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 root, 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.
[i]
Interestingly, if you were to isolate out the fructose from honey, and consume it in isolation in American-size 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 1800's 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.
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 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
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 Honey Raw 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.
READ MORE: http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/why-you-should-ditch-sugar-favor-honey
