Transcription
Welcome back to the Metabolic Classroom podcast. I'm Ben Bickman, biomedical scientist and professor of cell biology. Today we are getting sticky with it as the kids may say. We are going to be talking about honey and maple syrup.
Now maybe maybe these golden natural sweeteners could just be more than just something you put on your pancakes or your toast. They do have a rich history and there is some pretty interesting science suggesting that they might outperform plain old sugar when it comes to things like blood sugar control, even maybe weight management, heart health and more. But are they just metabolic allies dressed up as sugars or are they something different? In fact, now over the course of this mini lecture, I want to briefly tour through the history of these, especially honey, including its role in World War I. you're going to be interested in this if you've not heard it before, but also even how honey might be valuable for things like allergies. Then we're going to step into some of the clinical studies and look at some of the mechanisms that might explain why these natural sugars don't quite behave like table sugar. We'll compare these head-to-head in some of these studies.
All right, so let's get started with the historical aspect. Uh to appreciate honey and maple syrup's metabolic potential, let's start with their stories. So, first of all, honey, it is old, produced, of course, from bees. Dates the evidence of human use and deliberately raising and managing beehives is well over 8,000 years old. But it was both used in food and in medicine. In ancient Egypt, honey was used actually as a preservative in mummies, but also used to treat ailments. And Egyptians called it the food of the gods because it apparently was so helpful and healthful.
But one of the most gripping tales is a bit more modern and that comes from World War I. Uh amid some of the supply shortages. Uh honey actually was used increasingly as a lifesaving intervention, a drug almost on the battlefield. Russian physicians would apply it topically to infected wounds, noting that it would prevent sepsis or severe infections and increase healing. One of the reasons for this could be that it creates an osmotic pull that will dehydrate or kill the bacteria, but it also has a natural hydrogen peroxide which keeps it at a very basic or low pH that is lethal to microbes. So, it can even kill bacteria that are considered antibiotic resistant. At the same time, German medics could mix the honey with cod liver oil for gangrine and ulcers at the time, saving lives. And post-war studies in more recent decades have confirmed this. A 2017 review confirmed that honey's efficacy against wounds, infection, and it could reduce healing time by up to about 40% compared to standard dressings.
Raw honey, unheated and unfiltered, does contain things more than just the nutrients that we think of, and we'll get into those in a moment. But if it's raw honey, it retains enzymes like glucose oxidase, which is one of the sources of the antibacterial peroxides. And it will also have some pollen traces which can amplify some of these effects. And if we're talking about raw honey, you might have heard that it is useful for allergies. The theory goes a little something like this. If you have local raw honey and you're consuming it in relatively low doses, it will contain these even lower micro doses of regional pollen. And that can help an individual that can help a body build up a tolerance like a natural imunotherapy. You know, the child who may be highly reactive to peanuts. Well, they start exposing the child to very very modest amounts of nuts and then a little more and then a little more and they're building up a tolerance. Well, perhaps the same thing is happening with regards to the pollen that is found in the raw natural honey. In fact, a 2013 study found that one gram of kilogram body weight of birch pollen honey could reduce symptoms and did in 17 allergic patients over just a few months. And this worked far more than just regular honey did. A more recent paper found that the raw honey contained anti-inflammatory flavonoids that was were thought to help in rhinitis. And further uh a bigger study uh however a 2018 Cochran review and that's generally some of the gold standard research we might compare things to uh concluded that it's unclear that some of these benefits are are unproven and that some of what appears to be helping with allergies is just in fact that it's somewhat soothing in its texture.
Now, that's just all been honey. But remember, there was another sweet part of this topic, which is maple syrup. But maple syrup also has a history in nature, if perhaps not quite as old. As far as we know, its origins are from indigenous peoples in North America, the first known to tap sugar maple trees for the sap and then boiling the sap. Unlike honey's medicinal fame, uh, maple syrup's lore is more really focused on just the nutrition. It's high in minerals like zinc and manganese. Today, it's mostly produced through Canada in the US. And there are darker grades which do in fact contain higher levels of antioxidants. And that can be just a product of the boiling or the process of of producing it. But both of these natural sweeteners come readily in nature and they have some metabolic effect. So let's peek into these and take a spoonful as we dive in a little deeper.
