Why You Should Ditch Sugar In Favor of Honey

Why You Should Ditch Sugar In Favor of Honey







Sayer Ji, Contributor
Activist Post

While honey and sugar share similar degrees of sweetness, the differences in the way our bodies respond to them are profound.

Technically, honey and sugar (sucrose) both exist because they are food for their respective species.

In the case of sugarcane, a member of the the grass family (Poaceae)
which includes wheat, maize and rice, sucrose provides energy for its
leaves and is an easily transportable source of energy for other parts
of the plant, such as the roots, that do not produce their own energy.

Honey, of course, is produced by bees from the nectar of flowers solely for the purpose of food.

Beyond this obvious similarity, the differences between honey and sugar, however, are much more profound.

First, honey is a whole food and sucrose is not. In
other words, sucrose is an isolate – technically only one chemical
compound – lifted from a background of hundreds of other components
within the whole plant, whereas honey is composed of an equally complex
array of compounds, many of which are well known (including
macronutrients and micronutrients, enzymes, probiotics and prebiotics,
etc.), others whose role is still completely a mystery.

Even the "sugar" in honey, which we might mistakenly equate (due to
caloric and nutrient classification equivalencies) to the "sugar" from
sugarcane, is a complex mixture of the monosacharrides (one-sugars)
glucose and fructose, and at least 25 different oligosaccharides (which
are sugars composed of between two to ten monosaccharides linked
together), including small amounts of the disacchardide sucrose, as well
as trisaccharides (three-sugars) like melezitose and erlose.


Interestingly, if you were to isolate out the fructose from honey, and consume it in isolation in American-sized doses (over two ounces a day), it would likely contribute to over 70 fructose-induced adverse health effects;
primarily insulin resistance, fatty liver, obesity, hypertension and
elevated blood sugar. But place that fructose back into the complex
nestled background of nutrient chemistries we call honey, and the
fructose loses its monochemical malignancy to our health. Food is the
ultimate delivery system for nutrition. Reduce whole foods to parts, and
then concentrate and consume them excessively, and you have the recipe
for a health disaster that we can see all around us today in the
simultaneously overnourished/malnourished masses who still think a
'calorie is a calorie,' and a 'carb is a carb,' without realizing that
the qualitative differences are so profound that one literally heals,
while the other literally kills.

But the differences between honey and sugar are not simply based on
their respective chemical and nutritional compositions, but also the
length of time we humans have had to adapt to them as a source of energy
and nourishment.

Honey was the primary concentrated sweetener consumed by humans until
after the 1800s when industrial production of sugarcane-derived sugar
was initiated. While the first written reference to honey is found on a
4,000 year old Sumerian tablet,[ii]
and depictions of humans seeking honey have been found in cave
paintings at in Spain that are at least 8,000 years old, we can assume
that our love affair with the sweet stuff graciously provided by the bee
goes back much further, perhaps hundreds of thousands, if not millions
of years ago.

8000 year old cave painting from the Araña Caves in Spain

Regardless of the exact date of its introduction into
our diet, from the perspective of evolutionary biology and nutrition, it
is clear that our body has had infinitely more time to adapt to honey
than to sugar. It is instructive, as well, that sugarcane is in the
same grass family whose seeds in the form of "cereal grains" we now
consume in such plenty that, arguably, we are now slowly digging our
graves with our teeth (particularly, our grain-grinding molars). After
all, we have only been consuming them for 10-20,000 years, and in some
cases less than 10 generations - a nanosecond in biological time, even
if from the lived perspective of a single human lifespan, or even
cultural time as a whole, it may seem like "forever."

For those skeptics who consider this reflection on the differences
between honey and sugar mere theory, there is now plenty of clinical
research confirming their significant differences.

A double-blind, randomized clinical study titled, "Effect of honey
versus sucrose on appetite, appetite-regulating hormones, and postmeal
thermogenesis," published in 2010 in the [i]Journal of the American College of Nutrition,
compared the effects of honey or sugar on appetite hormones (ghrelin,
peptide YY) and glycemic and thermic effects after a meal, in 14
healthy, nonobese women.

