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What bit about it surprises you? Honey is a natural antibacterial (it never goes off - archaeologists have been known to get kicks out of tasting ancient roman

by yomly 6y ago

What bit about it surprises you? Honey is a natural antibacterial (it never goes off - archaeologists have been known to get kicks out of tasting ancient roman honey) it also is also nice and sticky which helps coat the treatment area, protecting it from further irritation. Nature is full of wonders (like the tensile strength of spiders web)

burlesona 6y ago
I guess the surprising bit is that they would find evidence that Honey may be more effective than conventional antibiotics. Why would germs not evolve resistance to honey? I'm not stunned, as you say nature is full of wonders, I just find it interesting.
orev 6y ago
Honey doesn’t go bad for the same reason that a bag of sugar or bag of salt doesn’t — it’s an environment that’s unsuitable for life. Sugar is hygroscopic, so it sucks all the water out of cells so they die. If you diluted honey in water, it would go bad just as quickly as any other sugary drink. Honey is not some magical potion, it was just engineered by bees to have specific properties.
- yomly 6y ago
  A cursory google about honey's antimicrobial properties suggest it's really not as trivial as the hygroscopic properties of sugar although I am comfortable agreeing that will be a contributing factor. So unless you're an expert in the field, I'd be curious to know where your certainty comes from. I never asserted it was a magical potion but after studying biochemistry, pharmacology and medicinal chemistry, I was pretty humbled by how little we humans think we know, and how primitive our methods are when compared against nature at problem solving. Our physiology is exquisitely sensitive, the fact that nature has found ways to exploit even things like kinetic isotope effects to good use undermines all kinds of naive assumptions we like to model over like "the chemistry elements express is the same across its isotopes". Modern medicine is still a woefully blunt tool in the face of the future of possibilities. So when the bees "engineered" honey to be a certain way, I like it as a product because it's been through an iterative design process and "clinical trials" for the course of millennia, if you will...

by yomly 6y ago

burlesona 6y ago

I guess the surprising bit is that they would find evidence that Honey may be more effective than conventional antibiotics. Why would germs not evolve resistance to honey? I'm not stunned, as you say nature is full of wonders, I just find it interesting.

orev 6y ago

Honey doesn’t go bad for the same reason that a bag of sugar or bag of salt doesn’t — it’s an environment that’s unsuitable for life. Sugar is hygroscopic, so it sucks all the water out of cells so they die. If you diluted honey in water, it would go bad just as quickly as any other sugary drink. Honey is not some magical potion, it was just engineered by bees to have specific properties.

yomly 6y ago
A cursory google about honey's antimicrobial properties suggest it's really not as trivial as the hygroscopic properties of sugar although I am comfortable agreeing that will be a contributing factor. So unless you're an expert in the field, I'd be curious to know where your certainty comes from. I never asserted it was a magical potion but after studying biochemistry, pharmacology and medicinal chemistry, I was pretty humbled by how little we humans think we know, and how primitive our methods are when compared against nature at problem solving. Our physiology is exquisitely sensitive, the fact that nature has found ways to exploit even things like kinetic isotope effects to good use undermines all kinds of naive assumptions we like to model over like "the chemistry elements express is the same across its isotopes". Modern medicine is still a woefully blunt tool in the face of the future of possibilities. So when the bees "engineered" honey to be a certain way, I like it as a product because it's been through an iterative design process and "clinical trials" for the course of millennia, if you will...