6 ms·

> This systematic review and meta-analysis showed that oral honey intake reduced fasting glucose, total cholesterol, LDL-C, fasting triglycerides, and ALT and i

> This systematic review and meta-analysis showed that oral honey intake reduced fasting glucose, total cholesterol, LDL-C, fasting triglycerides, and ALT and increased HDL-C, IL-6, and TNF-α I was surprised to find out that the average glycemic index of honey is about 55, much lower than I had anticipated. Even so, I still find it counter intuitive that honey — majority sugar — can lower your fasting glucose.

ollysb 4y ago
I wonder if they're displacing other sugars with Honey. Speaking as a diabetic I find it very hard to believe that a spoonful of Honey in the morning is going to improve my day :)
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  Indeed: “We’re not saying you should start having honey if you currently avoid sugar,” Dr. Khan added. “The takeaway is more about replacement — if you’re using table sugar, syrup or another sweetener, switching those sugars for honey might lower cardiometabolic risks.”
  - amanj41 4y ago
    This is my recommendation on diet soda to people as well. The literature points to diet soda being a productive replacement for those currently drinking soda and desiring to lose weight. But the jury is still out on potential effects of diet on the microbiome and insulin sensitivity etc, so I wouldn't go encouraging people to pick it up for no reason.
- trevyn 4y ago
  My intuition is that the non-sugar components of honey are responsible.
  - slothtrop 4y ago
    What might those be?
- tcbawo 4y ago
  It seems that the species of bee and pollen source make a big difference in the consistency and flavor of honey. It would be interesting to know which types of honey are highest in the healthy compounds and lowest in unhealthiest compounds (presumably sugar).
  - simonsarris 4y ago
    notably honey made from mountain laurel ('Mad Honey') can be hazardous to your health, since every part of the plant is toxic.
- MrYellowP 4y ago
  Unless you risk killing yourself by doing so, you should try and see what happens. I prefer honey over everything else. It's the smoothest form of sugar I've experienced and it's way more than just a source of sugar, too.
basilgohar 4y ago
I believe this kind of study will shed more light on how much more we have to learn about nutrition and how our body processes and metabolizes nutrients. I think a lot of nutrition has been, for lack of a better term, very basic and somewhat stoicimetric - fat consumed equals fat stored, cholesterol consumed equals cholesterol stored, and also treating manufactured sugars (e.g., High Fructose Corn Syrup) as equal to natural sugars such as what's found in fruits and honey. This and many other studies have shown that this parity between input/output is not what happens nor is it an adequate reflection of how our body works. Treating the body as a simple machine in this manner is very naïve and has lead, in my opinion, to a huge amount of misapplied health advice or just outright wrong policies. Of course, the factors driving this have profited handsomely from this misdirection, but that's another angle suitable for it's own thread.
- cromka 4y ago
  Not so recently the similarly shocking findings about the Mediterranean cuisine rich in animal fat also contradicted the common beliefs regarding the saturated fats. If I may be allowed to speculate, I think it could simply have a lot to do with the very basic idea of consuming processed vs natural foods. So refined sugar = bad, refined fats = bad. Our bodies have evolved to optimize digestion and make most of those natural ingredients, but not the artificial, industrial products we had been exposed for mere 150-200 years. EDIT: for more background, what was stunning is that some cuisines in Mediterranean, like Spanish or North Italian, can be quite heavy on meat, yet that did not negatively correlate with the lifespan, compared to more lightweight variates in the region. I can’t recall the paperwork, but that was the general gist.
  - soco 4y ago
    I guess "refined" should be probably understood as "many ingredients, seemingly important but unknown to actual medicine, filtered out"...
  - hombre_fatal 4y ago
    Can you share more? The balance of evidence against saturated fats is quite clear, and there are usually good responses to find around single studies that purport to show countervailing evidence. The biggest example of this is that it’s hard to find a cohort that contains substantially different levels of saturated fat intake (very low vs very high). So the quintiles inside the same cohort don’t necessarily have significant outcome differences, and that’s peddled as saturated fat not being bad for you.
nekoashide 4y ago
I would expect that there's something else at play, it's entirely possible that natural honey contains some organic chemical that increases metabolism in humans.
- ReptileMan 4y ago
  Honey is acidic. I think that the main problem in the western diet is that we don't balance sugar and starch with enough spices, hot stuff or acid.
  - CaptainNegative 4y ago
    Whatever you eat gets dissolved by something like 10-20 teaspoons of stomach acid, which is roughly 100x-500x more acidic (linear scale) than honey. By the time it gets there a teaspoon of honey is not making a dent in the overall acidity.
