Why Honey?

Since fruits and vegetables are an especially potent source of antioxidants, the Illinois team speculated that honey, which originates in plant nectar, might also contain high levels of the nutrients. They used laboratory tests to measure the antioxidant levels of 20 different American honeys collected by beekeepers across the country.

While all of the honeys contained low-to-moderate levels of antioxidants, study co-author Dr. May Berenbaum says "(not all honeys are the same." In fact, the researchers found that honey from bees fed on Illinois buckwheat flowers had 20 times the antioxidant content of honey from bees fed on California sage. The authors found that darker-colored honeys had higher antioxidant concentrations than did lighter-colored varieties.

Berenbaum notes that the antioxidant concentrations of the highly-rated Illinois buckwheat honey "...compares favorably, pretty much bite for bite, with the ascorbic acid-related antioxidant content of tomatoes."

Of course, most consumers would be more likely to eat a whole tomato at one sitting than the equivalent weight-worth of honey. Still, Atlanta nutritionist Dr. Chris Rosenbloom, a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, says she is happy to include honey as "...one more food in the arsenal of foods that contain antioxidants and other chemicals that are good for us."

She cautions, however, that "...it is not safe to feed honey to infants," since honey often contains spores of bacterium clostridium botulinum, the organism that causes botulism. "An older child or an adult has the acids in their stomach that can kill it off," Rosenbloom explained, "but not infants."

The preceding information comes from the Illinois study that was funded in part by grants from the Illinois value-added Research program and the National Honey Board. SOURCE: Journal of Apicultural Research, 1998;37:221-225.