Any lighty acidic hot beverage with fructose (or sucrose) would cause the same effect of reducing coughing (most regular cough "medicine" is 99% sugar), so if you ran out of lemon you could try with apple cider vinegar, and honey can be really substituted with any other syrup.

Lime would be ok but most orange variants are heavily engineered towards sweetness in detriment of acidity, so not as effective.

A century ago, the original treatment on Europe was hot herbs/lemon liquors (diluted in water) and sweet wines, which also comes with a few extra "side effects".

Don't forget the morphine based cough medicines.

Unpasteurized honey has lots of proven health benefits. You can Google scientific studies that show this.

As for lemon or other citrus in tea, I couldn't find anything other than websites that sell tea telling me that lemon tea is amazing for my health. I suspect lemon is simply used as a low-calorie flavor/sweetener.

Drinking hot liquids when you have a cold can help to temporarily clear congestion.

Ah the good old days of accidental infanticide through opium based medicines, makes you yearn for the simpler times.

Apparently a lemon has around 31mg of vitamin C in it and 80mg of potassium. I know honey has alot of microbes that help kill viruses and its thick and coats your throat so helps with coughing as well.

The citric acid in lemon breaks up mucus. Lemon juice has a lot more citric acid than orange juice. Lime is pretty close though.

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Let's not forget about the antibacterial properties of honey. It's not just there to taste nice, like any other syrup.

The question is really about why one thing is arbitrarily more popular than another, and the simple answer is that nobody knows. In the last chapter of "The Selfish Gene," Richard Dawkins introduces the idea of the "meme" which he likened to a gene, and he proposed the idea that memes vary in their characteristics, and that they compete with each other for limited mental terrain in their human hosts. Successful memes survive and reproduce by being remembered and spreading from one mind to another, while unsuccessful memes don't reproduce and die out (by being forgotten).

I'll use this evolutionary lens to address OP's question, but first I'll state that I assume that it doesn't matter which citrus you use, this cure doesn't work IRL. So why do people think the lemon-based cure works, but we never hear about similar alternatives substituting another citrus? I would expect that the belief the cure works comes from (possibly skeptical) people who try it, feel better (which would have happened anyway), and misattribute it to the "cure." Lemon would be the citrus because people probably have lemon in the house more often than other citrus. This would be simply because lemon is often added to tea and other beverages, and it's a more common garnish for food. So people believe in the lemon cure simply because they are more likely to have tried it.

If we take a step back and get a little abstract, maybe the deeper answer is that the lemon cure is more universal, so maybe memes with a "universal" quality have a survival advantage over memes with a more idiosyncratic quality.

Fun question.

Vicks's DayQuil+ Tincture of Opium, Coca, and Cannabis: Makes walks to school uphill both ways in the driving snow all the more tolerable

>ELI5. Why is honey and lemon a popular cure for cold like symptoms.

Because people believe it is a cure, and this belief passes through the population as a meme.

People see demand for products containing these ingredients, and so they make them in order to profit from their sale. The presence of these products in stores reinforces the belief that they do something, and so the meme perpetuates.

People looking for validation that the products work will try the product, and then will feel better, and will conclude that the product caused them to feel better even if they would have gotten better anyway. This also reinforces the belief.

We also have a compulsion to share our knowledge with others, even if that knowledge is wrong. So anytime you ask a question like this on social media you'll find many people convinced of their beliefs who sound very authoritative telling you about the benefits of things like raw honey, lemon juice, or that magical fluid vinegar. This also perpetuates the belief.

There is evidence that a vitamin C deficiency hurts your ability to recover from illnesses. It's very hard to be vitamin C deficient unless you're on a pirate ship for a year, so vitamin C supplementation is almost always pointless. You'll just pee it out. Your doctor can tell you if you are deficient in vitamin C.

In other words, there's no actual evidence that any of these home remedies actually do anything aside from the placebo effect.

But it's also relatively harmless, and if you're drinking fluids or eating soup in order to get that bonus vitamin C or whatever the remedy is that you're taking, you're getting fluids. It's important to be hydrated when you're sick so that your immune system has access to all of your body's waterways to fight off the infection. So even if putting lemon juice or honey in your water doesn't help you directly, if it encourages you to drink more water, and reduces your stress, it's still helpful. This is why your doctor may still encourage you to try things like this at home. It makes you feel better feeling like you have some control over your own recovery even if you don't and you're getting fluids, which really is what your body needs.

