Growers and Grocers

Let’s say that your five-year-old is deep in the throes of a chest cold, coughing her poor little head off in the middle of the night (when most of these rib-cracking, neighbor-waking hacking fits seem to occur). Miraculously, your husband appears to be sleeping through the crisis (”appears” being the operative word). And as much as you’d like to roll over and pull the cat over your head to block out the noise, you know you have to get up and do something before she coughs herself sick.

You stumble to the medicine chest for cough syrup, only to find that there is none. You threw it all out this winter, after the medical powers that be put the kibosh on OTC cold and cough medicines for young children. Seems those erstwhile soothing elixirs had more potential to harm than to help. And as you stare at your baggy-eyed reflection in the medicine-cabinet mirror for the fourth night in a row, grimly fantasizing about sneaking out to the backyard and curling up in the doghouse to get some decent shut-eye, you realize that the same could be said for an otherwise loving mom with a bad case of offspring-induced sleep deprivation.

So what do you do now?

Call Grandma. Apparently, that’s what researchers from the Penn State College of Medicine did, because they’ve come up with the same bit of conventional wisdom grandmothers have been spooning into us for years: Honey is good for coughs. Not just good, but super. 

According to the results of the research, a nip of buckwheat honey before bed works better than dextromethorphan (the active ingredient in many over-the-counter cough preparations) for quieting a cough due to upper respiratory infection and helping the child sleep. And you know what that means, Mom. (Or Dad.)

Sound too good to be true? Let’s see. Honey—it’s cheap, natural, and non-narcotic. And unlike that poison-flavored cherry or grape stuff, you won’t have to wrestle your child to get him or her to part lips for it. In fact, you might even want to let on that you are doling out the good stuff as a treat. It’s honey, for crying out loud!

And honey, as it turns out, has been used for hundreds of years to soothe, cure, heal, and salve a number of different human maladies, not the least of which is a cough. It has antimicrobial properties and  contains a variety of antioxidants and minerals, including niacin, zinc, iron, and magnesium. Also, honey is good source of easily digested carbohydrates—a boon for little ones under the weather. The soothing properties of honey are welcome for easing cough-irritated throats, too.

Your best bet is to buy locally produced organic honey. Made by your friendly neighborhood bees from the plants that grow in your area, local honey is believed to be beneficial in helping the body adapt to its environment. What does that mean? Well, briefly, it could mean that eating honey derived from pollen in your immediate environment may actually mitigate some of your hay fever symptoms. Worth looking into, no? 

However, honey should not be given to babies under 12 months of age. Clostridium botulinum spores may be present in honey, posing a risk to babies less than a year old.  Although these spores are widespread in the dust and dirt of our everyday environment, they do not typically pose a threat to older babies and children, whose nervous systems are more mature.

So the next time your little honey has an upper respiratory infection and a cough that is keeping everyone (but especially Mom) up at night, try soothing it with a little bit of honey. And then call Grandma and tell her she was right all along.

(Image by Scott Liddell, courtesy of Morguefile.)