The golden nectar that you pour on your morning pancakes has just found another possible function, and no, this one is not some crazy food fusion that you’ll be reading about in food blogs for the next six months; this function is one that could actually help with your health, more specifically to decrease your antibiotic use.

Researchers from McGill University presented their findings at the American Chemical Society this past weekend. The lead researcher, Nathalie Tufenkji, said that she was inspired to test the efficacy of maple syrup in treating infections because of the tradition within aboriginal people in Canada having used it for some time.

In the initial tests, the researchers extracted the maple syrup’s phenolic compounds by separating it from the water and sugar in the compound. Next, the exposed the phenolic compound to well known bacteria in petri dishes. Initially, their results were not great.

The maple syrup, by itself, proved not to do much in the way of fighting against bacteria. But, when they combined the maple syrup extract with antibiotics and exposed them to known bacteria in a petri dish, the results were significant.

“What we found is that when we added the antibiotics with maple syrup-extracted phenolic compounds, we actually needed a lot less antibiotic to kill the bacteria. We could reduce the dose of antibiotic by up to 90 per cent,” said Nathalie Tufenkji in a report to CTV.

Researchers say that a possible reason for the maple syrup having a catalytic effect on the antibiotics efficacy is that the syrup could be making the bacteria cells more permeable, by breaking down the walls of the cells so that the antibiotics can begin doing their work faster and with less effort.

Another possible theory they floated was the syrup could be turning off the “pump” on the bacteria, which works to remove the antibiotics from the bacteria’s walls.

Whatever the reason, researchers are excited that they have found a natural and local (and delicious I might add!) solution to using less antibiotics to fight bacteria and disease causing bacteria.

Click here to read the original report from CTV.