As I’ve said before, I have Type 2 Diabetes.
Anyway, I haven’t given up sweet things completely. My physician for his part, just says to eat them sparingly.
Consider honey. I did read in a book on herbs (I forget where) that honey is a better sweetener. It is natural. And the bees benefit from it.
I know that I once read, very long ago now, that sugars are typically glucose and fructose, aren’t they?
So what exactly is honey composed of? And is there any advantage to consuming it?
According to this… “Though honey is high in sugar and calories, it’s still a better choice than refined sugar. While refined sugar brings little to the table in terms of nutrition, honey provides antioxidants — including phenolic acids and flavonoids.”
Up to 40% of honey is fructose, 30% is glucose, and the rest is water. For what it’s worth, I use honey in hot drinks and on hot cereal instead of sugar, but I don’t know if it’s really that much better for you.
Honey is nearly identical to high-fructose corn syrup. On the one hand, HFCS isn’t nearly as bad as it’s often made out to be, but on the other hand, honey also isn’t nearly as good as it’s made out to be.
It’s better for you in some ways, but not in terms of sugar uptake if you’re diabetic.
They sell bandages with honey in them, and honey ointments. The advantage is supposed to be anti-microbial action, and positive immunologic and physiologic effects on wound healing.
It never goes bad.
If you prefer honey in your coffee, Louis L’Amour will let you be a good guy if he puts you in one of his westerns.
As you alluded to, I always understood the issue with HFCS wasn’t that it was particularly terrible or any worse than sugar, honey, etc. It’s that you’d find it in shit where you wouldn’t expect it. Until a few years ago it was in Wheat Thins, for example.
Yeah, the biggest problem with HFCS is that it’s so cheap that it gets put in everything, in large quantities. Use that much honey, and you’d have the same problems, except that nobody actually uses that much honey, because it’s too expensive for that.
And yes, honey has antibacterial properties, and never goes bad. That’s mostly just because it’s an extremely high concentration solution. Any similarly-concentrated sugar solution (like, say, HFCS) would have the same antibacterial properties, as would a similarly-concentrated solution of any other solute.
And if it were otherwise, you probably wouldn’t want to eat it. The intersection of stuff that’s appropriate for a wound dressing vs. what makes good food is pretty small.
If you were really comparing honey and HFCS on this axis, honey does worse: it can contain small amounts of botulism spores (hence you shouldn’t feed it to babies). HFCS doesn’t.
As diabetics, the only thing that matters is our net carbohydrate intake per meal or snack. 10g of honey-sugar is the same as 10g of cane sugar so far as our blood sugar is concerned.
Apparently there is some evidence for a condition called Fructose Malabsorption - somewhat similar to lactose intolerance and can result in a fairly wide spread of symptoms, some of them pretty nasty.
The main advantage of honey, if there is one, is that it tastes like honey. It is just sugar syrup, and any supposed health benefits from minerals or vitamins and other things would probably require you to eat quantities of honey greater than you can carry, which obviously isn’t something you should do.
Honey has a distinctive flavour and aroma - this might mean you could use less of it than plain sugar, for the same perceived level of sweetness, so that might be a thing.
For 99.9+% of individuals out there, there are no real tangible health benefits to consuming a serving of honey over a serving of some other form of sugar, talk of anti-oxidants and micronutrients notwithstanding.
But I must say I prefer honey’s taste over that of cane sugar. It’s even better than maple sugar, which I also enjoy a lot.
Go with what tastes good to you. But don’t think you’re being healthier by consuming it. Portion control is key, especially for diabetics.
Hm. Modern-day folk medicine: fructified man or corny man?
If you want a treat, try Lanier’s Tupelo Honey. Unfortunately, Tupelo honey is not a trademark, so a lot of the stuff you see advertised as such on Amazon has been cut with cheaper stuff and sometimes even with corn syrup.
Sugar doesn’t either. Actually storage conditions may matter more for honey - if it’s raw honey it will crystallize eventually, especially in colder weather. This is harmless but changes the texture a lot.
Given that we’re dealing in a topic where misjudgment could cause harm, I’ll just throw in that golden monkfruit sugar from Lakanto is delicious (not sponsored) and has zero effect on your blood sugar levels.
I say Lakanto because my brother tried all the brands and said it was the best. I haven’t tried any others but I haven’t found a reason to doubt it.
Like most sugar substitutes, I would expect that there’s some situation where it behaves differently than normal sugar but in all my current experiences of baking and cooking with it, I haven’t found the anything. If you didn’t tell me that it wasn’t sugar, I’d have no idea.
Granulated sugar doesn’t go bad, at least in my experience. I have two big jars of it – brown and white – that I have been gradually drawing down over ~15 years. Although it does absorb moisture and clump up, I wouldn’t say either has gone bad.
Honey will crystalize over a few months or years depending on the chemical composition or flower source. While I wouldn’t call it “bad,” it changes more than sugar, but can be revived with heat (or ignored for cooking) with no loss in utility.
How true that is. I only use honey for cooking, and very sparingly, so a jar lasts about 10 years in my household. Yes, it crystallizes after a time, but already as a kid I read that 3000 years old honey from Egyptian tombs is still good, so I never cared.
I haven’t done the math, but I’d be surprised if this was inaccurate:
If the anti-oxidants and micronutrients (aoam) in honey contribute significantly to your intake of aoam you are either: