Does honey help hayfever?
Annoyingly it’s not been scientifically proven one way or the other as the design of the experiment would be so complicated!
The theory is that the pollen in the honey helps to desensitise you to the pollens that you're allergic to.
I’m not sure if it’s the pollen or honey’s anti-inflammatory properties (or both) helping to calm the symptoms, but lots of people swear by it.
All our honeys keep all their pollen - in one of our jars they’ll be nearly 2 MILLION pollen grains!
- 70 TIMES MORE than in a jar from a supermarket which fine filter theirs!
Is honey a good alternative to sugar?
What are the sugars in honey?
The sugars in honey come from the nectars that the bees collect and are made up mainly of two simple sugars: glucose (the sugar that gives us energy to keep going) and fructose (the sugar that gives the sweetness and is the sugar found in fruit).
Then there are smaller quantities of more complex sugars such as sucrose (a combination of fructose and glucose) and others that have been formed by up to 10 sugars joining together. It’s the complexity of these sugars that make honey a better source of energy and sweetness than refined sugar does.
How much better is honey?
Honey is twice as sweet as refined sugar - put another way - you can half the amount of refined sugar you currently use to sweeten your tea or coffee!
Then of course there are the plant derived enzymes that the bees added which help with digestion, antimicrobial protection and nutrient absorption. You only find these in raw honey.
Combined with raw honey's antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial properties this may well explain why honey has been in people’s medicine cabinets since the Ancient Egyptians.
Honey is a naturally low Glycemic Index sweetener
The Glycemic Index (GI) measures how quickly the sugars in a food are absorbed in the body. To avoid those sugar rushes and then lows we need to eat foods that release their sugars more slowly and give us energy for longer, without the peaks and troughs we get when sugar races through our system.
Honey’s GI is lower than sugar as it’s more complex so our bodies are slower to break it down and absorb it. As a result athletes use honey as a good source of slower releasing energy to keep them cycling and running for longer.
What makes raw honey a prebiotic?
Honey is a mix of complex and simple sugars, the simple sugars are rapidly absorbed by the body when honey’s eaten, but the complex sugars aren’t and they make it down to the gut where they help the ‘good bacteria’ to flourish and the bad not to. It means honey’s a prebiotic i.e a carbohydrate that’s not entirely digested and absorbed so it reaches the large intestine intact allowing the good bacteria found here to use it to make essential nutrients to help sustain a healthy you.
A 2010 study conducted by The University of New South Wales, Australia* showed that eating a tablespoon of honey every day has a significant and dramatic impact on your good gut bacteria - and reduces the bad. One of our 224 g jars will give you a tablespoon a day for 2 weeks.
It's why raw honey and live yoghurt make the healthiest of breakfasts, with the prebiotic honey feeding the good gut bacteria in the probiotic yoghurt
*http://www.agrifutures.com.au/wp-content/uploads/publications/09-179.pdf
Is Honey Good For Coughs?
Another study, this time conducted in the US in 2007* showed that honey was the best at relieving coughs in children. In the research some children were sent to bed with a tablespoon of honey, some with a cough syrup and others with nothing. The study found that the frequency and severity of their coughs reduced most for the children that had the honey. As a result they had a better night’s sleep – and so did Mum and Dad!
*https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/571638
Why does honey crystalise?
One of the ways honey changes is by crystalising. This is a normal process and a sign of the honey’s purity as the glucose in honey starts to knit together around the pollen grains in the honey.
A honey's glucose content will depend on the flowers the bees have visited to make it - if they’ve been visiting the bright yellow oil seed rape fields it will crystalise very quickly, almost within days as it's a high-glucose nectar.
Glucose needs pollen grains to knit around and crystalise so supermarket honeys have been pressure filtered to take as much pollen out as possible, and then pasteurised to kill the yeasts and enzyme activity to keep the honey runny and stable for as long as possible.
But we love how honey changes over time and embrace every honey’s unique character which is why we simply jar it and leave it and let you enjoy it in all its natural glory!
Why do raw honeys have different textures?
It comes down to the balance of all the different sugars. The main ones of glucose and fructose - but also including many other complex sugars which are found in smaller quantities.
The bees don't collect uniform nectar from one type of flower. They visit literally millions of flowers to make a jar of honey. Each plant produces nectar with a slightly different sugar composition.
So even honey from the same hives, taken just days apart can have subtle differences in that glucose-fructose balance. Just enough to make one bucket crystallise faster than the other.
How can I make honey runny again?
If your honey has already crystalised in the jar and you want to pour it then gentle warming will bring it back to runny, either by stirring it in to your porridge, spreading it on your hot toast, or by sitting it by warm radiators, or even on a very low microwave setting will do it.
Inside the hive it's a constant 30-35 degrees, so just don't heat your honey more than this and it will remain intact and active.
But the most important thing to remember is that every honey will eventually crystalise and in different ways depending on the combination of flowers that made it. It most certainly hasn’t gone off and will still be good.