You can still get some pretty hardcore cough syrup with a prescription from a doctor. A few years ago I was feeling ill in the morning on my way to work. I checked the medicine cabinet and found half a bottle of cough syrup that was prescribed to my wife some time ago. Thinking it was standard cough syrup I chugged some unmetered portion of it. I had to pull over the few minutes into my drive to work as it kicked in. I open the car door and puked all over the place. In the moment I thought it was just the illness. But when I got home and looked closer at the bottle it was heavily fortified with opiates. I don't remember exactly which one. Hydrocodone or codeine or something.

This is a good summary. The benefit is entirely psychological, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I remember how mom used to kiss my boo-boos as a kid and I do the same for mine, just like I make them chicken soup and let them have a little ginger ale for stomachaches. It's as much for my own anxiety about them being sick as it is for their relief; some day I expect that they will remember the comfort they felt from these little rituals when it comes time for them to do the same, even if there's no biological basis as a "cure".

For some reason my mother used to have a large bottle of codeine as cough medicine at all times (in the 1990s), and I had it quite often. It's not great for chesty coughs, though, as it stops you from coughing the stuff up and out of your system.

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>A century ago, the original treatment on Europe was hot herbs/lemon liquors (diluted in water) and sweet wines, which also comes with a few extra "side effects".

Aka "grog" or "a hot toddy"

Spirit of your choice. Whisky or Rum is "traditional", but any "brown liquor" would be ok

Tea, black, made hot, almost boiling

Lemon juice

Sugar of some kind. Honey is my usual go-to, but maple syrup was an interesting substitute.

Spices. I like cinnamon and ginger

Make the tea, and while very hot, add everything else.

That makes sense. Whenever I get sick, I always have a really bad cough and keep coughing for about a month (worse part of being sick IMHO). I've tried pretty much every cough syrup there is, including codeine. They don't do anything.

I've found lemon juice to be the only thing that helps. Orange juice does nothing (it seems to make it worse actually). I actually keep some miracle berry tablets on hand so I can drink pure lemon juice.

I thought lime was like antibacterial. Cant you eat raw meat and fish with just lemon and lime? Also honey is sugery so not great when a little ill.

Taking vitamin c when you're sick doesn't do anything to help you, really. Potassium can in some cases, if your reaction to the illness is doing something to cause you to lose potassium (sweating, vomiting, etc) but for just a cough probably won't make a difference.

Pure honey is antibacterial because it sucks the water out of bacteria and kills them. Honey diluted into water is yummy bacterial food.

good answer but terrible response to an ELI5

Opiates reduce the respiration reflex. For the doses found in cough syrup, it just means that it suppresses your coughing, but if you take too much of it, you will eventually stop breathing.

Due to the opioid abuse epidemic, doctors have pretty much stopped prescribing opioid-based cough suppressants unless the other stuff doesn't work. You'll get the other stuff that works up to a point but won't make you barf or get you high.

> for some reason

I live europe, but i remember that this was covered in US sitcomes often, that parents give codein their kids to get them sleep

Even though Hot Toddys work mainly on the placebo effect, it doesn't quite answer the question of why lemon? The answer is simply, it tastes good. The belief is that the alcohol will help cure your cold and the honey will coat your throat, lessening your cough. Whether it actually does is beside the point. The honey makes the alcohol more palatable, but then the drink is too cloying. If you add an acid, it tastes less sweet and has a bit of a bite. Soda has an incredible amount of sugar in it, and if it wasn't for the citric acid, most people would fit way too sweet. It is the same concept. Why lemons versus oranges, limes or even vinegar? That is a cultural thing. Other places might swap out their acids for a different one, but the only reason is to make the drink more tasty.

Honey does not have a lot of microbes. Honey's properties kill microbes and fungi. Unpasteurized honey may have microbial spores - bacteria with a kind of protective shell. The worst of them is botulinum, the stuff that causes botulism poisoning. A healthy adult can eat unpasteurized honey with no ill effects, but children under one year of age and adults with weakened immune systems should never eat unpasteurized honey.

Lemon juice is more acidic than orange juice and more popular than lime juice. The acid helps to cut through the phlegm in the throat and make it easier to clear out. Honey, taken straight, is as effective at stopping coughs as any OTC cough syrup. It coats the back of the throat and soothes the irritated nerve endings. Unfortunately, the effect only lasts about 20 minutes. So, if you have an acute attack of coughing, it's great. If you've got a constant cough caused by a viral infection, you need something longer lasting.

