Is Mānuka Honey Safe During Pregnancy?

Summary: Mānuka honey is safe to eat during pregnancy. Honey does not appear anywhere on the NHS list of foods to avoid in pregnancy, and the botulism warning most people have heard of applies to babies under one year old, not to pregnant adults. The point worth watching is not safety but sugar, because honey is roughly 82 per cent sugars by weight.

Pregnancy comes with a long list of foods to check, and honey sits in an awkward spot on that list. Most people have heard that babies should not be given it, which naturally raises the question of whether the same applies while you are carrying one. The answer is reassuring, but the reasoning behind it is widely misunderstood, and the genuine caution lies somewhere most articles do not look.

What the NHS says about honey in pregnancy

The NHS publishes a detailed guide to foods to avoid in pregnancy. It covers cheese and dairy, meat and poultry, eggs, fish and seafood, caffeine, drinks, fruit and vegetables, and nuts, and it separates them into foods that are safe, foods to be careful with, foods to limit and foods to avoid.

Honey appears on none of those lists. It is not named as a food to avoid, not named as a food to limit, and not named as a food to be careful with.

NHS guidance for expectant parents in Scotland states the position directly, confirming that honey is fine for you to eat while noting that you should not give it to your baby until they are over a year old.

That distinction, between what is safe for you now and what will be safe for your baby after birth, is the single most misread point about honey and pregnancy.

Why the botulism warning is about babies, not about you

Honey can occasionally carry spores of a bacterium called Clostridium botulinum. In a baby under twelve months, those spores can settle in the gut, grow, and release a toxin. The NHS describes the resulting illness, infant botulism, as very serious, which is why its guidance is that children should not be given honey until they are over one year old.

Adults are different, and the reason is specific. A mature digestive system already carries an established population of gut bacteria that crowds out C. botulinum before it can take hold and produce toxin. Infants have not yet developed that protection.

It is worth being precise about what this means, because two explanations circulate widely and both are wrong. Pregnancy does not change your digestion so that it can suddenly cope with honey, and your immune system does not adapt to it either. Your gut flora was doing this job long before you conceived, and it carries on doing it throughout pregnancy. Nothing about being pregnant makes honey safer or less safe than it was before.

Mānuka honey is not an exception to the infant rule

This is worth stating plainly, because it is a point that honey brands tend to skip. No type of honey is safe for a baby under twelve months. Raw, pasteurised, organic and Mānuka honey can all carry the same spores, and pasteurisation targets bacteria rather than heat-resistant spores. A high MGO grade makes no difference whatsoever to this, and neither does provenance or testing.

If you are stocking up during pregnancy, that is fine. Just keep the jar out of your baby's reach for their first year. Our guide to Mānuka honey for children covers what happens after that first birthday.

Honey is still a sugar, and that is the real thing to watch

The meaningful caution around honey in pregnancy has nothing to do with bacteria. Honey is a concentrated sugar solution. Analysis based on United States Department of Agriculture composition data puts honey at approximately 82 per cent carbohydrate, almost all of it sugars, around 17 per cent water and roughly 0.3 per cent protein.

Figures are rounded and based on standard honey composition data. They are a guide to scale rather than a nutrition label.

Honey does contain around eighteen amino acids, but at trace levels of roughly 0.05 to 0.1 per cent. It is not a meaningful source of protein, and it should not be described as one.

Diabetes UK lists honey among the alternative names for sugar to look for on food labels. If you have gestational diabetes, or you have been told you are at increased risk of it, honey counts towards your sugar intake in the same way table sugar does. NHS dietetic guidance for gestational diabetes generally allows small amounts of foods such as honey and jam, while advising against adding sugar to drinks and against large or frequent portions of sugary foods. Your midwife, maternity team or dietitian is the right person to set your individual limits.

What Mānuka honey may and may not do during pregnancy

We are not aware of any clinical trials that have tested Mānuka honey specifically in pregnancy. That matters, because it means anything you read about Mānuka honey and pregnancy benefits is extrapolated either from research on honey generally, from laboratory work, or from studies in people who were not pregnant. We would rather say so than imply a body of evidence that does not exist.

Here is where things actually stand.

On coughs and sore throats

If you have a cough, the NHS suggests hot lemon and honey as one of several things you could try, made by squeezing half a lemon into a mug of boiled water and adding one to two teaspoons of honey. It is equally clear that the evidence for this is limited, and it carries a warning that matters here: some medicines and herbal treatments are not safe for everyone during pregnancy, and it advises checking the leaflet or speaking to a pharmacist.

Honey is a food rather than a medicine, so a warm drink is a reasonable comfort measure. The wider point still stands, which is that a cough in pregnancy is not something to manage indefinitely on your own. The NHS advises seeing a GP if a cough lasts more than three weeks. Our article on Mānuka honey for cough and cold goes into the general evidence in more detail.

When to speak to your midwife, GP or pharmacist

• If you have gestational diabetes, or have been told you are at increased risk of developing it.
• If you have a known allergy to pollen or to bee products.
• If a cough lasts longer than three weeks, or a sore throat is not settling.
• If heartburn is severe or persistent, since treatments suitable for use in pregnancy are available.
• Before using any product marketed as a remedy or treatment rather than as a food.
  

After the birth: the one rule to remember

Keep honey away from your baby until after their first birthday. That means all honey and in every form. Not a taste on a dummy, not stirred into food, not baked into anything, and not Mānuka honey either. The NHS also points out that honey is a sugar, so avoiding it in that first year helps protect emerging teeth as well.

After twelve months, honey can be introduced like any other food.

Why Choose Manuka Lab

Every jar of Mānuka Lab honey is sourced from the remote East Cape region of New Zealand, harvested from the native Mānuka bush, Leptospermum scoparium. Our honey is independently tested and certified for its MGO content, and it complies with the New Zealand Government definition for Mānuka honey.

Every jar carries a batch code you can check yourself through the traceability tool on our website, so you can follow your honey from hive to jar. We think that matters most to people who are being careful about what they eat, and pregnancy is exactly that moment.

If you are choosing a grade, our MGO guide walks through the differences and our MGO quiz will point you to a starting point.