I used to eat a lot of Manuka honey when I grew up in New Zealand. It is strong-tasting. The Chinese have raised the prices and now I won't buy the stuff in Australia because it is too expensive.
This is my thinking as well. This sounds like yet another Chinese health fad, which often has roots in "traditional" and "alternative" Chinese medicine, which has been shown to be almost all nonsense, with the rare exception that's due more to luck than anything else.
The linked paper describes manuka as having antibacteria properties in regards to dressing wounds. I'm not sure if eating it is giving anyone any benefits and considering what we now know about gut flora and antibiotics, well, people shouldn't just be eating antibiotics like tic-tacs.
> With the right marketing you could get the Chinese to consume anything.
Autocratic states generally don't have any sort of democratic movements for medicine, industrial, air, or food safety, so they never get the proper regulatory bodies to make this stuff safe. Case in point, my wife brought some cold medicine back from Russia. It was chock full of mercury. There were a few articles last year about some common cold medicine marketed to children in China. It was full of lead. FDA advisory here:
Don't recall name, this was four or five years ago.
With many of these things it boils down to: simple food likely does exactly the same thing. I hear that well-nourished people generally have stronger immune systems.
> regards to dressing wounds
Even if it actually works on dressings the bigger question is: how well does it survive HCl and bile? Can it be absorbed via the intestines? Or is the only active effect killing off flora on its way to be pooped out? Sanitized poop: great.
What these people don't realize is that the body isn't something you put things into an expect the same results. Would they guzzle down bleach simply because it cleans their clothes? Why would they then guzzle down this honey, merely because it sanitizes wounds?
Plus it being natural you will have off-label clones riding your expenditure once you got it through so there's no profit margin.
At this point, it would need to be evaluated by the FDA because its making a medical claim.
>because it's naturally occurring?
Penicillium fungi is naturally occurring too. That doesn't' mean you can put it in food arbitrarily.