Add some thyme if you want to be fancy!

Works like a charm

I always tought (without research) that lime had more acid that lemon. If its close, is it because lemon is more sweet and bitter 0o?

I mean, the same can happen with Tylenol.

I don't remember her doing that, but who knows! I do remember helping myself to it without any hint of a cough, though, as a teenager, which in hindsight was not the best situation.

Thats probably the stuff they make Lean with.

Oh yeah thats a tipical sitcom situation too. Teens having their first big party or prom and drinking codein (bc they are too young to buy alcohol)

Sorry. Are you confident that lemon has no effect? Because other answers seem to say that citric acid cuts mucus.

Who's lying? And who has any sources to back them up?

You are incorrect about it being a placebo effect in regards to just honey and lemon. Honey actually breaks down proteins ( mucus is a protein). But this only works when the temperature of the mix stays under 140f and the components stay intact. For anyone adding really hot water they are destroying it and for them it is a placebo effect. So done correctly it is very effective at killing bacteria and breaking down mucus Done incorrectly ( as most people do) it’s just a tasty drink

It's mostly anatibacterial for the reason you stated. But, it also contains methylglyoxal and hydrogen peroxide -- both are antibacterial.

Nope, honey is used because it’s anti inflammatory and anti bacterial. Honey is the shit.

Now that I’ve never quite understood since it’s a breathing suppressant. If you have a productive cough don’t you want them to cough?

I’m clearly not a doctor. 😏

Might have been paregoric. Doc prescribed it for me once when I was a little kid. It knocked me on my butt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paregoric

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>Sorry. Are you confident that lemon has no effect?

I am confident that there is no significant evidence supporting the claim that it does.

>other answers seem to say that citric acid cuts mucus.

I can find no supporting evidence for this.

Drinking water thins mucus. If you want to put some lemon in your water and that makes it more likely for you to drink water, then lemon can help you thin mucus.

>And who has any sources to back them up?

As with all requests for medical advice, talk to your doctor and don't listen to random people on social media. Even if someone can come prepared with a study that they feel proves them right, you have no idea whether that study says what they claim it does or whether the study was done correctly or whether it's an outlier when 10 other studies prove the opposite conclusion. Understanding how to read scientific studies is a skill they teach you in medical school. Talk to your doctor.

the citric acid in the lemon also helps with this. Its why a lime would actually work pretty much as well as a lemon, but an orange (which has much less citric acid, which is why you eat those without puckering up) would be less effective

>Honey actually breaks down proteins ( mucus is a protein).

Even if this were true, this says nothing about whether it fights illness or reduces time to recovery.

>it is very effective at killing bacteria

Colds are not caused by bacteria.

This is junk medicine. Get your medical advice from your doctor and stop taking it from random people on Reddit.

I did this once with some old prescription cough syrup for my daughter. It didn't contain any opiates, but whatever it was definitely had hallucinogenic effects at the dose I took. Everything looked animated, or like reality was CGI. Plus I felt like I couldn't remember how to talk. It was intense and not pleasant.

The good ol days.

Oof, I wouldn't view dosing directions as a suggestion. There's some stuff that you really don't want more than a certain amount in a certain time. Acetaminophen comes to mind. It's not going to make you throw up, it will just damage your liver, I believe. I dunno, look this up on actual medical sites, not just random Reddit posts.

Acids from lemons and limes can improve the shelf life of some foods by inhibiting bacterial growth. Pickling is a common example of this (acetic acid though rather than citric or ascorbic acid).

There is no evidence that eating these foods will do anything to any bacteria in your body. Your stomach already contains an impressive amount of digestive acid and your gut is fully colonized by a significant biome of bacteria that you would not want to kill. Eating a lemon isn't going to do anything.

But even if it did, colds are not actually caused by bacteria. They're caused by viruses.

If you want advice on how to prevent or recover from illness more quickly, please talk to your doctor and don't listen to random people on social media. That's the lesson you should take away from this. All of this junk about raw honey and vitamin C is just that: junk medicine.

Honey is antibacterial. It never spoils. And lemon is acidic, also antibacterial.

Combine the two and they have antioxidants which soothe the body

This is why when I drink 2 bottles of cough syrup, I prefer the DXM kind.

Raw honey specifically maunka honey is strong enough to be used as a prescription medicine for coughing. You are 100% wrong about honey having a placebo effect.

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Is the puke!

