Great news for those of us with a sweet tooth! (And good news for all of those hard-working bees out there!)
In the past, it was always believed that your body processed honey just like any other processed sugar, meaning it had no real health benefits and using it was simply a matter of preference.
I always found this a little strange, and honestly I chose to pretend it was false. I mean, how could this ancient medicine, sprouted from the nectar of plants and manufactured into a usable product by bees, be metabolically just the same as refined table sugar? For literally thousands of years honey has been used for everything from Egyptian embalmings to tea sweetener, and has even been studied for its antiviral and antibacterial properties in more recent years. Plenty of people swear by local honey for lessening the effects of seasonal allergies, and there’s no denying that honey will soothe even the sorest of sore throats.
So how could our body view this sacred, sweet, golden nectar as just a run-of-the-mill sweetener??? I won’t go into the scientific and metabolic processes here about how the body actually digests sugars, but I will say I finally feel a little vindication.
As it turns out, raw honey can actually be beneficial to your cardiometabolic health! In other words, it can help regulate blood sugar and cholesterol, which, if you didn’t already know, play a pretty big role in our overall health.
The study found that honey lowered fasting blood sugar levels (blood sugar on an empty stomach), lowered total cholesterol and “bad” cholesterol (also known as LDL cholesterol), and even lowered one of the markers of what they call fatty liver disease.
All of these benefits might be because honey is much different than the everyday sweeteners we’re used to. While most sugary foods we consume contain sugar in the form of either fructose or glucose, honey is made up of dozens of less-common sugar structures. According to one of the doctors on the study, honey also contains tons of other little fun components (AKA bioactive molecules) that can help protect against cancer, obesity, and inflammation, although those were not explicitly examined in this particular study.
So what is “raw” honey anyway? Most of the honey we buy at the store undergoes a process called pasteurization, which is pretty much when a product is heated at a really high temperature really quickly to kill harmful bacteria. Raw honey does not go through this process, which means it has higher levels of nutrients and antioxidants than its pasteurized counterpart. Raw honey was what this study found to be beneficial to fasting blood sugar and other markers, although if you’re pregnant you should definitely steer clear of anything unpasteurized, or at least consult your doctor first.
The different types of honey don’t stop there! This study also looked at what is called monofloral honey, which means the bees only collected nectar from one type of plant in order to make their honey. Monofloral honeys can have distinctive flavors from each other, and in this case, honey made from exclusively clovers had a greater effect on lowering cholesterol and fasting blood sugar.
The study did, however, focus on “healthy individuals” who don’t get more than 10% of their total calories from sugar, so there’s still more research to be done on broader populations before we all start guzzling honey by the bottle.
Overall, the main focus for your health should definitely be decreasing the amount of sugary, fatty, unhealthy foods that we consume, but this is still pretty exciting news for all of us who try to be health-conscious and want to stay away from sugary processed foods, yet have a nagging sweet tooth that demands to be fed. I, for one, will definitely feel a lot less guilty the next time I add a heaping spoonful of honey to my tea, and once again I feel we are forever indebted to those hard working bees that keep the planet running smoothly and continue to produce a healthy and tasty product.
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