The
researchers found that the group given 450 calorie (kcal) honey in
their breakfasts had "A blunted glycemic response may be beneficial for
reducing glucose intolerance," and saw positive modulation of appetite
hormones, i.e. delayed the postprandial ghrelin response and enhanced
total peptide YY levels.[iii]

Another study published in Journal of Medical Food in 2004, which
compared honey to dextrose and sucrose, found that natural honey was
capable of lowering plasma glucose, C-reactive protein, homocysteine in
healthy, diabetic and hyperlipidemic subjects.[iv]

Animal research also confirms that, when compared to sucrose, honey is
more effective at promoting lower weight gain, adiposity (fat
accumulation), and triglycerides.[v]

Why Consuming Raw Honey Is So Important

Raw honey contains enzymes and probiotics which are destroyed when
heated or used in cooking applications. These compounds are of no small
significance and contribute directly or indirectly to honey's many
well-known health benefits. Take the active starch-digesting enzyme
amylase, for instance, found only in the raw form of honey in a form
known as diastase, which is believed to contribute to clearing
antigen-antibody immune complexes associated with allergies to pollens,
while also reducing mast cell degranulation associated with histamine,
and related inflammatory hormone, release linked to allergic symptoms.
Also, if it is local honey, it will pick up small amount of local pollen
which may help to "immunize," or desensitize an overly active immune
response to these environmental triggers. There is also the enzyme in
raw honey known as glucose oxidase, which produces hydrogen peroxide and
gluconic acid from glucose. The hydrogen peroxide formed as a result of
this enzyme is associated with honey's well-known wound sterilizing and
healing properties.

Honey is also rich in prebiotics, as attributed to some of the
oligosaccharides already mentioned (e.g. FOS), and probiotics that
contribute to supporting the healthy flora in our gut as well.

Recently, in fact, an abundant, diverse and ancient set of beneficial
lactic acid bacteria were discovered within the honeybee gut.
Researchers found a collection of 50 novel species from the genera Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium
from a single insect. Further investigation of these strains indicated
that the association between these bees and the bacteria are at least 80
million years old.[vi]
Consuming raw honey, therefore, likely significantly impacts the
microbiota within our own gut, and is one way to reconnect to ancient
symbiotic relationships with flora that in our modern, sterilized,
pasteurized, irradiated, poisoned, cooked, and bleached world, are all
but eradicated from our environment, soil, food, and therefore bodies.

Honey's ability to support the growth of beneficial bacteria was
recently demonstrated in a study published in Letters in Applied
Microbiology in 2000, where researchers compared the stimulatory effect
of honey with sucrose on the multiplication of lactic acid bacteria in
in vitro conditions and found "[T]he number of Lactobacillus acidophilus
and Lactobacillus plantarum counts increased 10-100 fold in the
presence of honey compared with sucrose." Animal feeding of honey to
rats also resulted in significant increase in counts of lactic acid
bacteria.[vii]

The probiotic-boosting properties of honey may provide an explanation
for why it is such an effective anti-infection agent and has been proven
to heal many gastrointestinal disorders.

For a full list of honey's medicinal properties visit our honey health benefits research page. Also, feel free to explore our article on 5 Honey Health Benefits.

A Final Word on The Bee

A full appreciation of honey inevitably leads to a full appreciation of
the bee, as well as an awareness of the precarious relationship
presently existing between our species. While shallow, the bee's role in
pollination has been estimated to have over several billion dollars of economic value annually.

The
reality is that we are far more dependent on this insect than it is on
us, which is why when we use "pesticides" and various agrichemicals to
radically transform the bee's natural habitat and microbiota, or use
antibiotics, feed them high fructose corn syrup, and add other various amendments in its hive, the resulting collapse of immune function, and secondary infections that emerge, we pretend are a novel new disorder whose origins are unknown, i.e. bee colony collapse disorder,
much in the same way that we blanket over our own self-poisoning with
various idiopathic syndromes that are actually iatrogenic or
environmental in origin.

Bee products, including venom, wax, propolis, royal jelly, etc., have
been found to provide potential medicinal solutions for over 170
different health conditions (see Bee Products), expressing over 40 distinct beneficial pharmacological actions.

This growing body of research should awaken in us greater respect for
this sacred insect -- even if only for selfish reasons -- and when we
say sacred, we mean this both entomologically and etymologically, as the
word sacred means "to make holy," and the word holy shares the same
root meaning as the words whole and heal.

Source:-
http://www.activistpost.com/2012/12/why-you-should-ditch-sugar-in-favor-of.html