Is honey, a natural product, healthier than refined white sugar?
White sugar is produced by refining sugar beets and sugar cane. Sugar is made up of the disaccharide, sucrose, which is 50% fructose and 50% glucose, upon digestion.
Honey is sweeter than white sugar and is made up of a mixture of carbohydrates and other compounds. Honey consists mainly of fructose (40%) and glucose (30%) with a little maltose, sucrose and other complex carbohydrates making up the carbohydrate balance. Although honey is mostly sugars, there are trace amounts of vitamins, minerals and anti-oxidants. The water content of honey is 17% and honey is 36% denser than water.
The specific composition of any batch of honey depends on the flowers available to the bees that produced the honey.
Formation of Honey (National Honey Board, US)
Honey is produced by bees as a food source. To produce a single jar of honey, foraging honey bees have to travel the equivalent of three times around the world. In cold weather or when fresh food sources are scarce, bees use their stored honey as their source of energy. By contriving for bee swarms to nest in artificial hives, people have been able to “semidomesticate” the insects, and harvest excess honey. In the hive (or in a wild nest), there are three types of bees:
- a single female queen bee
- a seasonally variable number of male drone bees to fertilize new queens
- some 20,000 to 40,000 female worker bees.
The worker bees raise larvae and collect the nectar that will become honey in the hive. Leaving the hive, they collect sugar-rich flower nectar and return.
In the hive, the bees use their “honey stomachs” to ingest and regurgitate the nectar a number of times until it is partially digested. Invertase synthesized by the bees and digestive acids hydrolyze sucrose to give the same mixture of glucose and fructose. The bees work together as a group with the regurgitation and digestion until the product reaches a desired quality. It is then stored in honeycomb cells. After the final regurgitation, the honeycomb is left unsealed. However, the nectar is still high in both water content and natural yeasts, which, unchecked, would cause the sugars in the nectar to ferment. The process continues as bees inside the hive fan their wings, creating a strong draft across the honeycomb, which enhances evaporation of much of the water from the nectar. This reduction in water content raises the sugar concentration and prevents fermentation. Ripe honey, as removed from the hive by a beekeeper, has a long shelf life, and will not ferment if properly sealed.
Natural does not mean healthy!
Your body does not care whether you ingested honey or white sugar once the glucose and fructose enters your bloodstream. Sugar is sugar and both glucose and fructose are metabolized differently. All types of sugars should be consumed sparingly, even if it is so called “healthy” honey. The trace amounts of vitamins, minerals and anti-oxidants in honey might help alleviate common health ailments, like a sore throat or chronic sinus infections.
The antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties of honey give it a thumbs up over white sugar; however, it would be wise to not consume too much of this natural product, rich in sugars.
HEALTH INSIGHT
MARCH 2017
