Skeptic Hat: Local Honey Isn't Doing Anything Good For Your Allergies

My face is exploding. No, actually my whole body is exploding. Snot, eczema, tears, the constant pre-sneeze upnose tickling—I was not made for this planet. Or I at least wasn’t made for Maryland. The situations in which I’m OK are limited to clean cars with rolled up windows and air conditioning, or blasted-stoned on Benadryl. I feel rage. I went through three fucking rolls of toilet paper one day last weekend in the service of my disgusting nose.

A class of people that make me angry are the anti-doctor-for-real-problems people. Like, the people that would judge you for taking antidepressants for your major depression instead of, like, just drinking this tea because it’s natural and the drug companies are evil, right? Or would judge you for slipping a Claritin—from an evil drug company—instead of just sticking to a regular regimen of, say, local honey.

Local honey is an allergy folk cure with a pseudoscientific basis: local bees use local pollen, some of which goes into local honey (some/barely any of which), and so if you’re eating local honey every day, you will get used to the local pollen that is causing your allergies. In travelling my usual circles, I’ve been noticed that this “cure” is kinda big in the subset of people that includes (for lack of a better term) hipster or underground foodie types.

Which makes sense because local honey fits rather convieniently into the corresponding local foods ideology. And, again, has a basis that sounds rational and even a little science-y. It’s not at all, for a number of reasons, one of the big ones being the difference between biotic and abiotic pollenation.

Plants and flowers are pollenated a number of ways. One of those ways is via bees. This is biotic pollenation. Bees take the pollen from the pollen-producing stamen part of the plant to the pistil ladyparts of the plant, which is thus fertilized. This is plant sex. Other things move pollen around for plants biotically too: ants, bats, hummingbirds, and about 200,00 more varieties of animal.

Bees and other creatures do the pollinating because they’re after nectar, the sweet stuff plants make to attract bees and other creatures to do their sex bidding. They get bees and things bouncing around the plants going after nectar, and the pollen gets transmitted in the process. (It’s a pretty cool process actually and involves the bees having an attractive electrical charge, at least the furry bees.) Bees take the nectar back and make honey with it. They do in fact eat some pollen and feed their bee kids with it, but it’s not a part of honey beyond incidental.

So, by the local honey-as-curative logic, one could also consume some quantity of bat shit, and get the same net effect. But, in any case, the important thing is that there’s very little pollen involved in honey. (Which I get is part of the point of why this is supposed to work: it sounds like homeopathy, but homeopathy is also super-controlled and strict in its quantities. This isn’t.)

But the real big problem with the bee-pollen-honey-allergy theory is that the sorts of plants that are using bees to get their business done are not the sorts of plants you’re probably allergic to. Those plants get their pollen around in an abiotic fashion, without animal help. Instead of bees, these sorts of plants — grasses and deciduous trees, mainly — rely on the wind to take their pollen around to other plants.

And to your nose, where it makes your face explode. Bee pollen, however, is travelling around on bees. Nature — via evolution — is brilliant, and specialized. Pollen gets around different ways, and unless you’re snorting bees and hummingbirds, biotically-mobile pollen isn’t getting into your nose.

All this aside, science has given its attention to the local honey theory. Last month, The New York Times reported on a University of Connecticut study from several years back that took a 30 person sample of allergy sufferers, and found that among the study group local honey has zero effect on symptoms.

So that’s that? Probably not. Everything above is the stuff of science and doctors, and for a lot of people that’s an unreliable source. Though it’s worth noting that homeopathy — which the local-honey thing wouldn’t full under no matter what pollen bees carry — has had scientifically demonstrated success in helping allergy sufferers. Though it’s not conclusive.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv