Honey: Nature's Wonder Sugar

I don't know. That internet connection just sounded dodgy, That's what I'm saying. She came in like Houston, We're have a problem. You know that internet connection sound all right? Sounds like Apola thirteen. I'm pretty excited about this one. Me too. I even ate some honey for lunch today. I had a little dab at breck at brett Key, okay, which I don't usually eat, but I ate another toast with a a spun honey spread. Good for you man. So spun honey? Are you talking about the creamed honey?

Is that what I'm hearing now? Yeah? Creamed spun or I think there's one more word for it. But we always called it spun honey growing up, and boy is it good. And guess what it is just as helpful, has just as many helpful properties as regular honey doesn't. Spinning it or the process of getting into that state doesn't change it at all. Yeah, it's like honey in

a different format. Like if you had a really great song, like um uh play that funky music white Boy, and you had it on eight track, but you also had it on record. It's the same song. It's just in two different formats, right, yeah, same thing. Yeah, I like that. I really dislike that song though I really do too, actually, um, although I have a great memory of it. Um, I guess sometimes around Piedmont Park it must have been St. Patrick's say this, Like car full of dudes came up.

They were wearing like green wigs and everything. They were ready to throw down for St. Patrick's Day, and they were blaring that song and like everybody in the car was singing it, having like the best time, and then it totally was. And then as they got out of the car, all of them are like just like looking down the streets, still like going to the bar, and one of them like stopped kind of and like turned

around and made eye contact with me. It was I think he'll be embarrassed for the rest of his life about that. I didn't even stare him down. He just he initiated that embarrassing situation. So he you could tell he felt some shame because you were just looking at him a little bit and again not staring them down. You know, me, I'll stare somebody down, but not these guys. This was this was he initiated it. But hey, good

for them. I bet they had a blast. So honey, I think is what we were originally talking about, right, Yeah, and the Grabster helped us with this one. And this was my commission because Emily is very much into you know, she's gotten very much into her herbs and growing herbs and natural remedies and things, and honey is a big part of that. And although we are not bee keeping yet, that could be on the docket for us. I hope. So, man, I think bee keeping is one of the neatest things

you can do all but it's so relaxing. Yeah, she's she's interested in it, and uh so that might happen. Tell me how it goes, because she doesn't I will Okay, yeah, I'll follow it. Um. We've actually done an entire episode on bee keeping. H It was one of our best, if you ask me, certainly our most homespun episode by far. Um. So we're not going to talk too much about bee keeping, but you pretty much can't discuss honey without also talking

at least a little bit about bee keeping. It's so bee keeping adjacent it would be weird to not mention it. But I just want to say, if you have not heard our bee keeping episode, or you haven't heard it in a while, go listen to it, because it's a really really good app Do we do bees and be bee keeping? Yes? Yeah, we've done bees beekeeping now honey. Yeah, and one of our TV show episodes was about bees. It was one of the sillier episodes. I think it was. Yeah,

that's probably what was silly. I think you had a good eye for the absurd for that show. And I mean that in a complimentary way. Oh I took it that way. Okay. I love absurdist comedy and you nailed it. Um, So let's talk a little bit about Honey. Ed helped us with this one. I think you just said and I think he did about the best most clinical description of honey that you could possibly come up with. Where's

that was that? Like his definition? Yeah, I mean he talks about basically what honey is and how it's made. Oh so you're just saying start from take it from the top basically. But I thought the way he did it was like, here's here. It's totally unambiguous, completely understandable, and it's just a it's a good descriptor of honey and how it's made. Yeah, this is this is good stuff by the grabster. Uh So yeah, a bit of

a refresher though. But we all know that bees like to fly around to different flowers and stick their face in them and dance all over them and do kind of fun things. Uh. And there is a sugary liquid called nectar in flowering plants, and bees are wild about the stuff for a lot of reasons. One reason is, like you know, sometimes they just drink it, Like they want to save that stuff and what's called their crop or their honey stomach to bring back to the hive.

That's their main job. But when they're out there working all day, they're also like, let me take a little bit of this sweet stuff down for me. I wonder if there's any bees out there seriously that have like a bit of a problem with Yeah, it goes from one for me, three for you, two, three for me, one for you kind of. I wonder if there's some that like just kind of drink it more than others.

