honey is not made from pollen) not being the cause of common allergies: even for local honey[1].

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of pollen that evolved for different methods of dispersal: Insect and wind carried.

The kind of pollen that causes seasonal allergies is the small grained pollen which has evolved to be light enough to be easily carried on the wind, not to entice insects. Honeybees do not typically collect this kind of pollen, focusing instead on larger grained pollen for food.

Even if it were the right kind of pollen, there's no reason to believe it would survive digestion to be able to provide a suitable dose of allergen, or it could provoke an all-out allergic reaction; immunotherapy is based on very careful dosages, and the wrong dose can make things much worse.

If you need help with allergies, use conventional antihistimines & steroids as prescribed by your doctor, or allergy shots.

=Cough Suppression

Cough suppression is complicated by the fact that there are very few substantially effective medications available, placebo control being difficult for many remedies, and cough suppression itself being highly subjective. Several options outperform placebo, but only by a small margin.

On cough suppression of Honey, a Cochrane review concluded:

Honey may be better than 'no treatment', diphenhydramine and placebo for the symptomatic relief of cough, but it is not better than dextromethorphan. None of the included studies assessed the effect of honey on 'cough duration' because intervention and follow-up were for one night only. There is no strong evidence for or against the use of honey.[2]

In other words, it's possible but there's no good evidence. It's important to note that until very recently there was no good evidence that diphenhydramine (and antihystamine) was effective for cough at all (it does have a small effect at suppressing cough from capsaicin[3]), and even dextromethorphan (which is better than honey) is probably only slightly better than placebo.

If you have a cold, there's no credible reason to turn to honey to relieve your symptoms.

Bees in Agriculture

Some important questions to ask may be if these plants are really necessary to eat, and how they compare to other crops. There are a lot of unknowns in insect mortality in agriculture, as well as other questions of efficiency and sustainability (some are discussed in the article on Sustainable Vegan Agriculture), and while these unknowns probably do not justify any kind of massive shift in agricultural practice, the known harms may justify easy changes in consumer ones when it comes to honey.

Agricultural Byproduct

Sustainability

Bee Sentience

Insect deaths vs. other sweeteners