Your Life Daily: Honey’s Sweet Benefits Are Latest Buzz in Beauty

By KAREN HAMBRIDGE reports.

YOU can pour it on your cereal, dip it in your tea and spread it on your bread – but these days you can also rub it on your face, use it in the shower and smear it all over your body.

Honey is fast becoming one of the hottest ingredients in the beauty business.

Its nourishing and medicinal properties have been widely known for years but recently its regenerative powers have been harnessed by cosmetics and toiletry manufacturers.

And customers love it.

Honey has been used as a medicine for thousands of years. Ancient Roman physicians used honey to help their patients fall asleep while Greek physician Hippocrates wrote about the healing powers of honey and concocted preparations using honey to heal skindisorders, ulcers and sores.

Cataracts, wounds and burns were some of the ills treated with honey by the Egyptians and in more modern times, during the First World War German doctors treated soldiers battle wounds with honey and cod liver oil. Honey and lemon is still a popularremedy for colds and sore throats.

Honey works well as a wound healer because of its unique properties. As a natural antioxidant its consistency provides a barrier to infection on exposed areas and the high sugar content draws on excessive fluids around wounds, increasing the healingrate.

It is also an effective antibiotic and it helps stimulate the regrowth of tissue involved in the healing process.

Recent research has looked into its usefulness in treating burns and its application pre and post-operatively in cancer surgery to prevent tumours developing in the scar tissue.

And a study by scientists at Waikato

University in New Zealand found evidence that honey taken as a food could help slow the ageing process and reduce anxiety.

For 12 months the boffins raised three sets of rats on diets containing honey, sucrose or no sugar at all.

The honey-fed rodents spent almost twice as much time in exposed parts of a maze, suggesting they were less anxious and they were more likely to enter new sections of the maze making scientists believe they knew where they had been previously and hadbetter spatial memory.

One of the scientists, Nicola Starkey, whose work was reported in the New Scientist magazine, concluded: "Diets sweetened with honey may be beneficial in decreasing anxiety and improving memory during ageing."

FactFile – HONEY

A HONEYBEE has to visit about two million flowers to manufacture just one pound of honey.

HONEY is made up of primarily carbohydrates and water but also includes small amounts of a wide variety of vitamins and minerals.

IT contains a variety of flavonoids and phenolic acids which act as antioxidants, scavenging and eliminating free radicals.

(c) 2007 Coventry Evening Telegraph. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.