Buying Local Honey Will Not Cure Your Allergies; That’s Why

Allergy sufferers are often advised to eat local honey. According to the theory, this increases your tolerance for local pollen, and that would make sense, except for one inconvenient fact: honey is obtained from flowers, and you are not allergic to pollen.

The flowers produce a sweet nectar that attracts bees and other pollinators, and they also form large, sticky pollen grains that, with luck, will stick to the legs of the bees so that they can pollinate other flowers. It is true that the honey that bees produce from nectar may contain traces of this pollen.

But that’s not the pollen you’re allergic to. Pay attention to the typical allergy sufferers : ryegrass, maple, oak and many others. These plants do produce what the botanist considers to be a flower, but they are barely noticeable: not large, not colorful, not fragrant, not visited by bees. This is because these plants are wind-pollinated , relying on the wind to bring a mass of their powdery pollen to distant sexual partners. (Not to piss you off, but pollen is essentially plant sperm.) It is from this windblown pollen that you get occasional odors, and it’s small enough to irritate your nose and potentially cause allergies. This explains why research shows thathoney does not help with allergies .

However, we don’t want to stop you from eating local honey. You will support local beekeepers and you will probably get better quality honey than mass-produced products. In my experience, it tastes better, too: clover honey just doesn’t compare to a product made with (my favorite) autumn wildflowers.

Check out the full article on Slate to learn more about the allergy link and why, even if you’re one of the rare flower allergy people, it probably won’t help anyway.

Honey bundles of lies | Slate

Photo by Bob Peterson .

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