The story behind Mad Honey Review
An independent reference site about mad honey, the rhododendron honey that carries grayanotoxins. We publish long-form explanatory articles, we cite what we can, and we say plainly when the evidence is thin. We do not sell anything.
Legal status tracked
This is a reading site. Each article takes one question, what grayanotoxin actually does, why two jars from the same hillside behave differently, whether a country's customs law says anything at all about this, and answers it at the length the question deserves. Most pieces run two to four thousand words because the short answers circulating online are usually wrong in a way that takes a paragraph to unpick.
We started because the existing search results for mad honey were almost entirely written by people with something to sell, and because the small research literature that does exist, mostly Turkish cardiology case series, is rarely represented accurately by anyone summarising it. Our editorial standard is that a reader should be able to follow every claim back to its source, and should be told when there is no source to follow.
What this site is
Long-form and explanatory, evidence-first, and honest about who writes it. Eight standing sections, each with an editor responsible for it.
- Independent information
- Evidence graded
- Sources named
- Dated and re-checked
- Clinically reviewed
- Safety routing first
What this site is not
This list is the shortest way to describe our constraints, so we keep it at the top level of the site rather than in small print.
- Not a shop
- No affiliate links
- No sponsored posts
- No seller or brand names
- No dosing figures
- Not medical advice
Why we refuse the dose question specifically
It is the single most searched question about this subject, and refusing it costs us traffic. We refuse anyway, for a reason we can defend: grayanotoxin concentration varies enormously between batches, between hives on the same slope, and between seasons, and there is no consumer-visible marker that tells you which kind you are holding. A figure that is unremarkable in one jar can be a hospital visit from another.
So where a dose figure would normally sit in one of our articles, you will instead find a short box explaining this, and a line telling you what to do if something has already gone wrong. That box is standard across the site and is not a placeholder.
The source types every claim on this site is traced back to. We cite regulators, journals and poison information services; we are not affiliated with any of them, and a citation is never an endorsement in either direction.
Corrected by our readers
We get things wrong. When we do we fix the article, mark the change at the foot of it, and add a row to a public log. Nothing is quietly edited. These three came from readers.
"The third paragraph cites Gunduz 2008 for a claim that appears in Gunduz 2007 instead."
Reader correction, upheld
Logged 12 August 2026. Reference corrected, claim regraded.
"Dizziness appears in both columns of your symptom table without distinguishing positional light-headedness from collapse."
Reader correction, upheld
Logged 29 July 2026. Table restructured and clinically re-reviewed.
"Your entry cites only the England honey regulations. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own instruments."
Reader correction, upheld
Logged 19 June 2026. Devolved instruments added to the UK entry.
Our disclosure: declared ties to the honey trade
Some people on this team have professional ties to honey production and trading companies. That is stated here, at the top level of the site, rather than at the bottom of a policy page, because it is the first thing a sceptical reader deserves to know.
Specifically: one of our reporters spent five years as a quality-control officer for a honey exporting company and still belongs to a regional beekeepers' association; one contributor takes occasional paid consulting work on food-safety documentation for producers; and the site's hosting costs in its first year were covered by a founder whose income comes from the wider honey trade. The individual details, with dates, sit on each person's page.
We publish anyway, and we think that is the right call rather than a compromise. The people who actually know how this honey is harvested, graded, stored and shipped are people who have worked in it. A site staffed entirely by outsiders with no industry contact would be cleaner on paper and considerably worse informed. What we can honestly promise is not the absence of connections, it is conduct: nobody pays us to feature, mention, link to or omit anything, we name no sellers or brands at all, anyone with a current commercial interest in a subject is recused from writing or editing it, and every disclosure is re-confirmed in writing twice a year.
Meet the editorial team
Six people, six disclosures. Every article carries a named byline, a published date, a last-checked date and the name of whoever reviewed it. Nothing runs anonymously.
Disclosures were last re-confirmed in writing on 14 July 2026. Anyone with a current commercial interest in a subject cannot write, edit or review that subject, and recusals are recorded in the article's revision history.
One email a month, when there is something worth saying.
New articles, changes to any of the nine legal-status pages, and a short note on any study worth reading. If a month passes with nothing substantial, you get nothing: we would rather skip than pad. No sponsors, no seller mentions, no third-party sharing.