Honey: An Insider’s Guide to the Good Stuff

“If you’ve got the money, honey, I’ve got the time” — Lefty Frizzell, seconded by Willie Nelson, If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time

A lot of marketing about honey is, in a word, dumb. Wellness marketing portrays honey as a magical cure-all elixir. This is, in a word, unfortunate. The truth about honey–the history, the chemistry, and health implications–is far grander than any wellness industry woo-woo. The truth will also guide us to better outcomes.

Come along on a story much stranger than fiction.

Honey is the first sweet. Early farmers domesticated sugarcane about 8,000 years ago, but it was slow to spread beyond the southeast Asian archipelago. Scientists selected beets for sugar content only several hundred years ago. Fruit wasn’t sweet before early farmers selected fruit for sugar content. According to Daniel Lieberman in The Story of the Human Body, “Most of the fruits we eat today have been heavily domesticated to be much sweeter than their wild progenitors. Until recently, most apples were like crab apples and had considerably less fructose. In fact, almost all the fruits our ancestors ate were about as sweet as carrots.” This world used to be a lot less sweet.

Honey has always been sweet. Or, more accurately, honey has been sweet for at least 30 million years. The first human was not yet on the scene 3 million years ago.

For most of human history honey was the only potent sweet in our diets. We can see human infatuation with honey with modern hunter-gatherers. In Exercised, Lieberman writes how the Hadza of Northern Tanzania, follow the honeyguide bird to locate a hive. When the honey guide bird finds a hive, the Hadza build a fire, smoke the bees and take a substantial portion of the hive’s combs. They endure more than a few stings from Africanized bees. When Africanized bees reached the southern U.S., we called them “killer bees.” TV news flipped out.🤷

We love more than honey. We love what honey makes possible. Alcoholic fermentation requires an energy dense sugar. Before modern sugarcane and beet, honey sweetened alone. Honey was the first sugary fuel for the microbes that make alcohol. The first alcohol fermented by humans was likely mead–honey wine. Mead likely began as an accidental product of wax refining. By cleaning beeswax in water, ancients left a lot of sugar in the water. Water+sugar+microbes+time=alcohol. That’s right, honey enabled us, for the first time, to get high on our own supply.

Let’s get to honey’s chemistry. We can better understand honey's remarkable properties by looking there.

The sugars in honey are dissolved in about 16% water. Think about that for a moment. All that sugar is dissolved in 16% water?!? I’m no chemist, but that seems like a marvel of chemistry. This is why honey is so dense and, literally, sweeter than sugar. When you swap 1 cup of sugar for honey in a recipe, you use ¾ a cup of honey.

This chemical wizardry is why honey crystallizes. Two sugars–fructose and glucose–make up about 70% of the sugars in honey. One of them, glucose, is not stable dissolved in water. It ejects glucose from the solution, whereby it forms granular crystals. The other major sugar in honey, fructose, is stable dissolved in water. It stays put.

Corn syrup does not crystallize because it has more fructose than honey. It is common to add corn syrup to honey. It is fraudulent, but it lessens something people don't understand and don't like about honey: it crystallizes. Compounding the issue, honey crystallization is accelerated by pollen in honey. That is to say, good, less processed honey crystallizes faster. If your honey crystallizes do not worry. Your honey is genuine. If your honey does not crystallize it may be adulterated.

Did I mention that honey is the second most adulterated food in the world, after olive oil?

Honey contains a wide range of lesser sugars that alter honey’s chemistry and nutrition. About 4-5% of honey’s sugars are complex sugars called oligosaccharides. The oligosaccharides in honey vary according to the floral sources. Oligosaccharides affect honey’s color, flavor, and scent. They are, in a word, neat.

Please allow me a digression that is too cool to not ponder.

Oligosaccharides do amazing things in human breast milk. Every mammal makes them. Mothers make an exceptional variety for some reason. Though they are 1-2% of the volume of breast milk, scientists have identified over 200 Human Milk Oligosaccharides (HMOs) so far. Mothers expend immense energy making these complex sugars. But here’s where this gets weird: babies cannot digest HMOs.