There's gotta be sure. Yeah, so um yes, But for the most part, when out there harvesting and foraging for nectar, they're using their crop a honey stomach which they can store I think a thousand flowers worth of nectar in that is a lot, a lot of nectar um, which is weird because I saw that it can grow to about a hundred times that size, So a hundred times it's initial size. Holding a thousand flowers worth of nectar, that's just a that's a very efficient um organ. And

it just sits there. It's not doing anything. It's not digesting um. It's just basically for carrying back to the hive. By the way, I had the most amazing dad joke that I failed to tell what it should I tell it now. Of course when you said it just popped into my head. That's why I that's why I know that I'm just on the way down comedically. Well that means the podcast is on the way down too. Oh yeah, for sure. Uh you were talking about the bees having

the problem with drinking too much honey. I said, well, you know, they could always just go to a B B meeting. Boy, that was good. That wasn't bad. That was a really good one. I don't know, all right, Well, I would love to hear from people terrible or borderline genius. Okay, Well, I'm registering the first vote, and I'm going to say somewhere in the middle of those. I was about to say, there's no one between, but of course there is. All right,

So you where'd you leave off with eating pollen? That they take the nectar back to their their their nest they're hot. Okay, Well, then I'll chime in here with a pollen part. Bees are obviously accidentally transferring this pollen, but you know, some of this pollen is getting eaten and mixed in with that honey too, because they love it, because it's got protein and fat. And so what you end up with when you go back to the hive is a gut or crop or a honey stomach full

of this nectar, a little bit of pollen. There's probably like just dust and things from the air, and they start puking it up into each other. There's mouths chewing on it, some puking it around, transferring it to one another until it's ready for storage, right, which sounds gross it is, But Ed makes a really good point here that um, they're not actually it's not actually be vomit.

Honey is not be vomit. And I've I've said that before, so I think I'm kind of being inadvertently taken to task by Ed because again, oh yeah, definitely, I've said that every chance I've ever had. But the again, the the b crop, the honey crop, um is not um digesting. So what they're regurgitating is virtually the same thing that's going in, so it's not really puke, it's just something else.

But yes, they are transferring it from mouth to mouth, and as each bee takes another mouthful of nectar and then passes it around, they're chewing it for a little bit, and one of the things they're doing is absorbing some of the moisture inside. They're also mixing in their own enzymes, and what they're doing doing in that sense, they're they're transforming nectar into honey. So honey is a mixture of b enzymes, flower, nectar, pollen, and um that's dehydrated and

combines to form brand new compounds. And that's that's what honey is. Yeah, and as we'll see there there can be other things in there because it's nature and these are sort of messy although beautiful processes, so as well as you'll see when we talk about like completely raw and filtered honey, there may be some be legs in there and some other little beep, but there may be a piece of a wing because you know, this is just how things go out there in the wild. And

sometimes some bees have really bad days. Yes, that's when they go to the bb meetings. So um, there's there's another way that what we've been talking about is blossom honey what most people think of when they think of honey. There's actually one other way to make honey. And do you remember in our Aunt episode where ants are ranchers of aphids and the aphids suck the juice out of

plants and produce honeydew. Well, bees go find that honeydew in some cases and can actually make honey from the sap of the stems leaves and like bark of trees and other plants, and they basically harvest that like they harvest nectar from flowers, and so there's a there's an entirely different way to produce honey that comes straight from the plant, not even from the flowers, and that's called honeydew. Honey, honeydew, honey. Have you ever had that? I don't think I have.

I was looking it up to see like what some types of honeydew honey are, and I couldn't find many, and nothing that I found sounded like anything I've had before. Okay, Uh, we should point out that not all bees produce honey. Obviously, there are a lot of different species of bees, and we went over those in great detail in to be episode. But the honey bee is from the genus APIs, and uh, there are some other bees that do make make honey, But like the chief honey bee is the western honeybee.

