If you ask Grandma what she used to drink when she was little for a cough, she sure tells you she drank water with honey and lemon, or warm milk with honey. They are lifelong remedies that are not used as extensively as in the past because now there are cough syrups in which, as a general rule, we are more confident about coming in a bottle with a dispenser and looking to be able to cure .
However, a recent study comes to rescue the grandmother's remedy because, unlike other traditional remedies that do not help much, it seems so, because it shows that Honey with milk is as good a cough remedy as cough syrups.
Study Data
The study was done in Italy and they analyzed the difference between giving milk with honey or giving the two syrups that are most used for cough in that country: dextromethorphan (I would say that the best known here is Bisolvon) and levodropropizine (the Tautoss, for example).
For this they chose 134 children with non-specific acute cough (not related to another pathology such as bronchitis, pneumonia, asthma ...) that were separated into three groups, according to the remedy they were going to take, and who took what they had to play for three nights in a row Those of syrup received the dose that corresponded to them by weight or age and those of milk with honey took a mixture of 90 ml of milk with 10 ml of wildflower honey.
The parents of the children answered some questionnaires to assess the success of the child's treatment and considered that if the cough had been reduced by more than 50%, the treatment could be considered valid.
More or less, the same efficiency
When assessing the results, they saw that 87% of the children who had taken cough syrup had improved until the treatment was considered successful. Focusing on the children who drank the glass of milk with honey, they improved 80% of them, being such a minimal difference that the authors concluded that milk with honey is at least as effective as cough syrups.
It could be even better
Given the data it seems that no, it is better to give syrup to give milk with honey, however it is possible that in reality milk with honey is even better than syrups. The explanation is that the parents, who are the ones who answered the questionnaire, knew what their children were taking.
If some parents trust syrups because it is what they always give to their son when he is sick, giving him milk with honey might sound like "I am not giving him a syrup, I am not doing enough for him" and that feeling could alter the result of the subsequent questionnaires, putting worse score for a remedy that does work because of lack of trust. Similarly, if parents trust the syrups they administered to children a lot, the questionnaire scores may be inflated, being considered a better remedy than it really is.
This is only a hypothesis and to disrupt it, one would have to do a study in which a group of children drank milk with honey and the other two groups a syrup in a liquid that had the same appearance and taste as milk with honey. Or that, or get the parents, who answer the questionnaires, don't know what your child has taken, if the syrup or if the natural remedy.
In any case, we see that the remedy is great, economical, is always at home and we do not have to run to the pharmacy to get it because the child is coughing. You take the milk, heat it a little, pour honey, turn with the spoon and drink it. Good pretty and cheap.
Milk? But if you have more boogers, right?
Honey with milk, or milk with honey. Cough remedy, but of course, if one of the ingredients is milk and milk produces more mucus, what is the point? We remove the cough from the child but we cause more mucus, so he will end up having more cough, precisely to get out the mucus that reaches the throat.
It is likely that you have made this reasoning because the belief that cow's milk produces more mucus to children is widespread, but it's just that, a belief. There are many studies that talk about it that show that there is no relationship between both things and in Babies and more We talked about it a few years ago, so calm down, milk with honey is a good cough remedy and will not make the child have more mucus.
