Many Touting Honey's Health, Beauty Benefits

By Pat Nichols, Chillicothe Gazette, 6/8/2009

Honey has been exchanged as currency, employed as an ancient embalming agent and consumed as a sweet food staple from biblical times and beyond.

Now there's increasing talk of honey's healthful influence on the human body. From warding off infections to easing sore throat pain, honey could turn out to be precisely what the doctor ordered.

According to world- famous honey purveyor Sue Bee Honey, eating a small amount of honey each day may be just the shield your body needs to put up a decent fight against infection. Not only that, the company also recommends swallowing a teaspoon of the gooey goodness to ease sore throat pain, boost antioxidant intake or power up energy levels.

Recent studies also have indicated certain types of honey - manuka honey from New Zealand's manuka bush and sidr honey from Yemen's sidr tree, to be exact - also may slay bacteria associated with chronic sinus inflammation, according to WebMD's health news writer Kelley Colihan, who cites research from the University of Ottawa.

"The two types of honey were effective in killing the bacteria," Colihan wrote…