How Healthy is Honey? Information and Assessments

Honey is a popular spread. But because of its high sugar content, the question arises whether honey is healthy. In this article, you can read how healthy the sweet spread is when it can even be a remedy and what you should consider with infants.

Honey is so healthy

High-quality types of honey have more than 240 healthy ingredients. However, by far the largest part of the delicious spread is pure sugar – about 80 percent.

• On average, this sugar content consists of 38 percent fructose, 31 percent glucose, and 10 percent polysaccharides. However, the ratio of the individual sugars varies depending on the variety.
• The consistency of honey is determined by the fructose-glucose ratio. Glucose crystallizes faster than fructose. A high glucose content makes honey creamy to firm, a higher fructose content makes it more liquid.
• In addition, honey brings numerous vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, organic acids, and secondary plant substances, and 17 percent water.

Honey – a multi-talent when it comes to health

The health benefits of honey are not a recent discovery.

• Bee juice has long been valued as a remedy for numerous diseases and its positive effects on wound healing.
• Honey has an antibacterial and antifungal effect, i.e. against bacteria and fungal diseases. Hydrogen peroxide is responsible for the antibacterial effect. This substance is produced in small amounts by an enzyme that the bees add to the unripe honey via their saliva.
• In addition, the high sugar concentration binds excess water. As a result, bacteria and fungi are deprived of their basis of life and they die – they simply dry up. only the spores survive, but cannot grow or multiply.
• But the sweet goo can do even more: Honey prevents disease-causing bacteria from congregating in the body and communicating with each other. So you can no longer act as a “group” and are much more susceptible to antibiotics.

The spread as a remedy

Honey works just as well as medicine in many cases. The big advantage: With honey, you don’t have to accept any side effects.

• You are probably familiar with honey as a remedy for coughs and sore throats associated with a cold.
• Although the effect has been known for a long time from experience, it has now also been proven by studies. If you take a teaspoon of honey before you go to bed, it will noticeably relieve your cough. It doesn’t matter whether you take the honey pure, in warm tea, or with a glass of water.
• If you suffer from scaly and itchy skin, honey makes the skin healthy and supple again. To do this, dissolve a little honey in warm water and apply the mixture to the affected areas of the skin. After about three hours, wash off the honey. If you repeat the application daily, you will notice a significant improvement after a week at the latest.
• Women often suffer from a vaginal yeast infection, which is usually caused by a fungus of the genus Candida. If you use the antifungal effect of the honey in combination with the acidic pH of the yogurt, you will get rid of the annoying fungus naturally. If you apply the yogurt-honey mixture every day, this is just as successful a treatment as with a pharmaceutical cream.

Caution – not suitable for infants

As healthy as honey is, it is taboo in the first 12 months of life.

• The reason for this is the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, more precisely, its spores, which survive the high sugar content. Despite the most careful control, these can get into the honey.
• When these spores germinate, they produce a muscle-crippling toxin. This is not a problem for adults: a reasonably intact intestinal flora prevents germination.
• In infants, this intestinal flora is not yet sufficiently developed in the first 12 months of life, and then the spores – if present in the honey – could germinate and produce the poison.
• If this remains undetected and untreated, the result can be paralysis of the breathing and swallowing muscles for infants, which in the worst case can lead to death.

Conclusion: Honey is healthy – when handled properly

Despite its many healing and healthy effects, honey also has its downsides: the high sugar content also has negative effects.

• If you eat too much, you promote tooth decay. Too much honey consumption can also ruin the intestinal flora by killing healthy bacteria.
• Too much sugar also overwhelms the pancreas and leads to obesity.
• Incidentally, if you use honey for baking, you get none of the healthy benefits of honey: it loses its healthy properties at temperatures above 40 degrees.
• However, if you use the sweet spread in a targeted manner and moderation, do your body some good.