Honey has long been a favorite food because of its sticky sweet goodness. However, honey is far more than just a tasty treat. Honey has a long history of a food that is used as a natural medicine.

It’s important to note that when you read about honey’s health benefits, most of these articles are referring to RAW honey and not the highly processed honey you’ll frequently find on your local grocery store shelves.

Tom Ogren in his article Local Honey and Allergies writes

Honey contains bits and pieces of pollen and honey, and as an immune system booster, it is quite powerful.

In honey the allergens are delivered in small, manageable doses and the effect over time is very much like that from undergoing a whole series of allergy immunology injections. The major difference though is that the honey is a lot easier to take and it is certainly a lot less expensive. I am always surprised that this powerful health benefit of local honey is not more widely understood, as it is simple, easy, and often surprisingly effective.

According to WHFoods.com the benefits of raw honey are preventative in nature. Raw honey can be useful for fighting off bacterial, fungal and even viral infections. Rod Moser, PA, PhD concurs in his post Honey, I Healed the Wound.

Lifescript website offers this on honey’s natural antioxidant properties.

According to the University of California, the consumption of honey tends to raise the body’s level of antioxidants in the blood. In one particular study, 25 people were asked to eat about four to 10 tablespoons of buckwheat honey a day for an entire month. They were not allowed to bake or dissolve the honey, but any other consumption method was allowed. At the end of the study, researchers found that antioxidant levels had risen in participants’ bloodstreams.

The standard warning about honey goes here - honey should NOT be given to infants or toddlers. In my house, I waited until my children were 5 or older before adding raw honey to their diets.

As with any advice offered here or anywhere else on the web, check with your doctor to make sure adding raw honey is safe for YOU!

This is a something that I personally have battled. Here’s my story.

It was 1994 and I was expecting my third child in July. My husband was very concerned about raising three kids in a two bedroom home so the search was on for a 3 bedroom home for our expanding family. The first week of May, I declared the house hunt to be officially over, as making an offer on any home we found would put us moving too close to the birth of our 2nd son. However, my husband came home with just “one more house that you have to see to believe.” Sure enough, the previous sale on the three bedroom two bath ranch with a fenced yard and a separately fenced inground pool had fallen through and the home was miraculously back on the market. It was definitely a fixer upper but that was to be expected. After all, most of the homes in our price range were “fixer uppers”.

As I had predicted… we closed on the house the week before the baby was due. That week, while I was in the hospital, my family and inlaws were moving us into our new home.

I tell you this part of the story so you’ll understand why I wasn’t alarmed that first winter when I spent the entire heating season absolutely exhausted to the point of being ill. In my exhaustion, I totalled our car and am grateful that I didn’t do more harm to my children. Still, I plugged on. I worked and cared for my children despite my complete depletion of energy. I was also battling SEVERE headaches. When I spoke with my doctor, he prescribed antibiotics to kill the supposed sinus infection which was causing the headaches and depleting me of my energy. However, I was also patted on the head and told that part of being a working mother of three is a feeling of exhaustion.

Because I was so ill, my husband and I hadn’t embarked on one of the most pressing home improvements our new home needed which was new windows and doors. However, we had paid to have the furnace cleaned and inspected when we purchased the home, so it was a fluke that our furnace went out in March of the following year. Our old furnace guy had packed up and moved to Arizona so I found a new company to come fix our furnace.

When the new furnace guy got to work, he found the top of the furnace welded shut. It turns out the previous company hadn’t performed the cleaning or the inspection we’d paid for them to perform. Not only that, but the build up in the furnace was causing our home to be filled with poisonous CO gas! Had we replaced our windows as we had planned, it’s possible we could have died from the exposure! The furnace repair man told me that if someone had spent 30 minutes in the room where the furnace was, they would have been dead.

Turns out it we were lucky. Our exposure to Carbon Monoxide didn’t trigger the more severe MUSES (Multisensory Sensitivity).

The web site Multiple Chemical Sensitivity web site has a great article on Treatment of Chronic Carbon Monoxide Poisoning.

We now have CO alarms placed strategically throughout our home. Because we live in Florida now, when we’re without electricity and have to use our generator, we make sure to keep the generator running outside in a well ventilated area away from open windows. I’ve also read that running more than one exhaust fan at the same time can also cause a build up of CO within the home, so when one bathroom fan is running, the other isn’t! The same goes for the kitchen exhaust fan.

Carbon Monoxide is so dangerous because you can’t see it, smell it or taste it.  If you’ve been battling the flu “all winter” be sure to have your home checked for high Carbon Monoxide levels.

One of the most common "symptoms" of allergies is not a runny nose or itchy eyes, but instead is that constant battle with fatigue.  At one point, I was convinced that I had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome because I was constantly battling fatigue.  Fortunately, I began addressing environmental and food allergies which helped combat not only the allergies, but also the fatigue.  At the time though, it never occurred to me that the fatigue was linked to my allergies.

In my experience, I’ve found traditional MDs would rather run tests than try to chase down a food based allergy.  My own mother still is seeking the "holy grail"… a pill that will relieve her constant fatigue.  She has yet to have a Medical Doctor suggest a food allergy… even though her daughter and her daughter’s children all have food allergies.  The doctors don’t ask and my mother doesn’t offer it up either.  She’s looking for a pill and her long list of doctors is more than willing to test away.  She finally found a doctor who would prescribe thyroid medicine for her.  It helped for about 6 weeks… now a year later, she’s dependent upon the medication and she feels more fatigued than ever.

Doug Samuel over at Allergy Details offers a GREAT explanation of the allergy/fatigue connection:

The first is that an allergic reaction is like being sick. Normally, we become sick when we have an infection. The body fights it off, which takes lots of energy. Result: you get tired.

An allergy is the body mistakenly thinking that an ordinary substance such as a wheat protein or gluten, is an infection. The body is wrong, but it treats the substance in the same way as an infection. Result: you get tired, just like having the flu or a cold.

The other reason, and I know this happens in my case, is that allergies can affect your sleep. If you can’t sleep properly, you will feel a bit tired the first day, more the next, and eventually you will become chronically fatigued. Add this to the tiring effects of the body fighting the substance you are allergic to, and its not surprising that you get so tired.

If you’re constantly tired…. suspect an allergy.  Ask others around you to help "diagnose" you because chances are you’re too run down to accurately see the cause for yourself.   Begin by addressing the environment and if that doesn’t help, begin addressing food based allergies.  Doug offers a great self test for food allergies on his site  and he offers a list of the most common food offenders.