It wouldn't be Manuka honey then. You forgot the marketing angle, which is sells more of the stuff than any actual antibacterial prowess. And the Chinese consume all sorts of whacky stuff - rhino horns, tiger balls, ground-up cockroaches, etc. With the right marketing you could get the Chinese to consume anything.
I used to eat a lot of Manuka honey when I grew up in New Zealand. It is strong-tasting. The Chinese have raised the prices and now I won't buy the stuff in Australia because it is too expensive.
>And the Chinese consume all sorts of whacky stuff - rhino horns, tiger balls, ground-up cockroaches, etc
This is my thinking as well. This sounds like yet another Chinese health fad, which often has roots in "traditional" and "alternative" Chinese medicine, which has been shown to be almost all nonsense, with the rare exception that's due more to luck than anything else.
The linked paper describes manuka as having antibacteria properties in regards to dressing wounds. I'm not sure if eating it is giving anyone any benefits and considering what we now know about gut flora and antibiotics, well, people shouldn't just be eating antibiotics like tic-tacs.
> With the right marketing you could get the Chinese to consume anything.
Autocratic states generally don't have any sort of democratic movements for medicine, industrial, air, or food safety, so they never get the proper regulatory bodies to make this stuff safe. Case in point, my wife brought some cold medicine back from Russia. It was chock full of mercury. There were a few articles last year about some common cold medicine marketed to children in China. It was full of lead. FDA advisory here:
With many of these things it boils down to: simple food likely does exactly the same thing. I hear that well-nourished people generally have stronger immune systems.
> regards to dressing wounds
Even if it actually works on dressings the bigger question is: how well does it survive HCl and bile? Can it be absorbed via the intestines? Or is the only active effect killing off flora on its way to be pooped out? Sanitized poop: great.
What these people don't realize is that the body isn't something you put things into an expect the same results. Would they guzzle down bleach simply because it cleans their clothes? Why would they then guzzle down this honey, merely because it sanitizes wounds?
I write Forth code for tiny microcontrollers that are embedded in ASICs. They are ROM-based, and have to work first time. Size is a few hundred bytes, so C is out of question.
To quote: "The conventional approach, enforced to a greater or lesser extent, is that you shall use a standard subroutine. I say that you should write your own subroutines." (http://www.forth.com/resources/evolution/evolve_1.html)
I wrote the OS for my Raspberry Pi in Forth (which necessarily meant writing the interpreter).
I think that's an important thing: anybody who's seriously doing Forth work has written his or her own interpreter to do it with. Which may be as it should be.
Interestingly, Bitcoin and similar systems use a Forth-like stack language as script.
For instance, a typical transaction goes like this:
[scriptSig] [scriptPubKey]
Where scriptSig is: __signature__ __public_key__
and scriptPubkey is: OP_DUP OP_HASH160 __some_hash__ OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG
In rough terms:
OP_DUP works like classic Forth DUP, duplicates the immediate stack element. OP_HASH160 replaces the stack element with its hash160. OP_EQUALVERIFY performs a "fail if not equal" and OP_CHECKSIG takes two elements from the stack and verifies they're a pubkey and its signature.
So basically that's how the system verifies that a transaction is signed by the owner of the input address to go to the owner of the output address.
You can write pretty much anything you want. The problem is that the standard Forth has very few libraries, and most libraries around depend on a particular implementation. To see what is possible, check Win32Forth for example.