Why would a human mother expend so much energy making complex sugars that her child cannot digest? Here’s a clue–HMOs pass through the stomach into the small intestine. With a steady diet of HMOs, beneficial bacteria outcompete others. In abundance, they nourish the baby's digestive tract, make anti-inflammatory molecules that calibrate healthy immune development and block pathogens. Gut bacteria well fed on HMOs release a nutrient called sialic acid that is integral to brain development. In the words of Ed Yong in I Contain Multitudes, “It is possible that by keeping this bacterium well fed, mothers can raise brainier babies.”

Honey contains different oligosaccharides than breast milk. And let me make a clean break of it here: I am not claiming the honey oligosaccharides have anywhere near the beneficial microbial, immune, digestive and possibly brain development benefits that human milk oligosaccharides have for an infant.

A big reason for that is because your microbial path is largely set by the time it is safe for a baby to consume honey. Babies consume their mother’s milk at a formative time in their microbial and immune development.

But honey oligosaccharides are a prebiotic. Prebiotics feed your microbial multitudes. This little appreciated component of honey may be the reason honey may be a bit healthier than other sources of sugar.^[1]

But whether honey is healthier than other sugars is complex. In the Science Vs. episode linked in the paragraph above, Dr. Kimber Stanhope, an eminent sugar scientist put it this way in a discussion with the host, Meryl Horn.

“Dr. Kimber Stanhope: … if I was forced to make the decision between natural unprocessed honey versus sucrose or any other form of sugar I would pick the honey.

Meryl Horn: Someone had a gun to your head and was like, Kimber, you must add one of these things to your yogurt, you would choose the honey?

Dr. Stanhope: Exactly. That's how you'll have to phrase it.”

Dr. Stanhope advises that people eat less sugar. Period. Her advice is in line with other experts. The problem with sugar is that it is hyper-palatable. It makes almost anything taste better. So we overeat.

We evolved in a world where calories were scarce and physical activity was plentiful. We live in a world where calories are plentiful and physical activity is scarce. Sugar is an uneasy fit in our world. The Hadza I mentioned in the paragraphs above eat honey by the pound. But they run 10 miles and raid killer bees to get it.

There is another reason why honey may not be like other sugars. Local, unrefined honey contains local pollens. Some people call this “raw” honey. But there is no agreement on what raw means. As with a lot of things, the devil is in the details.

Drew’s Honeybees does not heat our honey while extracting. We work too damn hard to fumble on the one yard line. Our honey passes through one coarse filter when it leaves our centrifugal extractor. After that it settles in a series of three tanks. Honey’s density pushes debris to the surface. No heat leaves the sugars and enzymes unaltered. No fine filters leave all the best part–pollens, phenolics, and flavonoids. The last two may dissolve in honey from propolis, a resinous wonder of the honey bee hive.

Pollen is an allergen. It is an allergen we are exposed to unevenly. In the northeastern U.S. there is little or no pollen in winter. This changes drastically in the spring. All manner of trees spread pollen to the wind. It’s everywhere. If you leave a window open pollen will coat nearby surfaces. This intermittent exposure is hard for people with pollen allergies. You’re accosted all at once.

Honey provides graduated exposure to pollen in preceding months. The evidence whether this reduces allergic symptoms is mixed. The most compelling study that honey does reduce spring allergies is from a study where the researchers used honey with added pollen.^[2] Well, well.

¹ Spotify Studios. (2025, October 9). Sugar: How bad is it really? (Episode of the podcast Science Vs). Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/episode/6AXHsHo3dG9Y3A5LPpnSb1

² Saarinen, K., Jantunen, J., & Haahtela, T. (2011). Birch pollen honey for birch pollen allergy — A randomized controlled pilot study. International Archives of Allergy and Immunology, 155(2), 160-166. https://doi.org/10.1159/000319821