This is the the stud when it comes to making great honey. This is the one we domesticated. This is the one that makes so much honey. They have enough for them, Uh, they have enough for us, and everybody is happy, basically, which is one of the things I love about beekeeping. It seems like one of the she's a few things where we extract something from nature for ourselves where there's enough to go around, and if you do it in the right way, it's uh, it doesn't

harm the thing that that gave it to you. Yeah, that is kind of a beautiful thing about it. And as we'll see, the fact that honey exists is kind of miraculous. And that's just kind of like the cherry on the top chuck, that we can harvest honey without harming or um, the bees or taking some of their head stash for us, Like they just make a little extra for us. And when we can take that, I

think it's wonderful too. So yeah, you know, you mentioned we have a whole episode on beekeeping, but um, as a short refresher, this has been happening for a long time. They were people were collecting honey, um, you know, in the Mesolithic period, so they're like cave drawings that depict

this stuff. So we've always liked the honey as humans. Uh. And then you know, there's a belief that it may have just like beekeeping, may have happened by accident when a hive maybe set up in a jar or basket or something that was outside at somebody's place and they went, hey, wait a minute, like this awesome honey is now in this jar on my back porch. Like I wonder if we could do this like intentionally and do it on purpose, and they kind of just started doing it. That's what

the thought is at least. Yeah, and they think that originally maybe some of the earliest earliest artificial hives were um, some sort of clay pod or something that they were purposed for that. Um. Sometimes maybe they came across the hive and they're like, this is pretty firmly attached to this stick. I'm just gonna take the whole stick home with me farm it like that, you know. Um, Yeah,

there's there's regardless. At some point, somebody probably just stumbled upon this and then in very short order, um, it started to spread. Um. They think that bee keeping at least goes back, um about five thousand years ago. Um there's evidence of it in Egypt, the Indus Valley, and Mesopotamia,

and then China. About eight hundred years after that, evidence of bee keeping uh starts up and you would guess the people of China and the people of Mesopotamia may not have been in contact at the same time or at that time, So it's really possible that bee keeping just kind of independently grew up or evolved in different

societies and cultures around the world independently. Yeah, and it was something because you're using like clay jars and things like you were saying you didn't need to forge metal that wasn't super expensive. It was something that uh there was a low barrier to entry, I guess is what you would say these days. So and it was really delicious and as we'll soon find out, super beneficial. So it became a big deal. Yeah. Um. One of the earliest artificial hives is still um pretty much the symbol

for a bee hive. If you look at any uh a a Milan Winnie the Pooh illustrations. Yeah, um, like it's called it's it's basically a cone, a basket e cone turned upside down. So you take an ice cream cone, turn it upside down on the ice cream part, make it kind of bubbly and there you go. That's a skep. Yeah, it's great. That's why where you get your beehive hair do is named after these things, and you know, things

just advanced from there. Uh. And we'll talk a little bit about that later, but I say we take a break now and then talk about what's in honey and what makes it so good for us? It sounds good learn it's stuff with Joshua John Okay. So the question of what is in honey is very easy to answer

because it's almost all sugar. Uh. There is some water in there, although you know, like we mentioned, part of the process of getting uh to the honey state is to remove as much moisture as possible, but you still need some moisture. Um. So it's you know, something that you can squirt out of a plastic bear sure, uh, which you can later make a bong out of. I think most everyone that was in college when True Romance

came out probably tried that totally. And by the way, so long sixth grade classes that were just listening to this episode. Poor teacher who just ran to the front of the class. Nothing, nothing, nothing, I'm sorry. What's a bong? Um? Was that Ralph Wigham? It was? It was a pretty good win. So it's mostly sugar, and it's believe it or not, it's mostly simple sugar, fruit toast, and glucose.

There are some complex sugars. But that's not to say just because honey is mainly just sugar and simple sugar that it's not complex, because it really is. It is super complex. It's again, the word miraculous just keeps bringing to mind, and I'm definitely not one of those intelligent design people. I just think honey is something really special though, and so like, yes, it does have the simple sugars,

it has very complex sugars. Let me throw out a couple of these names just to kind of blow your mind. There's malto pentaos. I didn't add the extra tea in there. I wanted to so bad. Galactose, that's an amazing name. There's also iso malto trios. These are not your average everyday sugars like fruit, toast and glucose, both of which

are found in honey. But that's just the sugars. And again, the simple sugars combined with other enzymes and the bees mouths to create these much more sophisticated sugars, some of which have like actual protective health properties we found, But that's just the sugars. There's also amino acids enzymes, polyphenols, flavonoids.