    - karlshea 4y ago
      My father got caught up in nutrition conspiracy and "alkaline diets", and now won't have a milkshake with a hamburger because "all the milk makes it harder to digest" since according to him it's neutralizing your stomach acid. I think it's mostly that somewhere along the line he missed how logarithmic scales work.
      - Fnoord 4y ago
        Oh yeah, I read a book on that ages ago (start of millennium), by some fellow called Harvey Diamond. Just looked him up, looks like his royalties have dwindled and his son got jail time for a ponzi scheme. Hey, if it leads to your father consuming less unhealthy food (which milkshake and hamburger both arguably are) it works. Just for a different reason. And that different reason gives the faulty one credibility.
        karlshea 4y ago
nonameiguess 4y ago
There's absolutely no way to assess the likelihood of lowering your fasting glucose via eating more honey without knowing what you're already eating. The paper itself describes the characteristics of the control groups of the included trials: > Trial comparisons included the participant’s usual diet (70% of studies), sucrose (15%), high-fructose corn syrup (6%), and mixed comparators (9%). Kind of hard to know what "the participant's usual diet" means, but I'm just gonna go out on a limb here and say the intervention probably helped people who were otherwise eating a bunch of table sugar, HFCS, or both, and didn't help if you weren't eating sugar to begin with. The average diet of a person participating in studies like this is probably close to an average American diet, that is, high in added sugar. Don't expect honey to be some kind of miracle panacea food. It's just better than table sugar and HFCS.
brightball 4y ago
I used to put honey in my coffee when I still sweetened it. I read something about it having a slower release process and noticed I didn't have the same ups and downs throughout the day. There wasn't a sugar crash. Now I just drink black coffee but I do occasionally add honey in my tea. It's a great thing to keep around the house and can also be used to disinfect a cut.[1] 1 - https://www.sevengrains.com/the-healing-power-of-honey/ https://www.sevengrains.com/the-healing-power-of-honey/
- dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
  >I read something about it having a slower release process and noticed I didn't have the same ups and downs throughout the day. There wasn't a sugar crash. Hey, thanks for putting out your anecdote. In the absence of good mainstream science, anecdotes end up being an important source of 'data' for me.
thebigspacefuck 4y ago
Does sugar raise fasting glucose in non-diabetics?
version_five 4y ago
Fructose is metabolized via triglycerides iirc and so has a longer and different pathway to becoming blood sugar. That doesn't in itself mean anything good or bad. Honey is basically the same sucrose/fructose ratio as high fructose corn syrup, for what it's worth
Fnoord 4y ago
Define honey. There are various types of honey, and I read the other day that honey from China is not 100% honey but is essentially something else which also contains honey.
- jmhobbs 4y ago
  Even among 100% real honey, the ratios of sucrose, glucose and fructose vary wildly. At the extremes tupelo honey is very high fructose, and thus is famous for not crystallizing easily. On the other hand, canola/rapeseed swings so far the other way that it can crystalize in the comb before harvesting.
- ahzhou 4y ago
  Most supermarket honey, China or not, is HFCS + honey. A beekeeper told me that the biggest indicator of real honey is that it solidifies with time. Because of that, it’s usually sold in glass containers so that you can heat it up to re-liquify it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
StreamBright 4y ago
This just shows how bad table sugar really is (as well as HFCS for that matter).
imchillyb 4y ago
Glucose and Sucrose are not similar. Glucose is easily and readily available for the body's use, with little processing, and can be metabolized quickly energizing the brain directly (brains feed on glucose). The majority of the sugars in Honey are the glucose type and those are 'better' sugars for humans. I'm a type 2 diabetic and I utilize honey instead of sugar wherever possible. I've been doing this for several years now, and there was a definite and definitive corrolation between my A1C levels prior to switching and after switching to Honey.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > The majority of the sugars in Honey are the glucose type Multiple sources say that honey is around 30% glucose, 40% fructose.
svnt 4y ago
Honey is not sugar/sucrose — honey is an invert sugar which can be used directly by cells as a source of energy, whereas sucrose cannot. Bees also cannot eat sugar. In the invert form your body, including your digestive lining, can put it directly to work. I do not know if this is still the case if you dissolve it in tea or another hot beverage. I believe it is not.
- Anthony-G 4y ago
  > Bees also cannot eat sugar. Are you sure about that? I came across this article in another comment: https://carolinahoneybees.com/feeding-bees-sugar-water/ https://carolinahoneybees.com/feeding-bees-sugar-water/

