Our founder Shaun was featured in Woman magazine in an article highlighting the various benefits of honey, emphasising its rich content of antioxidants and antimicrobial properties. It discusses the potential therapeutic role of honey in treating diseases due to its phytochemical, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and antioxidant properties. Read a snippet from the article below.
Kānuka Sidebar:
Shaun Holt eats a spoonful of honey every day. “It’s a great supplement filled with vitamins and minerals. It’s a healthy part of my diet,’’ he says.
The Coromandel-based doctor, pharmacist and entrepreneur is the co-founder of a pharmaceutical company that uses kānuka honey as the base of all its natural products. HoneyLab produces medicinal honey, and has so far made several products out of kānuka that have been lab tested and are rivalling their pharmaceutical equivalents: a cold sore ointment, an acne cream, a rosacea cream and a honey liquid for sore throats.
Kānuka honey is sourced from kānuka trees, which are often mistaken with mānuka because they look similar and are also called tea trees. The late Professor Peter Molan talked about kānuka’s potential when he studied the medicinal benefits of honey in the 1980s and 1990s.
Shaun says his company’s cold sore trial tested 952 people and was the biggest clinical trial ever carried out in New Zealand. Published in BMJ Open last year, the results showed that cold sores took the same time to heal with Honey Lab’s Honevo cream as they did with Zovirax, the pharmaceutical equivalent. But Zovriax can only be used for a limited time, and with restrictions, whereas you can continue applying mānuka honey until the cold sore has healed.
“I think that’s exciting because if you ask consumers if they’d like a natural honey or a synthetic chemical, I think they’d choose the natural option,’’ he says.
Other HoneyLab natural products containing kānuka or bee pollen help with anti-ageing, nausea and vomiting, sleep and stress and muscle and joint pain. HoneyLab recently signed a deal with a pharmaceutical company in the United States to license seven of its products.
Source and full article here.
