One of the most common pieces of trendy advice that is given to those concerned about their weight is to try and eat organic. One of the main culprits for of weight in a lot of diets is an excess in sugar. Many of these same diets also include honey which can be surprisingly beneficial for a person. People have been going out of their way to obtain honey for thousands of years, dating all the way back to 6,000 year old cave paintings depicting a man climbing a makeshift ladder to obtain it.
Qualities of Honey
Honey on its own is a composite compound made of well over a hundred separate parts including vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and many other things. The point of eating honey is that it isn’t – just – sugar for sugars sake. It is a provider of many of the things the body needs to thrive, making honey a fuel instead of a treat. Often the refined sugars in foods are combinations of fructose and glucose and nothing else. High-fructose corn syrup in drinks is just glucose and fructose, the same things that make up white sugar. Honey is these two sugars and more, making it ideal an ideal replacement of refined sugars for consumption.
Honey under Scrutiny
There a number of studies that have been conducted on the qualities of honey compared to refined sugar. These studies have painted a pretty portrait of why an individual should be consuming honey as a fuel instead, as honey had a noticeable effect on a number of health markets when paired against other products of fructose. Some of the more noticeable effects of honey are items that are reason enough alone, and provide a staggering benefit when combined into one good fuel – honey.
For instance: When the conductors of the study fed fructose into the subjects, there was a noticeable increase of triglycerides in the body. Remember that triglycerides are a combination of three fatty acids and glycerol, with the result being an ester that is essentially a fat product floating in the blood. Normal refined fructose sugars also lowered the amount of vitamin E in the body while honey did not affect it. This suggests that honey creates less oxidative stress in the body as seen by there being no degradation of tissue due to vitamin E removal.
A separate set of studies compared honey to dextrose (basic glucose), sucrose, and a mixture of fructose and glucose called sham-honey. While these are a lot of names to keep up with, the basic results of the study were thus:
Overall, Honey results in fewer and less frequent glucose spikes in the blood.
The sham-honey provided the aforementioned increase in triglycerides while real honey helped to reduce these in the body.
Real honey also was shown to help lower LDL in the body after a 15 day period of testing.
Overall, consumption of normal honey helped improved the quality of the blood by reducing floating fat in the blood while not increasing the glucose in the blood significantly.
To answer the original question posed of does Honey help weight loss: Honey actually creates a decrease in weight as it works to reduce triglycerides (fat) instead of increasing them.
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