So, at the core of both of these, honey and maple syrup, they are sugars, but they're not like refined table sugar. Table sugar is or or sucrose is 100% disaccharide, which is to say it's 50% glucose and 50% fructose. Now, fructose has its own complications being largely metabolized by the liver. High fructose corn syrup will go a little higher. it can bump up the fructose commonly to about 55% and of course the glucose would be the rest of that and that can matter uh because fructose is generally more damaging in fact a human study that I'm very familiar with uh had humans consume isocaloric drinks of a glucose- richch shake versus a fructose shank a shake both gained fat but the fructose drink selectively increased visceral fat much more than the glucose drink.
Now, honey isn't as uniform as you might think. It is 80% sugar, and in that case, it is in fact roughly evenly split between fructose and glucose, but it does also have some trace levels of things like moltos, so other sugars. But the other 20% is totally different. The other 20% of what we're consuming when we take in honey is things like water, various enzymes, B vitamins, minerals like potassium and iron, and a lot potentially over 200 bioactive molecules like flavonoids and phenolic acids. I'll come back to some of those in a moment. Beyond the glucose oxidase which I mentioned earlier, there are other digestive enzymes like invertase and diastas that aid in sugar digestion. But honey boasts several non-nutritional or non kind of nutrient biochemistry enzymes if you will that enhance some of its antimicrobial and preservative qualities. And some of these include catal which regulates peroxide levels which helps maintain stability and keep a pH in a particular range. But further on that um acid phosphatase is another enzyme there and that helps also keep that low pH which again further blocks microbial growth so making it very antibiotic but it also has trace proteases which can help break down digested uh consumed protein and then overall it is just going to have this these kind of act together if you will to give it a pretty good preservative effect. Raw honey will keep the bee pollen in there as well as an antimicrobial resin called propylolis and then that invertase enzyme which breaks the sucrose into its monossaccharides. Now honey can come in a variety of colors and the darker the variety like say a buckwheat honey will tend to have about two to three times more of these antioxidants than lighter honeys.
All right, now that's a lot about honey but let's look at maple syrup. Maple syrup is about 60% sucrose and then it is the rest of it's basically water now but it also has some extras. It has over about a 100 polyphenols um which are sometimes formed during the boiling not natural to the sap but also minerals like I said manganese is a big one. Uh unlike refined sugars um isolation the compounds these compounds can act as prebiotics which can also feed gut bacteria. Now, some of the key differences further with sugar and maple syrup is that they have lower GI than sugar does. So, the glycemic index that means there's going to be less of a glucose spike, less of an insulin spike, and less of the consequences that follow spiking glucose and insulin like perhaps a little less fat storage, but they do go further. Antioxidants can neutralize some radicals, which in turn can reduce oxidative stress. So that goes well beyond the endocrine or even nutrient effects of the eating.
Now there's also a potential influence on fat, although we're going to check some of that enthusiasm in just a moment when we look at the human studies. But some of these flavonoids are known to inhibit fat cell growth or adapagenesis. They're also known to shrink fat cells by promoting lipolysis. So take coretin for instance, one of honey's more predominant flavonoids. It ramps upmpk pathways to suppress fat cell differentiation while also dialing down inflammation in the fat tissue. Then there's myetin which curbs or reduces lipogenic genes like sbp1c and that's a key regulator gene that drives up fat synthesis. Galangan is another one that blocks weight gain by limiting fat uh fat cell expansion. Then there's other ones like camperol, chrysin, epigenine, hesperitin, a lot of them and they all have their various effects at affecting fat cell dynamics overall creating a metabolic millu that is limiting fat cell growth and indeed promoting fat cell breakdown. But as I noted, while that all sounds very compelling, very provocative, whether this actually leads to changes in weight in humans might not really be so obvious.
Now, as I noted earlier, raw forms will pre preserve these heat sensitive enzymes. And the more we consume it raw, the more of that we're going to get. And the bioactivity of these things can be well over 50% higher in the raw form. There was an interesting study out of Mexico that looked at three distinct Mexican honeys. Highland honey, multif floral honey, and then avocado honey. And they compared those honeys with just pure glucose in healthy adults. Uh all three of the honeys produced an overall lower glucose response in the blood than glucose itself. But beyond blood sugar control, the research the researchers also looked at an unexpected outcome, namely satiety. How full did the people feel when they consumed these honeys? And here the highland honey was pretty robust. It produced the strongest and longest lasting satiety response, keeping the participants in the study feeling much fuller for upwards of 45 minutes compared to just about 30 minutes for the avocado and the multif floral honey. And the research team in looking at that paper suggested that it could be to the due to the higher level of phyitochemicals that may be changing absorption and digestion. So a takeaway here is that while honey is still a sugar, certain varieties of honey could offer a gentler metabolic impact as well as mitigating further hunger by promoting a better sense of satiety.
