Gwyneth Paltrow, the Hollywood actress, swears by it, alternative medicine practitioners prescribe it for everything from colds to stomach ulcers, and Holland & Barrett sell it for £100 a kilogram.
So it really shouldn’t have taken a bunch of primary school children to prove that manuka honey’s supposed curative abilities are as non-existent as Paltrow’s scientific ones.
But now in the north London borough of Islington — arguably Britain’s spiritual home of nonsense health fads — a school has conducted what is believed to be the country’s first proper randomised controlled trial of the honey, which is produced by New Zealand bees that collect their nectar from only the manuka tree.
The conclusion? It is no better for you than the sort of honey made