The Processed Food Processed Food Haters Love
Honey is a processed food that's processed by bees rather than by people. Foraging bees begin by drinking nectar, a dilute sugar-water solution in flowers, mixing the nectar with enzymes in their stomach-like honey sacs. These bees pass the digested material to hive-dwelling house bees who reduce the moisture content by ingesting and regurgitating the mixture. They in turn deposit concentrated drops into honeycomb cells. After this, bees fan the fluid with their wings over the next few days to further concentrate it, finally capping the cells with wax.
What is Processed Food? Most every food eaten by humans is processed. Only wild animals eat nothing but unprocessed food. Processing food means something has be done to alter its form before you eat it. Processing includes chopping, salting, seasoning, mashing, grinding, shelling, separating, mixing, peeling, pasteurizing, fermenting, filleting, butchering, baking, cooking... You get the idea. Stone-ground whole wheat flour is processed food.
Processed food is nothing more than food where some of the things you'd do to prepare it at home have been done by someone else, somewhere else, before you bring it home. You could say chewing is processing food. You're grinding and mashing and mixing it with saliva before it ever gets to your stomach. Honey is a processed food, flavored sugar water partially digested by bees.
What is honey? Honey is made of roughly 80% sugar, 17% water, and a mixture of trace compounds providing flavor, color and preservatives. By far the most abundant sugars in honey are two simple sugars, fructose and glucose. Among the minor complex sugars in honey are maltose, sucrose, and other disaccharides, as well as trisaccharides such as erlose.
What's the other 3% of honey? Mostly, acids, enzymes and protein. One bee enzyme, invertase, splits the sucrose in the nectar into fructose and glucose and also produces some erlose. Another enzyme, glucose oxidase, converts glucose to gluconolactone, which is hydrolyzed into gluconic acid, the main acid in honey. Formic, acetic, butyric, and lactic acids are also found in honey, rendering a pH value around 3.8 to 4.0 and is why honey lasts a long time without spoiling.
There's also flavoring and coloring agents. Many of the more than 100 such ingredients found in honey are volatile organic compounds, such as phenylethyl alcohol, that contribute to flavor. These many-varied substances are found in scant amounts and have no significant nutritional value. Honey contains up to 1% nitrogen, which comes principally from proteins. About 0.2% of honey is ash containing various minerals, which in such low doses are nutritionally insignificant.
Enzymes, bee or human, are digestive agents produced by the body into the digestive track that help break food down into the simpler substances that pass into our systems as fuel we actually use. The bee enzymes in honey are of little use to us as we produce vastly more than enough of our own in the same forms to do the same job. The acids in honey are also of little benefit because they are swamped by the similar digestive acids we produce on our own.
Of the 3% of ingredients in honey other than sugar and water, none are nutritionally significant. What we really get as food from honey is a sweet syrup, which amounts to sugar water. Pretty much the same as you get from corn syrup.
What is sugar? When people speak of sugar they usually mean the simple carbohydrate sucrose created in green plants through photosynthesis. Sucrose is in all fruits and vegetables, including their seeds, flowers and roots. Table sugar extracted from sugar beets or sugar cane is pure sucrose. Sucrose is two simple sugars: glucose and fructose in about a 50-50 mixture.
What is high fructose corn syrup? (HFCS) In the 70s, fructose was all the rage, which is why when the process of getting sucrose from corn was developed they dubbed it "high fructose corn syrup." Purely a marketing gimmick because it's made up of water and the same simple sugars as table sugar, glucose and fructose in about a 50-50 ratio.
What about Carbs? Simple carbohydrates are disaccharides such as sucrose, table sugar. Other simple carbohydrates are lactose in dairy products and maltose from malt. Complex carbohydrates (polysaccharides) are the starches from plants.
All carbohydrates are broken down to the same simple sugars and metabolized exactly the same by our body. Most are converted in the small intestine with digestive enzymes to glucose, the primary fuel used by every cell in our body. Fructose is converted to glucose in the liver. Our body uses insulin to move glucose from our bloodstream into our cells, the same no matter where the carbohydrate came from.
What's it all mean? Just to put it simply, food doesn't enter our system in the form it's eaten, but only after it's been broken down by digestion into simpler forms. It is this simpler form that's important, not what it started out as. Honey doesn't enter our system as honey, but as fructose and glucose, the same as any other sugar. Being chemically identical, the body cannot distinguish between so-called natural or added sugars. Actually, all sugar is natural, it is extracted from plants and isn't synthesized in chemical brews. While so-called natural sugars are supposed by many to be healthier, this idea is scientifically baseless.
Our bodies can't tell the difference between chemically identical simple sugars made from sugar beets or corn or flowers. It is biologically implausible for honey glucose and fructose and another source of glucose and fructose to be metabolized differently. The bottom line, 97% of honey is practically the same thing as corn syrup, water and a mixture of fructose and glucose. (In fact, dishonest honey dealers cut honey with corn syrup because it is indistinguishable from the real deal.)
By all means use honey if you like the taste. Just don't suppose you're getting any extra health benefit beyond what you'd get from any other sugar water.
copyright Terry Colon, 2008