When it comes to promoting health and fighting disease, perhaps no food is more “golden” than honey. Today honey appears in everything from facial scrubs to candles to lip balm to cough drops to your daily coffee drink. The number of backyard beekeepers has grown exponentially in recent years. Honey is just as likely to appear from your neighbor’s yard as the farmer’s market. But does honey deserve its healthy halo? Depending on whom one asks, that can be a sticky subject.
Gene Armstrong, president of the Nashville Area Beekeepers Association, certainly knows his honey. And according to him, “there’s science and there’s wishful thinking, and the two don’t always overlap. “I’ve got to ride the middle ground on this issue,” Gene comments, “because many of our members (there are some 500), believe that bees and their products are practically a panacea. For example, many strongly believe that bee stings provide a therapeutic benefit for people with arthritis. Well, I have arthritis, get stung regularly, and can’t say that there is any personal benefit. To the best of my knowledge, there is no scientific evidence for this hypothesis.”