Dude, it's no use. It's the same thing as you may get cold from cold weather. You won't convince them

> You'll get the other stuff that works up to a point but won't make you barf or get you high.

Not true, the cough syrup with dxm and acetaminophen will get you tripping balls and throwing up cherry flavored disgustingness. Spend the extra money and get the dxm only.

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I have asthma and I've had to get it a few times during bad viruses and pneumonia where the cough wouldn't go away.

I'm neither but what my doctor usually recommends is something which helps with coughing for the day and something to stop coughing for the night, since, well ... sleeping when you are coughing your lungs out sucks.

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Yep on that last part! Hubs still swears by B&B when he’s sick.

I've had multiple doctors over the years suggest honey and lemon as a way of combating cold symptoms. They've never implied that it would cure the cold, only lessen the intensity of the symptoms.

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...people pasteurize honey? Why?

I believe you are making this up.

There is virtually no evidence that honey reduces the severity of symptoms or reduces time to recover for respiratory infections.

Really most of the evidence comes from this one review: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22419319/

But everyone citing this review as proof that honey works is misunderstanding what the study is saying. Here is the Conclusions section (emphasis mine):

> > Honey may be better than 'no treatment' and diphenhydramine in the symptomatic relief of cough but not better than dextromethorphan. There is no strong evidence for or against the use of honey.

A lot of studies come out with these "may" conclusions. They use weasel words like this because the study usually has some flaw, such as a low sample size, or some significant uncontrolled variables (eg., are you sure it was the honey or just that they drank something?). You get to scientific (thus medical) truth through multiple studies with different methodologies, and only when you get consistent agreement do you start accepting something as truth. We're not there with honey.

But even here they were talking about pasteurized honey. Raw honey specifically is never recommended medically due to the high risk of botulism. If your doctor is prescribing raw honey for a cough they should be referred to their medical board.

As I keep saying, please don't take medical advice from randoms on social media. Just talk to your doctor and stop spreading medical misinformation until you do.

Opioids do suppress the cough reflex tho

you nearly escaped the matrix /s

I just watched a Call the Midwife Christmas special where a sick character was drinking onion tea. Didn’t realize this was a thing people actually do!

I'm surprised it took so long to find your bottom two paragraphs lol. Hot drinks are great when you're sick. Is someone tryna put oranges or limes in their tea?

The rationale is "it may make you feel better 🤷‍♀️". There is no evidence to indicate it's therapeutic, but if it causes you to drink more fluids, and if you subjectively feel better even if you aren't necessarily getting better, then there's no harm in recommending it.

There is actually no product on the market, prescription or over-the-counter that is known to meaningfully reduce your cough symptoms or the time it takes for you to recover from a cold. This includes things like Zicam and OTC cough syrups (dextromethorphan, etc.). The more these drugs are studied the less confidence there is that they a single thing to help you. A lot of these remedies came into use before we have today's standards for establishing their safety and efficacy.

The placebo effect is a very real phenomenon. It's not just "you're imagining that you're better". The belief that you are being helped can result in very real, measurable, physiological improvements. This typically happens because of a reduction in stress associated with the illness. When you anticipate more (and worsening) symptoms, your apprehension can release stress hormones that exacerbate them. The certainty that taking a drug will make you feel better can reduce or eliminate that stress, giving you better outcomes.

So, there are many studies that show that being cold makes you likely to catch cold.

There are double blind studies done with some people dipping their toes in cold water etc.

The hypothesis for reason is that the cold makes your immune system weaker temporarily especially in the nose. But that reason hasn't been proven. But the fact around feeling cold and catching cold is proven.

Am I buying the wrong vinegar? Apple cider vinegar feels to me like the most acidic one. I can barely smell it without my eyes watering

Umm. Are you saying that sharing studies/literature is pointless? Because there might be others that disprove it? That's kind of a cop out...

The claim made by the other person is very clear and concise and something that can be tested easily. If the effect exists, should be seen in studies. If it doesn't, that can also be seen in studies.

Also if you think one can get this answer clearly from any doctor, then there must be literature around this available widely. After all, the doctor also learns from somewhere.

So I did some search and almost all articles from big universities are saying acid in lemon does help cut the mucus. Doctors also refer to these studies, right? So, maybe you need to comeback with some legitimate sources (including doctors) that say otherwise.

Where have you been? All food companies use heated honey unless stated otherwise. Bacterial contamination.

Chew a small chunk of garlic. It helps removing cough.

DXM. You were robotrippin'.

