5 ms·

This story can be summarized as "Low water activity and low pH keep honey fresh permanently." The other 14 paragraphs are just filler. Moreover, even that sum

by kragen 1y ago

This story can be summarized as "Low water activity and low pH keep honey fresh permanently." The other 14 paragraphs are just filler. Moreover, even that summary is factually incorrect; low water activity and low pH don't come close to explaining honey's astounding shelf life, which amounts to centuries in many cases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Preservation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Preservation in particular mentions gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide produced by the bees' glucose oxidase, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Medical_use_and_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Medical_use_and_research also mentions its content of methylglyoxal, which damages DNA and cross-links proteins somewhat like formaldehyde, thus killing microorganisms; mãnuka honey is required to contain at least 85mg/kg of methylglyoxal, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81nuka_honey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81nuka_honey. I suspect that there is a great deal more research on the topic. It's disappointing to see such a low-quality article on the BBC website; I generally regard the BBC as a reliable source.

vlovich123 1y ago
Are you sure this isn’t just the Gell-Mann effect? It sounds like you’re probably better informed about this than the typical person and might be expecting a lot more detail than a newspaper would be endeavoring to try to convey. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
- jagged-chisel 1y ago
  I think the point is that the article is conveying too much of the wrong kind of details.
  - kragen 1y ago
    vlovich123 may be correct that I am giving the BBC too much credit in general. But I don't think I'm especially well-informed; I'd never heard of methylglyoxal before looking this up in Wikipedia. I agree that its focus is somewhat wrong. I don't think that the backgrounder on the importance of food preservation is completely without value. It's just that it's already fairly well known that food rots and why. My larger objection, though, is that there are important, well-established reasons for honey to be far less perishable than other substances of similar water activity and pH, and the article does not mention them even briefly. I think it's fine to have lots of the wrong kind of details, but it's not fine to omit the right ones.
    - bookofjoe 1y ago
      >I think it's fine to have lots of the wrong kind of details, but it's not fine to omit the right ones. Who decides which are "wrong" and which are "right?"
      - kragen 1y ago
        The title of the article, "The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long," seems like a good criterion in this case.
- positr0n 1y ago
  Isn’t the entire point of the Gell Man amnesia effect that all news is low quality, you just only realize it for topics you know a lot about? And OP evidently knows a lot about honey :)
  - kragen 1y ago
    I had a vague memory that it had some kind of antibacterial properties, but no, I don't know a lot about honey; I just went and looked it up in Wikipedia.
  - vlovich123 1y ago
    Sure although I interpret it a little bit differently. All news is low quality but raises the overall bar of ignorance for people not familiar with the topic. So experts get no value from them on topics they are familiar while improving their level of baseline ignorance on topics they aren't.
    - kragen 1y ago
      I think reading this article could result in acquiring the misconception that honey stays fresh for centuries only because it has low water activity and low pH, worsening your level of baseline ignorance and leading you to potentially significant false conclusions; for example, the conclusion that honey bandages are useless or harmful. I think that's the usual problem that Gell–Mann amnesia conceals: news that is so low quality that it actively makes you stupider when you read it.
gerdesj 1y ago
"which amounts to centuries in many cases." Pretty sure I read about honey found in a Pharaoh's tomb - that's millennia, not centuries. Quick search: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-science-behind-honeys-eternal-shelf-life-1218690/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-science-be...
- kragen 1y ago
  I edited "millennia" into "centuries" in my comment above because the Wikipedia article claimed those claims didn't pan out: > (However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances or only chemical traces.[29]) ...but the citation is from 01975. The Smithsonian page is a great link! It mentions that the pH of honey is 3–4.5 (another crucial fact omitted from the BBC article) and mentions the peroxide, but not the methylglyoxal. The Smithsonian article contains this link: > Modern archeologists, excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, have often found something unexpected amongst the tombs’ artifacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved which goes to a Google Books page I can't see (perhaps because I'm in Argentina) of a book from 02006 that is apparently about beekeeping, not archaeology, called "Letters from the Hive", published by Random House Children's Books. The copy of the book that I've been able to get does talk extensively about the uses of honey in ancient Egypt, but, unless I missed it, doesn't mention pots of honey being found in tombs at all. Even if so, it's unclear whether the book would have evidence posterior to Wikipedia's 01975 citation; it isn't the kind of book that cites its sources.
  - gerdesj 1y ago
    I'm so sorry but I can't help myself: 01975 is the dialling code for somewhere in Aberdeenshire! WP: "(However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances or only chemical traces.[29])" [29] is https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf - this does not look like a peer reviewed paper. They do look to be reputable and they refute some rubbish documented cases of ancient honey but not all of them. I'm going to call out the WP article as being factually wanting on that point.
jfengel 1y ago
I don't see why anything other than low water and pH are necessary. Stories about ultra long lasting honey come from the desert, which will dessicate it further. (The stories about pyramid honey always imply that it's fresh and liquid. It's not. It's dried out and usually completely crystallized.) There may be other effects on top of that, but if you made a sucrose solution thick enough it too will last forever.
- kragen 1y ago
  If you can get an aqueous solution of solids to completely crystallize (and sucrose does like to crystallize), it won't support microorganisms, but if it doesn't crystallize, it will have a critical "deliquescence relative humidity". When the relative humidity of the air is above the DRH†, the solution absorbs water from the air rather than giving up water to the air, and if there are crystals in it, they tend to shrink instead of growing. Different solutes have different DRHs, but there are many of them whose affinity for water is so strong that their DRH is so low that under normal circumstances they never completely dry out. Some of them are commonly used as desiccants, such as lye, calcium chloride, and magnesium chloride. In general, mixing solutes tends to impede crystallization, so more heterogeneous mixtures like honey tend to have lower DRH than more homogeneous mixtures like pure sucrose. (This is an engineering reason to add something like lemon juice when you make simple syrup: the citrate hydrolyzes some of the sucrose into glucose and fructose, greatly impeding crystallization and greatly improving your chances of having a pourable syrup when you want to use it next month.) Under many circumstances, honey will eventually absorb enough water from the air by this mechanism to permit the growth of yeasts and bacteria. But it takes a remarkably long time. ______ † The DRH does vary with temperature, but in most cases only slightly over the human-survivable range, so you can say "CaCl₂ has a DRH of about 40%" and be correct enough for many purposes.
owenversteeg 1y ago
It'd be fascinating if something like methylglyoxal was responsible, but I doubt it. Molasses also has an extremely long shelf life, and it doesn't have any of honey's exotic constituents. I would bet it mostly comes down to water content and pH (and a sturdy, sealed container.) Personally, I would bet that certain wines have a longer shelf life than honey. The evidence for honey's stability on extreme time scales is scanty, lots of very poor quality sources and hearsay. Meanwhile, we have countless wines that are hundreds of years old and in excellent shape. It only takes a fairly small amount of degradation of one small component of honey to taste "off", and many of the components of honey are in their non-oxidized, non-heat damaged states. Contrast that with a wine such as Madeira, where the entire wine is intentionally heat-damaged and oxidized to produce the final product. I would put my money on the Madeira any day.
- kragen 1y ago
  Can you make molasses bandages to speed wound healing, though? Honey really seems to have antimicrobial properties that go way beyond just low water activity and low pH, and in particular the peroxide production seems to be important. It does seem plausible that some wines might last longer than honey.
  - owenversteeg 1y ago
    After doing some more reading, I think you might be right. I've been looking at various sugary solutions such as molasses and it seems that it's not uncommon for them to be sold with mold inhibitors such as propanoic acid. I suspect the hydrogen peroxide might play a role, but it's not very stable, I wonder how long it lasts in the honey. I'm still putting my money on the wine as far as long term storage goes, but I think honey might have a solid second place above any other common foods. I've been trying to find others that might last a while but obviously most results these days are contentless slop or straight up fabrications. I did find one report of Irish chef Kevin Thornton trying 4,000 year old butter, unfortunately he described it as "rancid": https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p03yf4kj https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p03yf4kj
    - 1y ago