ollysb 4y ago

I wonder if they're displacing other sugars with Honey. Speaking as a diabetic I find it very hard to believe that a spoonful of Honey in the morning is going to improve my day :)

adamsmith143 4y ago
Indeed: “We’re not saying you should start having honey if you currently avoid sugar,” Dr. Khan added. “The takeaway is more about replacement — if you’re using table sugar, syrup or another sweetener, switching those sugars for honey might lower cardiometabolic risks.”
- amanj41 4y ago
  This is my recommendation on diet soda to people as well. The literature points to diet soda being a productive replacement for those currently drinking soda and desiring to lose weight. But the jury is still out on potential effects of diet on the microbiome and insulin sensitivity etc, so I wouldn't go encouraging people to pick it up for no reason.
trevyn 4y ago
My intuition is that the non-sugar components of honey are responsible.
- slothtrop 4y ago
  What might those be?
tcbawo 4y ago
It seems that the species of bee and pollen source make a big difference in the consistency and flavor of honey. It would be interesting to know which types of honey are highest in the healthy compounds and lowest in unhealthiest compounds (presumably sugar).
- simonsarris 4y ago
  notably honey made from mountain laurel ('Mad Honey') can be hazardous to your health, since every part of the plant is toxic.
MrYellowP 4y ago
Unless you risk killing yourself by doing so, you should try and see what happens. I prefer honey over everything else. It's the smoothest form of sugar I've experienced and it's way more than just a source of sugar, too.

basilgohar 4y ago

I believe this kind of study will shed more light on how much more we have to learn about nutrition and how our body processes and metabolizes nutrients. I think a lot of nutrition has been, for lack of a better term, very basic and somewhat stoicimetric - fat consumed equals fat stored, cholesterol consumed equals cholesterol stored, and also treating manufactured sugars (e.g., High Fructose Corn Syrup) as equal to natural sugars such as what's found in fruits and honey. This and many other studies have shown that this parity between input/output is not what happens nor is it an adequate reflection of how our body works. Treating the body as a simple machine in this manner is very naïve and has lead, in my opinion, to a huge amount of misapplied health advice or just outright wrong policies. Of course, the factors driving this have profited handsomely from this misdirection, but that's another angle suitable for it's own thread.

cromka 4y ago
Not so recently the similarly shocking findings about the Mediterranean cuisine rich in animal fat also contradicted the common beliefs regarding the saturated fats. If I may be allowed to speculate, I think it could simply have a lot to do with the very basic idea of consuming processed vs natural foods. So refined sugar = bad, refined fats = bad. Our bodies have evolved to optimize digestion and make most of those natural ingredients, but not the artificial, industrial products we had been exposed for mere 150-200 years. EDIT: for more background, what was stunning is that some cuisines in Mediterranean, like Spanish or North Italian, can be quite heavy on meat, yet that did not negatively correlate with the lifespan, compared to more lightweight variates in the region. I can’t recall the paperwork, but that was the general gist.
- soco 4y ago
  I guess "refined" should be probably understood as "many ingredients, seemingly important but unknown to actual medicine, filtered out"...
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  Can you share more? The balance of evidence against saturated fats is quite clear, and there are usually good responses to find around single studies that purport to show countervailing evidence. The biggest example of this is that it’s hard to find a cohort that contains substantially different levels of saturated fat intake (very low vs very high). So the quintiles inside the same cohort don’t necessarily have significant outcome differences, and that’s peddled as saturated fat not being bad for you.

nekoashide 4y ago

I would expect that there's something else at play, it's entirely possible that natural honey contains some organic chemical that increases metabolism in humans.