And when you start looking at all of the different things that pop up in honey that's in honey, and you look at each one individually and you look them up, you will find that they do all sorts of amazing things. And when you put all of it together, you just can't help but step back and say, honey is miraculous. Yeah, and let's have a spoonful. Yeah, exactly. That's the second thought that follows uh it is. It has, in fact,

you mentioned amino acids. It has all nine all nine essential amino acids, which are the ones that we need that we don't make in our own body, so we have to eat them. Um it is. And we'll get to the healthy stuff in like twelve seconds. But we do need to mention that one of the other great things about honey is that it's I don't know about last forever. Maybe I know they've pulled honey out of like Egyptian tombs and reconstituted it to where it was fine,

so maybe it does last forever. But it is acidic. It has antibacterial properties, so that means honey will last you a long long time. And if you find an old hard you know, lump of honey in a jar in your house that you forgot about. You can probably make that honey awesome again with very little effort. Yeah, supposedly, what you do is you just throw it in that jar, and you take that jar and you put it in like a bath of very hot tap water. Do not

heat it up on the stove. Just put it in hot tap water and very slowly that that chunk of honey will turn back into liquid gold a k A. Honey. Yeah, there's there's a lot of mixed messaging around um, honey being toxic if it's heated beyond a certain point because the you know, there there's ancient wisdom that says it becomes toxic. Other people these days say now it doesn't. So I was like, you know, I mean, surely there's a study about this, and I didn't really find one.

I found one about lab rats and honey heated with gee, but that wasn't only honey that sounds and has done it. But I don't know if I just didn't have time to find the study because it seems like a simple enough thing to research, Like you heat the honey and and feed it to a monkey, and see if it dies. So I'm kidding, by the way, but the thing is chuck as you raised something that came up for me later on, UM that I'll just put here, like the

stuff we do to animals is unconscionable. A hundred years from now, our cohort is going to be looked at as just so barbaric. And one of the things that kind of raised my hackles was UM. As as we'll see later on, one of the things they think honey can help with is UM neurological disorders or mental imbalances and UM. They test that stuff on rats and one of the things they found was that UM in rats, it recovers hopeless behavior, sorry, in mice that have undergone

restraints stress for twenty one days. And I was like, restraints stress doesn't sound very good. What is that? They put the mouse in a tube where it can't move any of its limbs or body or anything, and they kept it there for twenty one days. And you think being put in a tube as a human being for twenty one days where you couldn't move, like I can bear breathed, just saying that out loud, right, that's twenty one human days. Imagine what twenty one days is in

the length of a mouse's life. And then, by the way, after they studied the mouse after taking out the tube, they probably killed it shortly after that, so that mouse's entire life was spent under restraint stress in a tube. And this is just one of the myriad things that we do to animals. And the more I just kind of come across the stuff casually mentioned in this really dry, clinical tone and pure reviewed papers, the more I'm just like, this is, I don't know that we can justify this.

And yes, we've come up with so many amazing things to help humanity along, but I really think we should be we should be allocating a significant amount of our research efforts to figuring out how to not use animals to come up with those same amazing breakthroughs, because it's just wrong. It's cruel and wrong, and there's there's really basically no justification for it in the greater scheme of things. And that's my soapbox. I think that's your first soapbox moment. Oh,

it definitely is, now that you mentioned it. Sure, all right? That means we're going to toast uh some tomorrow. That is good for your body as well. H what's your tomorrow that you like? Congratulate? You know, I got a few of them. That's going to be a future, like very near future topic, by the way, Okay, cool, I've gotten very into tomorrow. Mine is Montenegro. Montenegro is is so good and it's really good to mix cocktails with two. It sure is a little bourbon and to tomorrow you're

some rye and tomorrow. A little bit of that it'll fix. It'll fix a mouse that's been in um restraints stress for twenty and one days. Right up, some orange bitters, A little shake of that. Yeah, it's good stuff even just also choked, by the way, just a little bit of amorrow Montenegro, like I think it ounces of that and some good seltzer is really good on its own too. That's a digestive and a half. It definitely is. Yeah,

that's great. Uh. You know what. Recently I went to l A just for the day to see our friend Ben Harrison and our our friend and uh booking agent Josh Lingren and are my friend Adam Pranica. You'd love Adam. You just haven't hung out with them much. But we went to Musso and Frank and I'll just say this, and I haven't been drinking much lately, but we had a day and we're way too drunk to be and Musso and Frank I could tell from your Instagram posts

