Majtan Juraj
Laboratory of Apidology and Apitherapy, Department of Microbial Genetics, Institute of Molecular Biology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia.
Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Medicine, Slovak Medical University, Bratislava, Slovakia.
Front Nutr. 2024 Oct 10;11:1433786. doi: 10.3389/fnut.2024.1433786. eCollection 2024.
Honey is an attractive functional food that often becomes a subject of clinical studies on the treatment of diverse diseases. However, the clinical efficacy of honey is rather controversial due, at least in part, to its variable composition and botanical origin as well as thermal processing or improper storage conditions. This review addresses the importance of honey quality standards and testing of the biological properties of honey prior to performing clinical studies, which can have a great impact on clinical outcomes. It focused on recently performed meta-analyses and systematic reviews where honey was used in the management of various disorders including respiratory tract infections, and metabolic and cardiometabolic diseases, with the goal of characterising the honeys used in clinical studies. In addition, it provides recommendations for the use and storage of honey for clinical testing. The vast majority of clinical studies included in meta-analyses do not provide any information about honey quality parameters. In fact, indicators of thermal damage or prolonged storage of honey were analysed only in one clinical study. This observation highlights on the alarming status of honey quality in clinical studies. Furthermore, biological properties of the analysed honeys were assessed in two clinical studies. Therefore, this review strongly advocates the clinical use of only fully characterised honey samples of known botanical origin with proven biological functionality and no or minimal thermal processing.
蜂蜜是一种具有吸引力的功能性食品，常常成为各种疾病治疗临床研究的对象。然而，蜂蜜的临床疗效颇具争议，至少部分原因在于其成分多变、植物来源不同，以及热处理或储存条件不当。本综述阐述了蜂蜜质量标准以及在开展临床研究前检测蜂蜜生物学特性的重要性，这对临床结果可能会产生重大影响。它聚焦于近期进行的荟萃分析和系统评价，其中蜂蜜被用于治疗包括呼吸道感染、代谢性疾病和心脏代谢性疾病在内的各种病症，目的是明确临床研究中所使用蜂蜜的特性。此外，它还为临床检测中蜂蜜的使用和储存提供了建议。荟萃分析中纳入的绝大多数临床研究均未提供任何有关蜂蜜质量参数的信息。事实上，仅在一项临床研究中分析了蜂蜜热损伤或长期储存的指标。这一观察结果凸显了临床研究中蜂蜜质量令人担忧的现状。此外，在两项临床研究中评估了所分析蜂蜜的生物学特性。因此，本综述强烈主张临床仅使用已知植物来源、具有已证实生物学功能且未经过或仅经过最少热处理的完全特性化蜂蜜样本。