by kragen 1y ago

vlovich123 1y ago

Are you sure this isn’t just the Gell-Mann effect? It sounds like you’re probably better informed about this than the typical person and might be expecting a lot more detail than a newspaper would be endeavoring to try to convey. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

jagged-chisel 1y ago
I think the point is that the article is conveying too much of the wrong kind of details.
- kragen 1y ago
  vlovich123 may be correct that I am giving the BBC too much credit in general. But I don't think I'm especially well-informed; I'd never heard of methylglyoxal before looking this up in Wikipedia. I agree that its focus is somewhat wrong. I don't think that the backgrounder on the importance of food preservation is completely without value. It's just that it's already fairly well known that food rots and why. My larger objection, though, is that there are important, well-established reasons for honey to be far less perishable than other substances of similar water activity and pH, and the article does not mention them even briefly. I think it's fine to have lots of the wrong kind of details, but it's not fine to omit the right ones.
  - bookofjoe 1y ago
    >I think it's fine to have lots of the wrong kind of details, but it's not fine to omit the right ones. Who decides which are "wrong" and which are "right?"
    - kragen 1y ago
      The title of the article, "The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long," seems like a good criterion in this case.
positr0n 1y ago
Isn’t the entire point of the Gell Man amnesia effect that all news is low quality, you just only realize it for topics you know a lot about? And OP evidently knows a lot about honey :)
- kragen 1y ago
  I had a vague memory that it had some kind of antibacterial properties, but no, I don't know a lot about honey; I just went and looked it up in Wikipedia.
- vlovich123 1y ago
  Sure although I interpret it a little bit differently. All news is low quality but raises the overall bar of ignorance for people not familiar with the topic. So experts get no value from them on topics they are familiar while improving their level of baseline ignorance on topics they aren't.
  - kragen 1y ago
    I think reading this article could result in acquiring the misconception that honey stays fresh for centuries only because it has low water activity and low pH, worsening your level of baseline ignorance and leading you to potentially significant false conclusions; for example, the conclusion that honey bandages are useless or harmful. I think that's the usual problem that Gell–Mann amnesia conceals: news that is so low quality that it actively makes you stupider when you read it.