from it. Yeah, it just looks really happy in this great big meal and drinks and all this stuff at one of the oldest restaurants in Hollywood. And at the very end, Ben Harrison just shouts out, is that it. We're like, yes, nothing else, and Ben went four tomorrows. Oh yeah, so that's how we ended our meal. We're just supposed to put a hangover, so let's not blow all of our knowledge on tomorrow right here, Chuck j alright, So health qualities of honey is where we left off

ten minutes a. Uh. There are lots of health benefits and there are lots of studies that back this up, which is great. Um. There are medicinal uses that have been academically studied and and verified. So this isn't like you know, witchy hocum or woo woo stuff like that. Honey is really really good for you. And we've known this for a long time. And one of the things that honey is great for is if you have allergies, uh,

if you. They did studies where they looked over the course of a couple of months during allergy season, and it had significant reductions in what's called rhinitis rhinitis, which is you know stuff you know, sneezing, allergy, allergic sort of qualities fear of. And this was like quite a bit of honey. I think it was one gram of honey per kilogram of body weight. A lot of funny, it's a lot of honey, but it works, and you

know it's better than uh, some dumb allergy medication. So you remember our immunotherapy episode from very early on, we talked a lot about eating honey to get over allergies, and it totally makes sense because you're exposing yourself to the local pollen. That's why people who say this actually

works to get yourself over allergies say it won't. It won't work unless you are eating local honey, meaning like within twenty or I think thirty miles of where you live, because you're you're exposing yourself a little by little to that pollen and your body' is like, oh this is this stuff is not that bad. We won't give you any more allergies. Yeah, And there's a lot of reasons to eat local honey and eat locally period, not the least of which is that's just how it was for

gazillion years. Uh what was near you because you couldn't get anywhere else, and that's just sort of the better way to eat. Yeah. I've really gotten into green grapes lately. They're just so good and they're so good for you. Just always have like a bowl of them out. And we just left grape season and this stuff that's out now is just it's so bad. It's just like you're put in your mouth and there's no like pop to it. It just MUSHes, and I'm like, this is not any good. Yeah,

it is like an eyeball. It's really, it's like a rotten eyeball basically. So I'm off a grape So I'm trying to find a grape replacement until they come back in season. Grape replacement is not a bad band name. Actually it is a bad band name, But I could see someone naming their band that. That seems like a side project band name. Right. Uh, what about inflammation, that's

you know, inflammation We've talked a lot about. That's it's not the root cause of every problem humans have, but inflammation is one of the leading causes of a of a lot of problems that humans have. Definitely, I think we need to do an episode on that. Yeah, totally, but yeah, I mean it's behind cardiovascular issues. Your blood

pressure might be high. Um, you might have gut problems, arthritis, some types of cancer, and it's your body basically mounting this immune response that is overblown and so you're suffering as a result, and it has all these terrible UM effect. Well, the flavonoids that I mentioned UM are there's a ton of flavonoids, like thirty different flavonoids found and basically all types of honey, just to varying degrees depending on what

flowers it came from. And they are antioxidants. We've talked about antioxidants um and whether or not they actually work or not, the jury is still kind of out, but there are some things that flavonoids do that are like this is just demonstrably effective. One of the things they do is go to the genes that produce inflammatory proteins and say, nope, not today, you just you just rest easy, stop making those things. So they block expression of inflammatory proteins.

That's just one of the things that you can find in honey. Yeah, a pretty big one if you ask me, uh, if you want, kind of one of the king Daddy's of healthful honeys. You've probably heard of Manuka honey. Um. It seems to have I don't know about exploded, but it seems to have really garnered a lot more um popularity and popularity, garnered popularity whatever, you know what I'm saying.

Sure in more recent years, partially because of marketing in pr but partially because Manuka honey is really good for you. This is a monofloral honey, which means, as as we'll talk about a bit more later, that it comes from a single flower as much as possible from New Zealand, and it's got a pretty short period in which this flower flowers, and that makes it a more rare honey. That makes it more expensive, of course, but Manuka honey kind of does all the things that honey does times,

you know, with a plus afterward. Yeah. Supposedly, the active ingredient for Manuka honeys anti microbial properties is um methyl glyoxyl um. It's a word as ugly as it sounds spelled out, but it has about a hundred times the amount that other types of honey have, and um, that's one of the reasons why they're everybody is so bully on manuka honey. I think the other reason is because

