Under the packaging, honey is mostly sugar. By mass it's about 38% fructose and 31% glucose, with water and a sub-1% trace of enzymes, acids, and plant pigments called polyphenols that shift with the flowers ¹. That last 1% is where the real uses live. Bacteria have never been shown to build meaningful resistance to it, nearly unique among antibacterials ².

Honey does two things well and one thing quietly. For a child's cough it beats no treatment and ties the dextromethorphan in adult syrups on cough and sleep, with moderate certainty across six trials ³. The active ingredient is mostly "thick sweet syrup that coats the throat": in adult trials, the honey edge vanished against a plain sweet placebo ⁴.

As a wound dressing, medical-grade Manuka heals a partial-thickness burn about four to five days faster than plain gauze ⁵. And swapped one-for-one for table sugar at roughly two tablespoons a day, it nudges HDL up and fasting glucose down by small amounts, mostly with raw single-flower honey ⁶. You won't feel that one; it shows up on a blood panel a year out.

Honey counts inside your daily sugar budget: the WHO ceiling for free sugars from all sources is under 50 grams a day ⁷, and two tablespoons of honey is about 40. You trade a marginally better matrix for the same calories, not free ones.

Between 3% and 27% of supermarket honey is cut with cheap rice or corn syrup, so buy from a named single-source producer. Middle-tier raw single-flower honey ($10-20/lb) is the value spot; Manuka ($40-80) belongs in the medicine cabinet. Sealed, it keeps at room temperature essentially forever; don't refrigerate it.