Category
Safety
What mad honey does to the body, how reactions present, and when a reaction becomes a medical emergency.
2 articles. Every piece in this section is reviewed by a clinician before publication.
If someone is unwell
If you are with someone who is faint, grey, confused, vomiting repeatedly or unable to stay upright, stop reading and call your local emergency number.
If you are unsure, your national poison centre will take the call, will not charge you and will not involve the police. Nothing on this site can assess a person; only a clinician can.
Start here
Mad Honey Poisoning: Symptoms and What to Do
Grayanotoxin poisoning is rarely fatal but it is genuinely dangerous, and it does not look like ordinary food poisoning. The pattern is a slowing heart, falling blood pressure, sweating and dizziness, sometimes hours after the honey was eaten.
We publish no dosing figures
You will not find a spoon count, a weight, a volume or a "start with this much" anywhere on this site, and that is a deliberate editorial rule rather than an oversight.
Grayanotoxin content varies between batches by more than an order of magnitude, so any figure we printed would be wrong for most jars and dangerous for some. A figure that is wrong in the direction of "more" is the exact failure mode that fills the case reports.
There is no established safe amount. Published poisoning cases involve small quantities, and the only people who should be advising you about your own body are clinicians who can see your history.
Related sections
Science
Grayanotoxin, batch variability, and what the studies actually establish.
Basics
What the substance is, what it tastes like, and which claims survive scrutiny.
Culture
The people who harvest it, the places it comes from, and the practices around it.
Comparisons
How mad honey sits against other honeys and other substances it gets shelved with.
One email a month, when there is something worth saying.
New articles, changes to any of the 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.