it is very rare. The manuka shrub grows in fairly remote, isolated regions of New Zealand, so it's hard to get and that means it's very expensive, so you can sell it for a lot of money. So anything you can say is minuka honey, you can kind of hype, but there does seem to be some some actual like reality behind the hype. Yeah, like there there are people who do this and uh who just like take a spoonful of minuka honey every day as if they're taking their

vitamins in the morning or something like that. For sure. And there's another one that's kind of come up recently that has been rivaling Menuka's too alloying honey. It grows in Malaysia. The thing is, Manuka honey is a monofloral honey. As we'll see, it's just made from the manuka, the flowers of the minuka shrub. To allaying um is called jungle honey, like it's just made from whatever is flowering

in Malaysia. But supposedly the flowers that are growing in the jungles of Malaysia have a lot of them using properties too. Because people are saying this to a laying it's the hot new product and so long Manuka, you're so over and done with. Yeah, jungle honey is a good song title, yeah, for sure, or maybe I'm just thinking jungle boogie. No jungle honey sounds good. You put honey with any other word and it's gonna make it more appealing. For sure. I love the word jungle. It's

one of my favorites. Yeah. You said earlier you were starting your honeyfile, and I was like, you should call all files your honeyfile. Maybe I will. Honey is also good topically, Um, you can put honey, especially something like manuka honey on a skin, knee or something like that. Uh, cuts any kind of stubborn wounds. Uh, it's gonna help out with Um. They've done meta studies on putting honey on topically and a lot of these were Uh it seems like from studies on diabetic foot wounds. This is

what ED found. But you know, it healed faster, those less inflammation. Apparently it can reduce nasty odors, and even in diabetic foot wounds, helped reduce the need for amputation. Yeah. Um, apparently that's with just about any honey you could use

for wound healing, not just manuka. I saw a paper that said, actually you might not want to use menuka because that methyl glyoxal is something that might actually prevent um a diabetic foot ulcer from healing because it's so potent it might actually like kill off like this the new cells that are trying to form. But other honey has been shown in is honey in general that it actually does help heal diabetic foot ulcers in really any

kind of wound. But the reason they say diabetic ulcers because they have so much trouble healing because there's so little circulation being led to that wound site that it just basically just persists. And if you slather some honey

on there, you can say goodbye, stubborn wound. Goodbye. We already talked about blood pressure some but we should note that some of the studies have found that it reduces hypertension and women and not men, and that's not to say that it can't in men, but it's in you know, Ed points this out very astutely that honey is just there's a lot of studies and meta studies and things, but you know, it's something that bees make in nature, uh, and that humans collect, So they aren't always the most

consistent results when it comes to studies. And there's so many varieties and so many kinds of bees and where they live and then the flowers that they're pollinating and getting that nectar from that. It's uh, just because a study says something, it doesn't mean like that's the end, full stop. Yeah, one way or the other, Like didn't find this property actually helpful or did? Yeah, there just

needs to be more studying that. Yes, they need to refine the study of honey, which I think we're in the in the midst of, like right now on this podcast, we're helping move it along. I think what about cancer cancer it's another one they think that um Basically there's there's properties in honey that um create apoptosis, which is programmed cell death, and that they help target cancer tumors to um to go ahead and die, just die, die die tumor um and that's basically how chemotherapy works in

a lot of ways. So, yes, it does seem to have some sort of effect on cancer. I saw that. Um. Not only has it has it been shown to work in the lab, like in in cell lines of cancer cells, but that it's it's had some clinical um results as well. But apparently when they go after cancer cells there's something

that's called blebbing. And blebbing is where, um, a cell gets pulled away like it's membrane gets pulled away from the cytoskeleton, and there's like a bulge and at that point, um, you have called blebbing, and that cell is in very big trouble. So honey goes after to cancer cells, it makes them bleb Well, you know how I knew it would be something that makes you in trouble is that it's called blebbing. Yeah, exactly. Can't that can't be good. No, Oh my god, I'm blebbing. That's not a good No

one ever say oh, that's fantastic, good for you. Yeah, high bleb Right. You mentioned neurological problems earlier a little bit. Um. Obviously this can be a whole host of things. But they have found and this is another you know area that there needs to be a lot more testing, but the clinical trials have shown some pretty good results and things like uh, you know, depression, dementia in any kind of age related like mental neurological deterioration basically, but even

things like convulsions. Uh, they did there was one study in some uh, some senior adults that where they had a placebo control group which had a about greater incidents of dementia than the group that took a daily tablespoon of honey. That is astounding, that's huge. Yeah. Um, that's the kind of study where it's like, no, that's the end. Nobody else needs to do any more, researchers. Everybody eat a tablespoon of honey, and that's actually that raises a

good question that a lot of people have. It's like, wait a minute, honey is a sweetener. Yes, it's natural, but it's got tons of sugar in it. So is it really okay to eat a tablespoonful honey a day? And the answer is in the West, especially um, you you should, yes, go ahead and eat a tablespoonful honey a day, but make sure that what you're doing is exchanging the added sugars that you're eating in your diet normally. For that tablespoon, don't just add it to your normal diet.

