Oh, Honey

It’s Wildcard Wednesday at 10almonds! You may be wondering, “I thought Wednesday was Q&A day?”, and the simple answer is we switched it with tomorrow, so we could have the alliteration on Wednesdays. It makes us smile, anyway 😝 Today we have:

• Unblocking That Sniffly Seasonal Allergy Nose—far kinder and gentler ways than blowing your nose until it’s red raw!

• The Optimism/Pessimism test—what’s your outlook like, really?

• The Latest Buzz on Honey—and what it could do for those allergies we mentioned!

• The Path To Revenue—the realistic guide for tech start-ups that’s not just a collection of early 00s motivational posters in book form.

Pssst… About the Q&A day now being Thursdays… That means this is your chance to get your questions in! You can always hit reply to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom 😎

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

👃 The Way Forward Is Clear!

Allergy season is upon us, so here’s a short (3:21) video with 9 tips for gentle, soothing decongestion!

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

To further condense the already-condensed info here, we’ll mention that the video includes…

• Variations on steaming and how to optimize them

• The wonders of a neti pot and how to use it

• Some spices that, counterintuitively, reduce nasal inflammation!

• Soothing fluids to take, from hot drinks to broths

• Meds—over-the-counter and prescription (and when to see a doctor!)

Wondering where to get a neti pot as shown in tip #4 in the video (← this link will jump you to it)? Neti pots are (awesome, by the way, and) very cheap online, for example:

Pack of two super cheap plastic net pots / Pack of one simple but pretty ceramic neti pot

❓QUICK CHECK-IN

To believe self-reports, the world is divided between optimists and realists. But how does your outlook measure up, really?

While like most free online tests, this test is offered “as-is” with the usual caveats about not being a clinical diagnostic tool. However, this one actually has a fair amount of scientific weight behind it:

Check Your IDR-OPT Score Here! (1–2 mins test)

How did you score? And what could you do to improve on that score?

(Maybe we’ll do a piece on that, one of these Psychology Sundays!)

🐝 MAIN FEATURE

🍯 The Bee’s Knees?

If you’d like to pre-empt that runny nose, some say that local honey is the answer. The rationale is that bees visiting the local sources of pollen and making honey will introduce the same allergens to you in a non allergy-inducing fashion (the honey). The result? Inoculation against the allergens in question.

But does it work?

Researching this, we found a lot of articles saying there was no science to back it up.

And then! We found one solitary study from 2013, and the title was promising:

“Ingestion of honey improves the symptoms of allergic rhinitis: evidence from a randomized placebo-controlled trial”

But we don’t stop at titles; that’s not the kind of newsletter we are. We pride ourselves on giving good information!

And it turned out, upon reading the method and the results, that:

• Both the control and test groups also took loratadine for the first 4 weeks of the study

• The test group additionally took 1g/kg bodyweight of honey, daily—so for example if you’re 165lb (75kg), that’s about 4 tablespoons per day

• The control group took the equivalent amount of honey-flavored syrup

• Both groups showed equal improvements by week 4

• The test group only showed continued improvements (over the control group) by week 8

The researchers concluded from this:

❝Honey ingestion at a high dose improves the overall and individual symptoms of AR, and it could serve as a complementary therapy for AR.❞

We at 10almonds concluded from this:

❝That’s a lot of honey to eat every day for months!❞

We couldn’t base an article on one study from a decade ago, though! Fortunately, we found a veritable honeypot of more recent research, in the form of this systematic review:

Read: The Potential Use Of Honey As A Remedy For Allergic Diseases

…which examines 13 key studies and 43 scientific papers over the course of 21 years. That’s more like it! This was the jumping-off point we needed into more useful knowledge.

We’re not going to cite all those here—we’re a health and productivity newsletter, not an academic journal of pharmacology, but we did sift through them so that you don’t have to, and:

The researchers (of that review) concluded:

❝Although there is limited evidence, some studies showed remarkable improvements against certain types of allergic illnesses and support that honey is an effective anti-allergic agent.❞

Our (10almonds team) further observations included:

• The research review notes that a lot of studies did not confirm which phytochemical compounds specifically are responsible for causing allergic reactions and/or alleviating such (so: didn’t always control for what we’d like to know, i.e. the mechanism of action)

• Some studies showed results radically different from the rest. The reviewers put this down to differences that were not controlled-for between studies, for example:

  • Some studies used very different methods to others. There may be an important difference between a human eating a tablespoon of honey, and a rat having aerosolized honey shot up its nose, for instance. We put more weight to human studies than rat studies!

  • Some kinds of honey (such as manuka) contain higher quantities of gallic acid which itself can relieve allergies by chemically inhibiting the release of histamine. In other words, never mind pollen-based inoculations… it’s literally an antihistamine.

  • Certain honeys (such as tualang, manuka and gelam) contain higher quantities of quercetin. What’s quercetin? It’s a plant flavonoid that a recent study has shown significantly relieves symptoms of seasonal allergies. So again, it works, just not for the reason people say!

In summary:

The “inoculation by local honey” thing specifically may indeed remain “based on traditional use only” for now.

But! Honey as a remedy for allergies, especially manuka honey, has a growing body of scientific evidence behind it.

Bottom line:

If you like honey, go for it (manuka seems best)! It may well relieve your symptoms.

If you don’t, off-the-shelf antihistamines remain a perfectly respectable option.

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

The Path To Revenue - by Theresa Marcroft

So many books about start-ups skip right over the elephant in the room: survivorship bias. Not so for Marcroft! This book contains the most comprehensive and unapologetic treatment of it we’ve seen.

Less “here’s what Steve Jobs did right and here’s what Chocolate-Teapots-For-Dogs-R-Us did wrong; don’t mess up that badly and you’ll be fine”... and more realism. Marcroft gives us a many-angled critical analytic approach. In it, she examines why many things can seem similar in both content and presentation... but can cause growth or failure (and how and why), based on more than anecdotes and luck.

The book is information-dense (taking a marketing-centric approach) and/but well-presented in a very readable format.

If we can find any criticism of the book, it’s less about what’s in it and more about what’s not in it. This can never be a “your start-up bible!” book because it's not comprehensive. It doesn’t cover assembling your team, for example. Nor does it give a lot of attention to management, preferring to focus on strategy.

But no single book can be all things, and we highly recommend this one—the marketing advice alone is more than worth the cost of the book!

Take Your First Step Along The Path To Revenue By Checking It Out On Amazon!

May your month ahead be abuzz with health and productivity,

The 10almonds Team