Hay fever cures?
- Thread starter rich59
- Start date
Hookworms release a chemical that suppresses your bodies immune reaction, thus stopping your body noticing and attacking them, and as a side-effect reducing your immune sensitivity to things like pollen, but also any other kind of disease or parasite! Generally not recommended.
A few things about local honey - first you have to be quite careful about which honey you pick, and when. Generally most people are more susceptible to either grass, tree, or flower (usually rapeseed) pollen - local honey is good in the sense that it is more likely to contain the pollens that are in the air you're breathing, but remember that bees have a relatively limited harvest area from their hives, and that if a hive is next to a rapeseed field, when you're allergic to grass pollen, then the honey will be full of the 'wrong' pollen, and of less help to you (bees after all will go for the nearest source of nectar to them).
Secondly, there are various treatment processes involved in preparing honey, and bees are quite selective about picking the pollen out of their honey and storing it separately, and so the honey you get might be quite low in pollen. Best bet is to get honey still on the comb, or even get 'mixed comb' where some cells are honey and some pollen - eating this comb will give you best coverage (you will need to track down a friendly beekeeper for this).
Finally, honey is removed from hives at different times of year, and you might just be unlucky in getting honey that hasn't got any of the pollen in it you're allergic to (especially if you're allergic to a flower that doesn't bloom until after the first honey crop is harvested). Again, checking with the beekeeper is helpful here.
Some people report propolis helps, but since propolis is really tree saps and resins, chewed up and mixed a bit by worker bees, it too doesn't really contain much pollen.
The process that works in all of this is your body is set up to become less sensitive to foreign substances that you digest - after all if you reacted to foreign animal proteins in meat you ate, you'd be in trouble. Eating pollen gets your body 'used' to it, and the same can be done with other allergens (in tests, cat protein was used, although I don't suggest trying to eat cat hairs at home
). For pollen relief, you probably want to start eating local honey for a good 2-3 months before the pollen arrives in the air - so start in January in most places!
Hope this info is of help to folk with hayfever problems - I'm one of the lucky ones who's free of hayfever (but I do live in Scotland, and am especially sensitive to midge bites, so nature still has one over me
)
For getting information on buying local honey and liaising with local beekeepers, contact your local beekeeping association - they're generally a friendly bunch:
England & Wales: http://www.bbka.org.uk/members.php
Scotland: http://www.scottishbeekeepers.org.uk/services/html/links.html
A few things about local honey - first you have to be quite careful about which honey you pick, and when. Generally most people are more susceptible to either grass, tree, or flower (usually rapeseed) pollen - local honey is good in the sense that it is more likely to contain the pollens that are in the air you're breathing, but remember that bees have a relatively limited harvest area from their hives, and that if a hive is next to a rapeseed field, when you're allergic to grass pollen, then the honey will be full of the 'wrong' pollen, and of less help to you (bees after all will go for the nearest source of nectar to them).
Secondly, there are various treatment processes involved in preparing honey, and bees are quite selective about picking the pollen out of their honey and storing it separately, and so the honey you get might be quite low in pollen. Best bet is to get honey still on the comb, or even get 'mixed comb' where some cells are honey and some pollen - eating this comb will give you best coverage (you will need to track down a friendly beekeeper for this).
Finally, honey is removed from hives at different times of year, and you might just be unlucky in getting honey that hasn't got any of the pollen in it you're allergic to (especially if you're allergic to a flower that doesn't bloom until after the first honey crop is harvested). Again, checking with the beekeeper is helpful here.
Some people report propolis helps, but since propolis is really tree saps and resins, chewed up and mixed a bit by worker bees, it too doesn't really contain much pollen.
The process that works in all of this is your body is set up to become less sensitive to foreign substances that you digest - after all if you reacted to foreign animal proteins in meat you ate, you'd be in trouble. Eating pollen gets your body 'used' to it, and the same can be done with other allergens (in tests, cat protein was used, although I don't suggest trying to eat cat hairs at home
). For pollen relief, you probably want to start eating local honey for a good 2-3 months before the pollen arrives in the air - so start in January in most places!Hope this info is of help to folk with hayfever problems - I'm one of the lucky ones who's free of hayfever (but I do live in Scotland, and am especially sensitive to midge bites, so nature still has one over me
)For getting information on buying local honey and liaising with local beekeepers, contact your local beekeeping association - they're generally a friendly bunch:
England & Wales: http://www.bbka.org.uk/members.php
Scotland: http://www.scottishbeekeepers.org.uk/services/html/links.html
