However, right-wing blogs falsely claim that sour honey is a cure for cancer that the government has been hiding from you. To fully understand the conspiracies surrounding this mysterious type of honey, we must go back to the 2016 presidential election, when the sour honey myth first surfaced. The rumor about “sour honey” emerged on several text-only YouTube videos (these types of videos are characteristic of hoaxes) sometime during the 2016 presidential election.

As the story goes, Big Pharma - and Hillary Clinton - didn’t want cancer patients to know about, as it would undercut their profits.Ī November 2016 article published by The Horn News, an extreme right-wing blog, reported that sour honey can cure any type of cancer, based on a private and unpublished email exchange from 2013 between alleged “government researchers.” The outlandish story was simple: Scientists recently discovered “sour honey,” a substance hidden deep in the Amazon jungle that could cure cancer. “… is the only effective therapeutic available on the market so far,” claimed one email from an alleged “government researcher.” There is no image or link to the email. The article is written by Brian Chambers with the Health Sciences Institute, a direct-marketing company owned by Agora. The publisher has gotten in trouble with government investigators multiple times, according to a 2015 investigation by Mother Jones.

Sprinkled throughout this absurd anti-Clinton article were unfounded claims that “sour honey” could cure cancer. Chambers cited unfounded studies that this mysterious honey killed 13% of breast cancer cells within 24 hours, stopped human-like tumor growth in mice, and killed up to 75% of cancer cells in two aggressive types of prostate cancer.

Dr. allan spreen conspiracy theory