Much ado about Mānuka ?

I’ve been seeing a lot of mommies raving about Mānuka honey ? and how it has helped them during the pandemic when they’d have that occassional “potential Covid” scare as a relief to kick away scratchy throat to the curb instantly.

I LOOOOVE honey. I love a teaspoon of it in my tea, I love it on my pancakes, I love it with my Greek yogurt. But, by no means, I’m an expert with it. I’d regularly buy my honey from the grocery, and pick up the most common brand I see since childhood.

I’ve seen documentaries where it reported how honey is one of the most adulterated consumer products worldwide, even the most popular brands in the biggest retail stores are not as 100% pure as they claim to be. So I started buying this local brand of honey which I got from one of those holiday bazaars for only Php150 ($3 for 190ml!).

I found myself needing to buy a bottle of Mānuka honey when one of my cats, Snowy, got this big gaping wound that we needed to remedy and the veterinary doctor advised us to use honey to hasten the healing of his wound.

Instead of buying the Mānuka honey cream from the veterinary that costs about Php600, I decided to just buy a jar of Mānuka honey for almost the same price so I can even use it for eating.

After much research (and after scrolling through FB groups for feedbacks), I went with HNZ Mānuka Honey with UMF 5+ or MGO 83+.

UMF and MGO are standardized indicators of the concentration of some of the bioactive chemical compounds found in Mānuka honey. Bioactive chemical compounds, when applied to your skin or digested in your digestive tract, are able to give your body unique assistance in resisting infection, improving skin health and aiding digestion.

I’ll talk about the different grades and how it worked on Snowy in another post but I decided to go with a lower UMF as I tend to want to consume this jar of honey for daily consumption.

Comparing my two jars of honey, on the left is Mānuka UMF 5+ and on the right in my local raw honey, you can see the difference visually. The locally produced, just like the common honey that we know, looks translucent. On the other hand, Mānuka UMF 5+ looks more opaque.

Viscocity is comparable… perhaps a little more viscous for Mānuka UMF 5+. I also noticed crystallizations on the sealing lid of my Mānuka UMF 5+ jar. I was told that real honey would have crystalizations sometimes… but I’m not quite sure how accurate that is.

Taste-wise, Mānuka UMF 5+ tastes okay… but it’s a tad less sweet than the locally produced honey. I still like it, though. I’ve read a lot of mums taking a spoonful of Mānuka honey during an onset of sore throat and that’s when this jar of Mānuka UMF 5+ will truly shine. So I’d probably try that next time.

I got this jar of Mānuka UMF 5+ for only Php599.00 (250g) from Cebu and it took almost a week to reach Manila. I’m curious to try other brands of Mānuka honey or even the higher UMF graded ones.

Have you tried using Mānuka honey? How did you find it?  ? ?

 

Let’s socialize:
Twitter: @couchwasabi
Instagram: @jirbiego
Tiktok: couchwasabi

---

Join my latest Online Workshops by checking out my Patreon