In Central Morocco, Families Still Treat 42 Ailments With Honey

• In a survey of 400 adults across five provinces of the Beni Mellal Khenifra region, 82 percent of honey users said they reached for honey specifically as a home remedy, ahead of using it as food or in skincare.
• Respondents reported using honey to treat 42 different symptoms and conditions in total, most often respiratory complaints, followed by skin problems and digestive issues.
• Eleven of those uses, including for Covid 19 symptoms, acne, and gallstones, had never turned up before in comparable honey folk medicine surveys from other countries.
• Most people took honey by mouth, and nearly half said they had given it to infants under a year old, a practice generally discouraged because of a small risk of infant botulism.
• Euphorbia, Citrus, and Multiflower honeys were by far the most commonly used varieties, together accounting for about eighty percent of reported use.

Ask someone in the Beni Mellal Khenifra region of central Morocco what honey is good for, and the list runs well past a sore throat.

A questionnaire based survey of 400 adults across five provinces of the region found that 82 percent of honey users reached for it specifically as a home remedy, ahead of using it as food or in cosmetics. Respiratory complaints such as coughs, colds, and sore throats were the reason cited most often, followed by skin conditions and digestive problems.

Researchers from several Moroccan universities collected the data between September 2022 and January 2023, interviewing residents of Beni Mellal, Fquih Ben Saleh, Khouribga, Azilal, and Khenifra using a structured questionnaire. They asked what honey people used, what they used it for, and how, then checked the answers against factors such as gender, education, and whether someone lived in town or the countryside using a chi squared test.

In total, respondents named 42 separate symptoms and conditions they treated with honey, taken by mouth in the large majority of cases. Eleven of those uses, among them Covid 19 symptoms, acne, and gallstones, had never turned up in comparable honey folk medicine surveys from Benin, Lithuania, Germany, India, Cameroon, or Burkina Faso, according to the researchers' review of that literature. Nearly half of respondents also said they had given honey to infants under a year old, a practice generally discouraged because of a small but real risk of infant botulism.

Folk knowledge about honey rarely gets written down in a form other researchers can compare across countries, which is what gives a survey like this its value. It builds a record of a living tradition, the kind of household knowledge that predates any laboratory, and gives scientists a starting list of traditional uses worth testing properly. The honeys named most often, Euphorbia, Citrus, and Multiflower, were simply the varieties most available locally rather than ones chosen for any particular property.

None of this establishes that honey treats any of the 42 conditions listed. It is a record of what people in the region believe and do, gathered through interviews rather than clinical testing, and the study's authors are explicit that they did not attempt to verify whether the remedies actually work.

It is a reminder of how much traditional knowledge travels along with a jar of honey, and why Tayab treats verifying that knowledge, not just repeating it, as part of the job.