After looking around on the Internets, I ran across the Wikipedia article for the Mellified Man. It mentions that, according to legend, if you eat only honey, your sweat turns to honey. It also says the same thing happens for feces, but doesn’t stipulate whether or not that’s because of legend. I presume this is either legend too, or shoddy editing.
Is that even possible?
Edited to add: Okay, it appears that it’s shoddy editing. Later in the article, it says that the feces part is also part of the legend. Oh well. It’s still funny to think of.
Honey is basically fructose syrup. In order for it to come out of you as sweat, but still recognisable as honey, you’d need absurdly high blood sugar levels, which would not be survivable for long enough to work up a sweat anyway.
I guess there might be circumstances in which you can introduce sufficient volumes of honey at the top.end of the human digestive system that it starts leaking out the bottom end in some way intact, but again, that seems likely to bring about rapid demise (faster than the myth implies)
ETA: of course, bathing in the stuff might mskevit appear to be coming out of you as sweat and poop.
A significant percentage of human feces is, in fact, bacteria from your intestines. So I don’t imagine there’s anything that can turn bacteria into honey.
Unless the milk is entirely responsible for the regular appearance of the feces, one would think that eyewitnesses to Scaphism, in which the victim is forced to eat nothing but milk and honey, would have mentioned that their feces was special.
Now we know why.
In the set of legends, there is a significant subset “legends that are not true.”
Ther’s nothing special about honey - it’s basically sugar, as pointed out above. Eating too much carbs has a set of effects depending on how much and how fast you overdose.
IIRC pure honey was resistant to bacteria because it was too saturated with sugar. Bacteria that get into it will die because by osmsis the honey will suck much of the water out of the bacteria. This is why it can be stored at room temperature in unsterilized hives literally crawling with insects.
I suppose part of the problem is - would a person eating only honey, not drinking anything, very quickly have a dehydration problem? If so, there won’t be much sweat to speak of.