Here is another "is it worth it?"
Recently I have seen that "manuka honey," which comes from nectar of the manuka tree of New Zealand and Australia, is being touted as "Honey with superpowers!" and "The world's most powerful honey!"
If you want some, a 1.1 lb jar (17.6 oz) is advertised for $145.00. That seems like a lot.
We know that honeys contain antioxidants and other nutrients that can have benefits for health. Is manuka all that special?
Like other honeys, manuka honey has been shown in several studies to inhibit bacterial and fungal growth. Products such as the bark from manuka trees have been used for many centuries to improve healing of wounds, and salves made with manuka honey are now licensed in many countries for that purpose (Gkoutzouvelidou 2021).
Manuka honey is very dark, and thus contains more polyphenols that can confer antimicrobial or antioxidant capability. This is true though of other dark honeys, such as buckwheat honey (Deng 2018). The unique feature of manuka honey seems to be that it contains a substance called methylglyoxyl (MGO) that only appears in trace amounts in other honeys (Goslinski 2020). MGO confers antimicrobial activity by a different mechanism that other honey constituents, and it is believed that this extra potential capacity makes manuka uniquely potent (Zuchetta 2022).
When Goslinski et al. (2020) compared two different manuka honeys with buckwheat, honeydew, and floral honeys from Poland, they found that the manuka honeys did indeed have higher polyphenol content and had more effective antibacterial actions than the floral honey.
But the honeydew honey was comparable on both counts. Honeydew honey is made from sap that bees collect from trees (such as pines or oaks), or from the "honeydew" of sap-sucking insects such as aphids. The sap contains more substances than pollen, adding to antioxidant capacity.
Is manuka honey worth the extra price?
It seems to me that there are other honeys out there with similar characteristics. It is claimed in advertisements that manuka honey has been used traditionally by Māori people, but actually it is the other products of the manuka tree that have been used. Honey bees are not native to New Zealand, so manuka honey is a relatively new thing. Perhaps more concerningly, a problem with the strong focus on manuka honey in New Zealand is that the high prices obtained put pressure on agriculture to grow more manuka, to the detriment of other native species (Zuchhetta 2022).