Honey contains more than 180 different nutrients, including protein, enzymes, vitamins and minerals such as B12, calcium, sodium, phosphorus, manganese and fluoride.
Honey is known to be rich in both enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidants, including catalase, ascorbic acid, flavonoids and alkaloids. Just make sure the honey you pick is raw and unprocessed. Besides the antibiotic benefits - where it has the ability to kill and inhibit the growth of wide range of bacterial and fungal species, due to its low Ph levels - here are five other ways to use honey.
Health and healing: Honey can help heal skin wounds, gastric ulcers and burns. During the Second World War the famous Soviet surgeon S A Smirnov used honey to treat gunshot wounds. The curative effects are owed to honey's acidity, hydrogen peroxide content, osmotic effect, nutritional and antioxidant contents, stimulation of immunity, and to unidentified compounds special to honey.
The respiratory system: Honey helps with allergies and respiratory illnesses, including a cough. It helps eliminate and melt mucus and clears the respiratory system.
The heart: Honey helps slow the oxidation of low density lipoprotein cholesterol - the "bad" variety, which is responsible for causing arteriosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. It also contains a variety of antioxidants, which help reduce blood pressure.
The mind: Honey helps with memory and as coined by Ibn Sina (980–1037), or Avicenna as he is known to the Western world, is the "happiness drug". He wrote more than a dozen prescriptions to different ailments containing honey in his world-famous medical textbook The Canon of Medicine, and one of them how it helps fight depression. More recent studies show it possesses memory-enhancing properties.
• Beauty. Honey is a humectant, which means it attracts and retains moisture. This makes honey a natural fit in moisturising products such as cleansers, creams, shampoos and conditioners.
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