Just A Spoon Full Of Honey

Just a spoon full of sugar may help the medicine go down, but now it looks like a spoonful of honey might be the best thing to stop a cough.

In head-to-head comparisons with some of the best cough medicine we have, honey actually came out on top.

When your child is coughing, especially if it's keeping everyone up at night, you'd give just about anything to get that cough under control. Up until now that's been either an over-the-counter or prescription cough medicine.

Well now something your mother or grandmother used is coming to the rescue. A simple spoonful of honey looks like it does a better job at getting that cough under control than even those medicines.

In a recent study, researchers compared honey to cough medicine containing the popular ingredient Dextromethophan--that's the DM you see on the cough medicine label. They found that the honey worked as well and sometime better than the bottled cough medicine containing DM. A newer study, just published in the journal Pediatrics, came to the same conclusion.

The major exception here is for children less than one. Because of the rare possibility of honey transmitting Botulism, it shouldn't be given to children this young. But otherwise, for those older than one, a spoonful one hour or so before bedtime should do the trick. And that should help them, and you, get more sleep.