Figure out where you can cut down some sugar and use honey instead. And yes, you will probably be much better off of it long right, because sugar is really not good for us at all. That's great. I think we take our second break here, we come back and we talk about honeycombs, grades of honey. We still got a lot to go over, so let's get to it. Learning stuff with Joshua John. Okay, Chuck, this suddenly turned into a short stuff Go well, I mean we can

talk about the honeycomb briefly again. That's in our bee keeping episode, in our b episode, um and with a lot of detail. But uh, basically, you know this, the honeycomb is like that hexagonal cell structure that you see inside the hive, uh, made of that wax that the bees produce. Uh. And they you know, they make cells for storing honey or for housing that queen and the brood.

But the important thing as far as the honeycomb goes is that humans came along as far as beekeeping is concerned, and said, you know, let me let me build the framing your house for you and you can come in and add the detail. So we started making these, um, you know, what would you call it, like a form substrate, Oh, look at you, which gives the bees a little bit of a head start. Uh, And then you know the honey is in there. They extract that honey in a centerfuge. Uh,

leaves that that honeycomb intact. Although you can get that natural honey if you've seen it in the store with that or maybe at a farmer's market, local farmer's market with a honeycomb floating in that honey. Uh, you can. You can eat that stuff. It's wax. It's not gonna hurt you. Yeah, train it probably makes you feel like Martha Stewart or something. It makes my teeth feel gritty. So I don't like it, but I do know that

it is edible for sure. Yeah. One of the things I saw Chuck though, I was like, well wait a minute, beekeepers are like making basically fully formed honeycombs for the bees to to use. This is going to produce some soft, lazy bees. But it turns out there's actually a really good reason to do this, and that is that with bees produce their own wax. They have to eat honey to produce the wax, and they they consume six pounds

of honey to make one pound of wax. So by giving them the wax to begin with, you're saving all of that extra honey. They're just gonna keep making that honey and you're gonna get more for it. Yeah, I mean, maybe that's one of the reasons we had that surplus. Probably, I would think. So. Yeah, if you're if you're keeping bees and you're not giving them preformed bees, wax, bees wax cells, you're a chump. Uh. There are lots of

different ways to rate or grade honey. We're gonna go over a lot of those now, one of which is how much it's processed. We talked about right out of the hive. It's gonna have some some bead legs and pieces of winging and some yeast in there, some bacteria, some pollen, maybe some dust, some honey crystals. You know, you generally want to I'm sure they're purists that just love that stuff, but if you're selling it in a story, you probably want to remove um some of that or

a lot of that, uh, to make it a food. Product. Uh. The other reason why is because if there's something floating in your honey, that just gives the honey a solid thing in there to crystallize around. And generally the honey buying public sees crystallization is like, uh, that I don't want to buy that honey. I saw that. That was mostly Americans that have an aversion to crystallized honey, and

it's because we think that it's gone bad somehow. And again, yeah, all it is is like, yeah, there's been some crystallization of the sugars and all have to do is put in a nice tap water bath and it'll go back. But yes, you can just totally eat crystallized honey. There's no problem with it whatsoever. But because they know they're consumers, honey producers are like, we've got to get the solids

out of there. Um. So basically, any honey you buy in the United States is going to have at least undergone macro filtering what the usc A called straining, and what that produces is raw honey. It's just they're getting out the biggest of the big solids. But then that's it. There's no more filtration whatsoever, and it's it's raw honey, which is a bit of a misnomer because every honey, uh type that isn't pasteurized, and pasteurized honey is just

one small subset. Every other type of honey is technically raw honey. It's not been heated, there's nothing that's been killed off in it. It's all still raw. But I think what they're basically using the word raw for is like rustic honey. Right, yeah, I agree. You mentioned pasteurization. We might as well talk about that. Uh. I looked it up. I was like, why why would you past your eyes honey? Because you typically think of pasteurization for

