What Exactly is Honey, And How Does It Benefit Human Health?

What does the bee do? Bring home honey! And what does father do? Bring home money! And what does mother do? Lay out the money! And what does baby do? Eat up the honey!

A rhyme by Christina Rossetti that tells about the love for honey! Rare are the people who turn up their noses at the suggestion of honey drizzled over pancakes or thickly spread on breakfast bread or a spoonful taken to soothe a cough! So, what exactly is honey, and how does it benefit human health?  

Honey is a liquid made by bees using the nectar from flowers. It is sweet and can be graded by colour, with the clear, golden amber honey often fetching a higher retail price than the darker varieties. The flavours of honey also vary, dependent on the types of flowers from which the nectar was harvested. Honey is available in both the raw and the pasteurized form. 

Raw honey is removed from the hive and bottled directly and will contain trace amounts of yeast, wax, and pollen. Pasteurized honey has been heated and processed to remove impurities, and is the commercial honey available on market shelves.

Honey, like table sugar, is a simple sugar that is easily digested, providing instant energy when consumed. It is a sweet liquid containing a combination of fructose (38%), glucose (31%), maltose (7%), sucrose (1%), and water (17%). A minuscule amount (0.2%) of minerals (potassium, magnesium, iron, calcium, phosphate) is also present in honey. One teaspoon (5 g) of honey provides 4 g of carbohydrates equivalent to 16 kcal of energy as opposed to 5 g of carbohydrates and 20 kcal derived from 1 tsp. of table sugar.  

A type of honey doing the rounds today is Manuka honey. Manuka is the name of a plant that can be found only in the most remote places in New Zealand, and the honey obtained from the bees pollinating the Manuka bush is called Manuka honey. The properties of the plant are imbibed by the honey thus produced, and laboratory tests indicate more effective benefits of Manuka honey over other types of honey. 

“Fake” honey refers to honey that has been adulterated. The adulterant can be sugar syrups from sugar cane, corn, or rice, which are cheaper and easier to produce than honey obtained from the beehive. The contaminating syrups are not likely to be harmful, but they definitely have different nutrient profiles, sweetness levels, glycemic indexes, and have undergone different processing techniques. The health benefits of the latter are, therefore, not in line with the widely propagated benefits of honey (anti-bacterial, anti-inflammatory, easing digestive problems, alleviating ulcers, and providing antioxidant value to health). 

Honey blends can be marketed and sold legally as long as they are labeled such. Laboratory purity tests for honey include the “C4 sugar test” which can determine the pathway used to make the product, thereby indicating the source of honey. The C4 test picks up most fake honey, because most of the cheap sugar syrups used to make fake honey came from C4 plants, like corn and sugar cane. But newer substitutes, like rice, wheat, and beet syrups, come from C3 plants, and so won’t be picked up. 

At the home level, the simplest method of checking if the product is “pure” is by using the Flame Test – dip a cotton swab in honey, and light fire to it; if the flame burns, the honey is pure; if the swab does not catch fire, it may be adulterated. Placing a small amount of honey on a plate and checking if it trickles down quickly or is resistant to flow when the plate is tilted is another method of checking the purity of honey – pure honey is thick while impure honey will be runny.

A word of caution – honey should not be given to children below the age of one year as it contains bacteria that can produce toxins in a baby’s intestines, leading to infant botulism, which is a very serious illness. There is also a risk of pollen allergies developed from honey. So, while this naturally sweet accompaniment used in bakery and savory products are enjoyed by many, a lookout for its allergic profile and its and caloric content needs to be maintained.