Yeah I remember being around 11 and having the flu. My doctor prescribed pure codeine and my mum would give it every four hours. Needless to say I slept that whole week, lol.

Had a bad enough cough to be prescribed it once. Answer is: if you can't get any sleep due to the cough, you'll soon be too weak to fight what's causing it (or even to cough properly). Had been sick for 2+ weeks when I got the prescription, iirc only took it 3 nights. Once it bought me the sleep I needed to get my immune shit back together, I was feeling better in a couple days.

Yeah. Not sure why my comments were downvoted. Maybe ppl think I work for big honey or something.

Another comment mentioned citrus and sugar and referenced oranges and limes. I don't drink tea so I have no idea what ppl put in their tea.

Pineapple juice works too, it's an anti-inflammatory

> Are you saying that sharing studies/literature is pointless?

Depends on what your goal is. Scientific and medical studies are written for a specific target audience that is not the kind of person that would be asking an ELI5 medical question on Reddit.

If you're a research doctor wanting to discuss a specific finding so that you can understand how it relates to your area of research or whether to establish a new standard of medical care around it, by all means share and discuss. Reading medical studies requires a deep understanding of study methodology and the scientific method that most people do not possess.

This is why we fought an obnoxious culture war in the middle of the COVID pandemic where people were vomiting up links to all sorts of studies that they felt "proved" their side when it rarely did.

Medical doctors have this training and this background and if you want to understand how a study relates to how you should be treated for your illness, the best way to do that is to talk to your doctor about it.

> So I did some search and almost all articles from big universities are saying acid in lemon does help cut the mucus.

No you didn't. You did a Google search for "lemon acid cuts mucus" and found links to sites hawking homeopathic or alternative medicine, food blogs, and YouTube content producers. If you'd found a real research study on the topic you should be able to link it.

You can do a Google search for other stupid things, like "vinegar cures cancer" and find at least a few search results that seem to agree with what you're searching for. Just because you can find a random site on the internet agreeing with you doesn't mean it's a medical fact.

> So, maybe you need to comeback with some legitimate sources (including doctors) that say otherwise.

I'm saying no significant evidence exists establishing that these remedies are effective at anything. A very small number of studies have been conducted into things like honey (not really lemon), and they all say things like this one does in the end:

>> There is no strong evidence for or against the use of honey.

Most codeine cough medicines also have an expectorant in them as well so when you do cough it does help you get stuff out. None of the prescription cough medicines completely eliminate coughing so you'll still be able to clear mucus from your respiratory system.

I'm on one right now because I've got a pretty severe case of bronchitis, but I only ever take it at night time because even a little bit of codeine gets me hella high, and even then it only mildly reduces my cough.

Raw, or? One clove or a third? Thanks.

I'm currently on a codeine-based cough medicine and it has an expectorant in it to help bring up any mucus when you do cough because none of these medications completely eliminate it.

I personally only take it at night because I cannot function on codeine, but even then I still have a productive cough during the night.

These medications aren't (shouldn't be) prescribed to people with mild/moderate coughs. They're for people who can't sleep at night and can't get rest to fight off the infection (I was sleeping less than four hours when I saw my doc). They're for people who are coughing to the point of vomiting and injury (also me). So, generally people who are doing more harm to their bodies by coughing than they are by not coughing.

Hope you feel better soon, thanks for the additional context.

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Man... I don't get why people hate google. Google is just the search engine and it matters what results you read.

If I went into Google scholar links or if I read publications from nature, science, harvard, Stanford, etc. it's not the same as saying random blog.

In your Google search, the first few are random blogs and magazines but then there are more reputed sources like PBS that talk about how John Hopkins is actually using vinegar for certain specific things in relation to cancer. So what did you prove?

Maybe you are bad at learning from Google searches. Doesn't mean everyone is. I myself have a good science education, a bachelor and masters from the best engineering university in my country and hold 2 patents. Why be so condescending? I think I am able to read summaries from scientific articles or even regular articles from reputed sources and understand them.

Plus the original comment took such a strong stance that lemon and honey have no effect on cough. This is so easy to invalidate with even one instance. No scientist would take such an extreme stance. It takes a lot of research and studies to be able to conclusively say something like this.

Are you a doctor who has extensively studied this topic? If no. How are you so confident that lemon/honey cannot help with cold/cough? This wouldn't be the first time that medicine have been reverse engineered from common traditional practices.