gerdesj 1y ago

"which amounts to centuries in many cases." Pretty sure I read about honey found in a Pharaoh's tomb - that's millennia, not centuries. Quick search: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-science-behind-honeys-eternal-shelf-life-1218690/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-science-be...

kragen 1y ago
I edited "millennia" into "centuries" in my comment above because the Wikipedia article claimed those claims didn't pan out: > (However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances or only chemical traces.[29]) ...but the citation is from 01975. The Smithsonian page is a great link! It mentions that the pH of honey is 3–4.5 (another crucial fact omitted from the BBC article) and mentions the peroxide, but not the methylglyoxal. The Smithsonian article contains this link: > Modern archeologists, excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, have often found something unexpected amongst the tombs’ artifacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved which goes to a Google Books page I can't see (perhaps because I'm in Argentina) of a book from 02006 that is apparently about beekeeping, not archaeology, called "Letters from the Hive", published by Random House Children's Books. The copy of the book that I've been able to get does talk extensively about the uses of honey in ancient Egypt, but, unless I missed it, doesn't mention pots of honey being found in tombs at all. Even if so, it's unclear whether the book would have evidence posterior to Wikipedia's 01975 citation; it isn't the kind of book that cites its sources.
- gerdesj 1y ago
  I'm so sorry but I can't help myself: 01975 is the dialling code for somewhere in Aberdeenshire! WP: "(However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances or only chemical traces.[29])" [29] is https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf - this does not look like a peer reviewed paper. They do look to be reputable and they refute some rubbish documented cases of ancient honey but not all of them. I'm going to call out the WP article as being factually wanting on that point.

jfengel 1y ago

I don't see why anything other than low water and pH are necessary. Stories about ultra long lasting honey come from the desert, which will dessicate it further. (The stories about pyramid honey always imply that it's fresh and liquid. It's not. It's dried out and usually completely crystallized.) There may be other effects on top of that, but if you made a sucrose solution thick enough it too will last forever.

kragen 1y ago
If you can get an aqueous solution of solids to completely crystallize (and sucrose does like to crystallize), it won't support microorganisms, but if it doesn't crystallize, it will have a critical "deliquescence relative humidity". When the relative humidity of the air is above the DRH†, the solution absorbs water from the air rather than giving up water to the air, and if there are crystals in it, they tend to shrink instead of growing. Different solutes have different DRHs, but there are many of them whose affinity for water is so strong that their DRH is so low that under normal circumstances they never completely dry out. Some of them are commonly used as desiccants, such as lye, calcium chloride, and magnesium chloride. In general, mixing solutes tends to impede crystallization, so more heterogeneous mixtures like honey tend to have lower DRH than more homogeneous mixtures like pure sucrose. (This is an engineering reason to add something like lemon juice when you make simple syrup: the citrate hydrolyzes some of the sucrose into glucose and fructose, greatly impeding crystallization and greatly improving your chances of having a pourable syrup when you want to use it next month.) Under many circumstances, honey will eventually absorb enough water from the air by this mechanism to permit the growth of yeasts and bacteria. But it takes a remarkably long time. ______ † The DRH does vary with temperature, but in most cases only slightly over the human-survivable range, so you can say "CaCl₂ has a DRH of about 40%" and be correct enough for many purposes.

owenversteeg 1y ago

It'd be fascinating if something like methylglyoxal was responsible, but I doubt it. Molasses also has an extremely long shelf life, and it doesn't have any of honey's exotic constituents. I would bet it mostly comes down to water content and pH (and a sturdy, sealed container.) Personally, I would bet that certain wines have a longer shelf life than honey. The evidence for honey's stability on extreme time scales is scanty, lots of very poor quality sources and hearsay. Meanwhile, we have countless wines that are hundreds of years old and in excellent shape. It only takes a fairly small amount of degradation of one small component of honey to taste "off", and many of the components of honey are in their non-oxidized, non-heat damaged states. Contrast that with a wine such as Madeira, where the entire wine is intentionally heat-damaged and oxidized to produce the final product. I would put my money on the Madeira any day.

kragen 1y ago
Can you make molasses bandages to speed wound healing, though? Honey really seems to have antimicrobial properties that go way beyond just low water activity and low pH, and in particular the peroxide production seems to be important. It does seem plausible that some wines might last longer than honey.
- owenversteeg 1y ago
  After doing some more reading, I think you might be right. I've been looking at various sugary solutions such as molasses and it seems that it's not uncommon for them to be sold with mold inhibitors such as propanoic acid. I suspect the hydrogen peroxide might play a role, but it's not very stable, I wonder how long it lasts in the honey. I'm still putting my money on the wine as far as long term storage goes, but I think honey might have a solid second place above any other common foods. I've been trying to find others that might last a while but obviously most results these days are contentless slop or straight up fabrications. I did find one report of Irish chef Kevin Thornton trying 4,000 year old butter, unfortunately he described it as "rancid": https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p03yf4kj https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p03yf4kj
  - 1y ago