How Sweet It Is.

I recently went shopping at a local farmer's market and as usual stopped at the honey supplier to check out their offerings.  I love honey and use it as a sweetener in coffee and tea as well as in my cooking.  I prefer the taste and there is no unpleasant after taste like that I detect with refined sugar.  It is also my opinion that honey is just sweeter than other sweeteners.  But, mostly, I use it because I love the flavour.

I always find it amusing, though, that honey is the one food I purchase at farmers' markets that is marketed to me by the vendors as some kind of miracle cure all.  I do not doubt that honey is a good source of some nutrition, but the same can be said for any food.  This vendor on this particular day was even more effluent than usual about the health benefits of honey and was trying to convince me that honey was more of a panacea than a food.  She asked me how much honey I use and I told her I go through a large jar every couple of weeks to which she replied "oh, that's wonderful. Good for you. You will never have to worry about cancer or diabetes."  This I found amusing since I am at high risk right now for diabetes and my doctor is currently considering medication for same.  But, I let it go.  She then cautioned me to not use that horrible stuff they sell in supermarkets, to which I assumed she was referring to pasteurized honey.  She enlightened me that honey from large companies is not real honey.  I did not have the patience to sit through an explanation of what it was so I did not ask.

In the end I told her that her product was nice, thanked her for the sample and said I wasn't really in need of any just now but maybe next week.  This only seemed to open the door to a discussion about the health properties of bee's wax candles.  Really?  Burning a candle is going to provide me some kind of health benefit?  I still haven't seen any relief from mosquitoes by using citronella candles so I'll be damned if I am going to spend $10 on a bee's wax candle.  I was able to extricate myself from her grip and went on with my shopping but the experience stuck with me and I wondered just what is the evidence of honey's health benefits?  Off to Google I went and the only evidence was a number of pages for benefits-of-honey.com.  However, while the information appears well written and well sourced, when you actually click on the links they are only linking to themselves as the source.  Obviously this would be unreliable.

So, I went to PubMed and looked up some of the most recent studies. I reviewed 11 recent studies on PubMed that looked at various health effects of honey.  These studies suggested that there is limited evidence (most in the form of using honey as a wound dressing in diabetic foot) regarding the health benefits of honey.  None of the studies used very large sample groups and none showed overwhelming statistical evidence to support their conclusions.  The general conclusions were that honey does seem to have some antibacterial properties that may benefit in the use as a topical ointment in diabetic foot and that honey may be used as a low glycemic sweetener in healthy and at-risk individuals and could be a sugar substitute for diabetics as long as hemoglobin A(1C) is monitored (elevated levels tend to be the cause of diabetic foot and eye sight loss).  To me this does not show overwhelming evidence that honey is a miracle food that we all need to consume. There was one study that looked at the in vivo effects of honey on damaged cells but no follow up studies have been conducted to replicate the findings.

I love honey, all types and styles and, yes, even BillyBee honey.  I look at honey as a better tasting sweetener, and am aware of some of its dangers (and here.).  I will continue my use of honey out of pure love of the taste and won't be feeling guilty about buying pasteurized honey either, and I might even save a little money in the process. But it would be nice, in the mean time, if honey producers would concentrate on marketing their product as a great tasting, quality sweetener that won't kill you when used in moderation, you know, like everything else.