Okay, now let's actually step into the human trials now to get a better idea. When we look at the human trials with honey, the story is cautious and in fact more murky than some people might expect. One very well-designed study compared honey, sucrossse, and high fructose corn syrup in adults, both glucose tolerant adults and glucose intolerant. After two weeks, they found that all three sweeteners produced similar effects on glucose, insulin, and blood lipids. In other words, the honey didn't perform any better. Now, that was a processed honey, right? What might it have done if it was a raw honey? In people with type two diabetes, the results are also a little mixed. A C a controlled crossover trial gave adults about 50 grams of natural honey. That's what they called it though. It didn't again say whether it was raw. Um they did this for eight weeks. Lipids such as triglycerides and cholesterol showed some modest improvements, but honey did not reduce HBAC or fasting glucose. Um and the systematic reviews generally confirm this that honey appears more reliable at affecting triglycerides than it does anything with blood sugar. And animal studies actually do show a slightly better effect. And let's not toss out the animal studies. The nice thing about the animal studies is that it does help control for some of the variety of human living, which something could include something like maybe they end up eating more and they're not reporting it. You know, there are always variables in the human studies that you just can't control. In the in the animal studies, unlike the human studies, you can control for everything. So, one animal study stood out to me. They fed rats a a diet to make them fat. So a highfat, high carb diet. And they supplemented it with honey and they gained less weight, stored less fat, and they had smaller atyposites. And once again, it was thought to be perhaps a result of the polyphenols and the flavonoids which help regulate fat cell dynamics.
Now, what about maple syrup? There really has is not as much, but in 2024, there was a good well-controlled study that put maple syrup to the test. The adults had mild metabolic or with mild metabolic health. So like a little bit of metabolic syndrome. They replaced about 5% of their calories from refined sugar with pure maple syrup for 8 weeks. The results were very modest but potentially meaningful. The maple syrup group had better glucose tolerance, slightly lower blood pressure, and a little less abdominal fat than those that were just eating the normal amount of refined sugar. Now the effects were not dramatic but once again it suggests that there might be something here independent of the calories like the the polyphenols uh that might have a cardioabolic advantage when it's used as a substitute for sugar.
So the clinical reality is that honey and maple syrup are still sugars. They don't cause weight loss on their own, but compared with normal refined sugar, I think it's fair to say they would certainly offer some modest metabolic benefits. And that could be not only due to the slightly lower levels of actual glucose and fructose because remember there are some water in them in both of them, but also the presence of the polyphenols and the flavonoids. In the end, both of the natural sweeteners could certainly outperform refined sugar. uh honey could edge out with a broader antioxidant profile and not not in just the wound healing. In fact, it's increasingly common for people to be putting raw honey in their skin care products. And then uh maple syrup can shine in other ways with different polyphenols, but of course compared to sugar, both of them are going to have a lower GI. There's going to be better blood sugar stability, and I would extrapolate that to say lower risk of insulin resistance. But again, it's still a sugar and should be respected as such. The key difference uh again here being how the macros break down uh that they're not a 50/50. Well, it's not a key difference. It's a difference. Sugar is a split 50/50 of glucose and fructose. These ones tended to be a little higher fructose than glucose, but again, not 100% of it is either of them. uh uh if you look for the complete composition there was up to 40% of water in them in addition to all the extras like the minerals etc. I would say that neither is healthy in excess but I think they could be used for tools. I know of people who are on low carb diets and they find that just a small tablespoon of honey or a teaspoon of honey just sort of sucking on it like a lollipop can help. And there could be something to be said uh to say about the effects of raw honey on things like sore throats. Grandma's old cough medicine of the raw honey with lemon and hot water. Remember, honey is a pretty potent antibiotic.
All right, thanks for joining me. I hope you feel like you've learned something new. Please let me know in the comments how you use either honey or maple syrup. I'll be interested to hear what you say. I want to know what your experience has been. Until next time, more knowledge, better health.
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