ReptileMan 4y ago
Honey is acidic. I think that the main problem in the western diet is that we don't balance sugar and starch with enough spices, hot stuff or acid.
- CaptainNegative 4y ago
  Whatever you eat gets dissolved by something like 10-20 teaspoons of stomach acid, which is roughly 100x-500x more acidic (linear scale) than honey. By the time it gets there a teaspoon of honey is not making a dent in the overall acidity.
  - karlshea 4y ago
    My father got caught up in nutrition conspiracy and "alkaline diets", and now won't have a milkshake with a hamburger because "all the milk makes it harder to digest" since according to him it's neutralizing your stomach acid. I think it's mostly that somewhere along the line he missed how logarithmic scales work.
    - Fnoord 4y ago
      Oh yeah, I read a book on that ages ago (start of millennium), by some fellow called Harvey Diamond. Just looked him up, looks like his royalties have dwindled and his son got jail time for a ponzi scheme. Hey, if it leads to your father consuming less unhealthy food (which milkshake and hamburger both arguably are) it works. Just for a different reason. And that different reason gives the faulty one credibility.
      - karlshea 4y ago

nonameiguess 4y ago

There's absolutely no way to assess the likelihood of lowering your fasting glucose via eating more honey without knowing what you're already eating. The paper itself describes the characteristics of the control groups of the included trials: > Trial comparisons included the participant’s usual diet (70% of studies), sucrose (15%), high-fructose corn syrup (6%), and mixed comparators (9%). Kind of hard to know what "the participant's usual diet" means, but I'm just gonna go out on a limb here and say the intervention probably helped people who were otherwise eating a bunch of table sugar, HFCS, or both, and didn't help if you weren't eating sugar to begin with. The average diet of a person participating in studies like this is probably close to an average American diet, that is, high in added sugar. Don't expect honey to be some kind of miracle panacea food. It's just better than table sugar and HFCS.

brightball 4y ago

I used to put honey in my coffee when I still sweetened it. I read something about it having a slower release process and noticed I didn't have the same ups and downs throughout the day. There wasn't a sugar crash. Now I just drink black coffee but I do occasionally add honey in my tea. It's a great thing to keep around the house and can also be used to disinfect a cut.[1] 1 - https://www.sevengrains.com/the-healing-power-of-honey/ https://www.sevengrains.com/the-healing-power-of-honey/

dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
>I read something about it having a slower release process and noticed I didn't have the same ups and downs throughout the day. There wasn't a sugar crash. Hey, thanks for putting out your anecdote. In the absence of good mainstream science, anecdotes end up being an important source of 'data' for me.

thebigspacefuck 4y ago

Does sugar raise fasting glucose in non-diabetics?

version_five 4y ago

Fructose is metabolized via triglycerides iirc and so has a longer and different pathway to becoming blood sugar. That doesn't in itself mean anything good or bad. Honey is basically the same sucrose/fructose ratio as high fructose corn syrup, for what it's worth

Fnoord 4y ago

Define honey. There are various types of honey, and I read the other day that honey from China is not 100% honey but is essentially something else which also contains honey.

jmhobbs 4y ago
Even among 100% real honey, the ratios of sucrose, glucose and fructose vary wildly. At the extremes tupelo honey is very high fructose, and thus is famous for not crystallizing easily. On the other hand, canola/rapeseed swings so far the other way that it can crystalize in the comb before harvesting.
ahzhou 4y ago
Most supermarket honey, China or not, is HFCS + honey. A beekeeper told me that the biggest indicator of real honey is that it solidifies with time. Because of that, it’s usually sold in glass containers so that you can heat it up to re-liquify it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

StreamBright 4y ago

This just shows how bad table sugar really is (as well as HFCS for that matter).

imchillyb 4y ago

Glucose and Sucrose are not similar. Glucose is easily and readily available for the body's use, with little processing, and can be metabolized quickly energizing the brain directly (brains feed on glucose). The majority of the sugars in Honey are the glucose type and those are 'better' sugars for humans. I'm a type 2 diabetic and I utilize honey instead of sugar wherever possible. I've been doing this for several years now, and there was a definite and definitive corrolation between my A1C levels prior to switching and after switching to Honey.

rootusrootus 4y ago
> The majority of the sugars in Honey are the glucose type Multiple sources say that honey is around 30% glucose, 40% fructose.

svnt 4y ago

Honey is not sugar/sucrose — honey is an invert sugar which can be used directly by cells as a source of energy, whereas sucrose cannot. Bees also cannot eat sugar. In the invert form your body, including your digestive lining, can put it directly to work. I do not know if this is still the case if you dissolve it in tea or another hot beverage. I believe it is not.

Anthony-G 4y ago
> Bees also cannot eat sugar. Are you sure about that? I came across this article in another comment: https://carolinahoneybees.com/feeding-bees-sugar-water/ https://carolinahoneybees.com/feeding-bees-sugar-water/