The first time I was asked what my miracle-honey obsession was, I wasn’t expecting much.
At the time, I was an undergraduate studying chemistry at a top-ranked university, and I was in a lab full of PhDs.
But it wasn’t long before I started talking about it in class.
A few years later, I found myself on a panel with a woman named Katie.
She said she’d heard of the phenomenon, and wondered if there was any research behind it.
The next time I heard it, I realised there was.
I had just heard about miracle honey.
I knew I was about to learn something new, and not just about my life.
Katie was a PhD student at the time and, by chance, a scientist.
I was curious to know what she had discovered.
Katie and I would sit in a conference room, with other PhD students from different disciplines.
We would all work on the same project, which was to identify the most likely source of honey from a single plant.
One of us would then collect pollen samples and test them against samples taken from different species.
If there was a match, we would compare the results.
After a while, the group would have narrowed down to two possible sources of honey: wild honey or a plant.
But if there wasn’t a match and we had different results, we had to figure out why.
The honey found in the wild was naturally occurring, and it wasn, Katie said, “a lot more natural”.
As we all discussed the honey in the lab, I started thinking about how different plants had been used in the past.
For example, the wild honey was used as a flavouring in traditional Chinese cuisine.
But the honey from wild flowers was used in medieval Europe, where it was used to make wine.
And it was in ancient Egypt where wild honey and wine were produced.
Katie would later tell me she was surprised by how much we didn’t know about how plants were used in different parts of the world.
And so, in my first PhD research project, I tried to find out how honey was actually made in different cultures.
Katie had found that the honey found naturally in the ground was used for cooking.
But I wasn´t sure why.
Why do we eat honey?
Katie explained that we all eat it for a variety of reasons.
First, it is a very nutritious food.
As we grow older, our bodies start to lose weight, and this causes a reduction in the sugar content in our bodies.
In addition, we also lose some of the enzymes in our guts and the fats we have in our blood.
So we lose a lot of our vitamin B12, which is crucial for keeping our skin and eyes healthy.
Second, honey is a rich source of vitamin B2, which helps us with our immune systems.
And third, honey can also be a source of antioxidants.
It contains antioxidants called flavonoids and phenolic compounds that help the body repair damaged proteins.
The final reason for eating honey is to reduce the risk of heart disease.
It has been estimated that one third of people in the US and Canada have high blood pressure.
But when we eat a lot more honey, our blood pressure rises.
So it may be that people who drink honey for a long time have higher blood pressure, even though they don’t eat any honey.
In my research, I looked into honey and how it might protect against heart disease in humans.
After I finished my PhD research, Katie and my colleagues put together a study looking at the health effects of honey consumption.
They looked at studies published between 2007 and 2009 and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
The studies were based on a total of 907 people.
The participants were all between the ages of 50 and 79, and they all had heart disease and had diabetes.
The studies showed that people with diabetes who consumed honey had higher blood pressures than people who didn’t.
For instance, people with heart disease had higher systolic blood pressure and diastolic blood density.
And people with higher blood density had higher concentrations of certain nutrients, such as vitamin B6, calcium, magnesium, potassium and zinc.
The results of the study showed that honey was associated with a significant reduction in heart disease risk, and there was no difference in the number of deaths.
It also showed that the more people consumed honey, the lower their risk of dying from heart disease, diabetes or heart attack.
And this reduction in risk was linked to the amount of honey people consumed.
For the average person, the reduction in their risk was just over 50 per cent.
But for people with a high blood-pressure and diabetes, the number was higher.
The study looked at the effects of different honey varieties on the levels of a key nutrients, namely vitamin B1 and vitamin B3.
In other words, the more honey people drank, the higher their risk levels.
So for people who drank the most honey,