Natural Antibiotics: Honey

Honey, scientists are saying, is now understood to contain powerful naturally occurring antibiotics that may hold great potential for fighting disease. Researchers from the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam are telling us that for the first time they now understand why honey has held such a prominent place in natural medicine. The study was published in the July 2010 issue of the FASEB Journal. The scientists explain that when bees make honey they insert a protein called defensin-1 that may be used to fight antibiotic resistant bacteria in the near future. “Honey or isolated honey-derived components might be of great value for prevention and treatment of infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria,” said Sebastian A.J. Zaat, Ph.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Department of Medical Microbiology at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam. “We’ve known for millennia that honey can be good for what ails us, but we haven’t known how it works,” explained Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of the FASEB Journal, “Now that we’ve extracted a potent antibacterial ingredient from honey, we can make it still more effective and take the sting out of bacterial infections.” Source: http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/full/24/7/2576

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