Difference between revisions of "Honey"
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Revision as of 06:18, 19 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).
Contents
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.
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 and is specially sterilized is prescribed by a doctor for a burn or post-surgical infection, it is of course vegan.
Beyond that, there's no strong evidence for effect on cough, and there's not even a mechanistic possibility for it to affect common allergies.
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.
