Honey, Honey, Honey

Is Honey good for you? Or better than other options? Peter Whoriskey:

Honey has an aura of purity and naturalness. Fresh air, birdsong, forests and meadows.

High-fructose corn sweetener? Not so much.

So you might think that honey is better for you. But a study published this month compared the health effects of honey and the processed sweetener and found no significant differences.

“The effects were essentially the same,” said Susan K. Raatz, a research nutritionist at the USDA who conducted the study with two colleagues.

The belief that HFCS may be harmful – linked to obesity or diabetes – has helped sink consumption of HFCS over the last ten years.

Researchers at the USDA decided to put that belief to the test. The honey industry, likely hoping that that honey’s suspected health benefits might be proven, helped fund the effort.

The researchers gave subjects daily doses of each of three sweeteners – honey, cane sugar and high-fructose corn sweetener – for two weeks at a time. They then compared measures of blood sugar, insulin, body weight, cholesterol and blood pressure in the 55 subjects.

The researchers found that the three sweeteners basically have the same impacts. Most measures were unchanged by the sweeteners. One measure of a key blood fat, a marker for heart disease, rose with all three.