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Food

Honey Is Just as Bad for You as Sugar

A study published this month in the Journal of Nutrition compared the effects of high-fructose corn syrup, table sugar, and the sweet secretions of the honeybee. Wanna guess what happened next?
Foto von rachelopasch via Flickr

Have you not received the memo informing you that high-fructose corn syrup isn't the same as corn syrup, that agave syrup is no better for you than table sugar, and that brown rice syrup can contain high levels of arsenic?

If not, do some homework, and then come back to suck down this bit of bitter news: honey ain't all that great for you, either.

A study published this month in the Journal of Nutrition compared the effects of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and the secretions of the honeybee. Wanna guess what happened next?

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"The effects were essentially the same," said Susan K. Raatz, a USDA research nutritionist who led the study, to the Washington Post.

Oddly enough, the honey industry helped fund the USDA study, possibly in the hopes that it would prove that honey was nutritionally superior to HFCS. That recalls a study from earlier this summer, funded by the Danish butter industry, that found that butter can be harmful to human health.

In the honey study, researchers compared the impact of honey, sucrose (table sugar), and HFCS on 55 volunteers, half of whom had normal glucose tolerance and half of whom were in a pre-diabetic state. They each ate 50 grams of a randomly assigned sweetener for two weeks, after which their body weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and other health factors were analyzed.

Despite the fact that half of the group was considered to have "impaired" glucose tolerance, all of the study participants showed essentially the same results by the end. All three sweeteners raised participants' levels of triglycerides, a type of lipid that can raise the risk of heart disease.

"Honey is thought of as more natural whereas white sugar and high fructose corn syrup are processed from the cane or the beet or the corn," Raatz told the Post. "We wanted to find out if they were different. But chemically, they are very, very similar, and that's what it seems to break down to."

Sorry, Mom. Your chamomile tea will forever taste a little less sweet.