Hey I'm not really interested in debating this any further. If you want to find evidence supporting your belief, you're going to find it. This doesn't mean it's real. The fact that you took my "vinegar cures cancer" search (which is just a fake claim I made up) and now believe there's merit to it because you found a search result that glances at the idea sideways is an example of the problem.

Talk to your doctor if you want medical advice, not social media.

Iirc lemon and lime juices are both around 6% acid, but the composition differs. Lemon is almost entirely citric acid, whereas lime is 4% citric and 2% malic. At least, I’m pretty sure these are the values we use when acid-adjusting cocktails, which is how I know about it lol

it is probably right, you just need to dilute it in water

And the sugar content of honey acts as an osmotic, drawing out fluid, reducing swelling.

2-3 whole heads, raw It also drives away vampires and Tinder dates.

Haven’t seen anyone mention robotrilling in a minute. Fucking weird ass trip to be sure. Lol

Just a small piece, like half the size of an m&m. And yeah raw. Don't chew just suck on it

I've got a cold for the first time in like 5 years and that sounds really enticing right now...

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My choir director always recommended lemon and honey cough drops because the lemon's acidity cleans the gunk off your vocal chords and the honey coats it to protect it further. So like a shampoo and conditioner situation. Other flavors do one and not the other and are kind of like eating mentholated candy. You could do lime, I guess, but lime and honey? Bleh.

In ppm ranges, making them completely ineffective.

Methylgyoxal is utter marketing mumbo jumbo for alternative medicine shills.

Not to mention, even at antibacterial concentrations, neither hydrogen peroxide nor MGO would have any effect at all abhobt cold like symptoms.

Botulism. Not a big deal for the average person, but potentially dangerous for infants, and anyone else with a suppressed immune system (including most people medicated for autoimmune diseases).

I'm not sure it matters, really. I use lime more than I use lemon when I make a hot toddy for myself (still citric acid with vitamin c). Some things are just "the way it's always been done" and not necessarily better or worse, probably due to availability and pricing in the past.

>but any "brown liquor"

yup, I use a cheaper brandy for this.. same stuff I keep in the the kitchen cabinet for cooking. Paul Masson Grande Amber VSOP in my case.. best bang for the buck around if you want something with four years of oak aging. It's smooth enough to drink straight although not comparable to something like Hennessey or Remy which can easily cost 3-4x as much.

Even my second choice, a whisky like Wild Turkey or Four Roses costs a few bucks more.

Completely false that modern cough medicine is “99%” sugar. Maybe don’t give any kind of medical advice over the internet?

Sucrose, Sodium Saccharin, Sodium Benzoate, Alcohol 5% v/v. Each 15mL dose contains 5.55g Sucrose. This should be taken into account by diabetics.

Honey is used not just because it was available before other sugar syrups, but because it's naturally antimicrobial. That and the sugar content is why it doesn't go bad.

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Honey is literally antibacterial. Don't you see how that can be confusing?

That makes sense.

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Could be. I may have experienced that before, but it felt different. TBF, I have no clue what dose I took this particular time, I just took a big swig/gulp.

yeah srsly, Oranges actually make it worse...

This current cold is so awful!

I would be careful with that. My doc is conviced I've given myself some bad heartburn due to drinking lemon juice diluted with water everyday. Can't imagine what drinking pure lemon juice a lot would do

>initial strong claim that it doesn't do anything

I did not make this claim. I said there was no significant evidence that it does anything.

>I can actually find reputed sources (top tier universities) saying that it does.

I strongly recommend you have this conversation with your doctor.

>Unlike you, I do have a good science education and I like to learn.

Awful bold of you to assume you know anything whatsoever about my background, education, or professional experience.

>You are either just dumb

✌️

Just in case you don't know, sucrose is sugar, which would make roughly 37% of that thing, which looks like cough syrup.

What nobody is telling you is its water content (medicine doesn't tipically show dry content data) for people like you who doesn't know it and also doesn't understand that ingredients are listed in amount order.

Honey and lemon is a popular home remedy for cold-like symptoms because the honey acts as a natural cough suppressant and the lemon contains vitamin C, which can help boost the immune system and potentially alleviate some cold symptoms. Lemon may be more effective than other citrus fruits like oranges or limes because it has a higher concentration of vitamin C.

That's fine. I'm not arguing its efficacy as a treatment. You said "Get your medical advice from your doctor and stop taking it from random people on Reddit" and I'm just pointing out that many doctors do advise honey and lemon as a treatment for cold symptoms.