more of like a dairy product. Um, it's basically just there is no reason to do it that I found, other than making it look and like pour out of the bottle or jar or whatever, um more freely. Um, it's smoother apparently. Um, it's gonna alter the flavor obviously, because you're heating this honey up. But that's that's the only thing I found why you would pasteurized honey. Um. I saw that. You know, honey has all these anti microbial,

anti viral properties. That doesn't mean there's no such thing as bacteria in honey or there's no such thing as mold. Spores in honey, and mold in particular can cause honey to ferment slightly. Again, nothing wrong with that, totally fine. You basically have a free little mini shot of mead right there in your in your honey. But people don't like that kind of thing, so I think pasteurizing it kills off any of those potential microbes, are yeast or old or anything. I'm at a hippie once in I

think West Virginia that made his own meat. I think I might have told the story before, but he gave me some meat. Yes, somebody mailed us meat years and years and years ago. It's the only meat I've ever had in my life. I'm not a fan. It was it was fine. Yeah, It's not something I could drink regularly or anything like that. But yeah, if I were in West Virginia wearing nothing but a pair of overalls, I could probably drink a little meat. This is a nice guy, despite the fact that he was a fishman.

I'm getting killed for knocking fish, by the way, Just keep it up though it doesn't matter. Well, you know what's funny is all the people that have written in are trying to talk me into liking fish right there, Like, surely you clearly haven't listened to fish and you don't know what you're talking about. They do it. It's all almost verbatim. It's funny. It's almost like that talking points they shared. But I know fish fans wouldn't share talking points.

It's not the fish way. Uh. Back to the filtering. We're jumping back to the other the U s d A designation which is filtered honey, and that is basically just more filtering. The filters are finer and it's gonna remove almost all those solids that you're gonna see. Uh. And it probably does require some heating because to get through those filters, you gotta have it a little more

viscous or less viscous. Yeah, a little bit um. But if you're ultra filtering, not only do you have to warm it up, you combine it with a lot of water because you're pushing it through not not quite reverse Osmoses membranes, but something not too far off where it is getting everything out of the honey. So much so the U s d A says, this isn't honey. You

can't call it honey honey. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, so there there's another way to basically achieve the same end without blasting it through a um ultra filtered membrane, and that's using diet tomaceous earth and dietms are fossilized microalgae with silica shells and this is the shells left over UM and they are super tiny, but they pick up

even tinier particles. They are attracted to them. They get stuck in the shells, and then you filter out the diatoms, and then you've also filtered out the stuff even further, so you don't have to use quite as fine a filter because the diatoms have sucked up all the stuff that would have passed through that filter. That's catching the diet tooms. Does that make sense, Yeah, and it's pretty amazing.

You might remember toomacious earth from our cockroach episode because that's the stuff that you can spread around that they eat that kills them from the inside out. It also drives fleas out too. If you have a fleat problem, you can spread diet tomacious earth on your carpet in it will help. Yeah, I've I've been through that. Uh. We talked about spun honey already and just want to reiterate that spun honey or creamed honey or whipped honey, it's all the same thing, and it's still doesn't lose

any of those helpful properties. You can also rate honey by a color, of course, Um, you know, honey has a great range of color, and they you know, technically it's called optical density. But would they use the fund color scale? I think it's fund not really like Fister, the fabulous faucet with a funny name. Yeah, but I

always say the Fister just because I think it's funny. Okay, well, then yes, this would definitely be fun And this is a scale from zero, which is water white all the way to one fourteen and above, which is dark amber. Very nice. Uh. And then what's the deal with organic honey?

So organic honey is a different type of classification. Any of the stuff we've talked about, ultrafiltered, pasteurized, raw, microfiltered, creamed, all of that stuff could also be organic honey basically, as long as the organic techniques that the U s d A requires were used to um create the honey, and also on the plants that the bees are harvesting

nectar from. That's right, So that's it. So from what I can tell based on all this information, grade a raw organic honey is probably top of the pops for anybody, top of the pops. And then when it comes to flavors, Uh, this is where we get into sort of the last piece we mentioned monofloral. The other end of the spectrum would be multifloral, and that is just simply what these bees are flowering on, or what they're what kind of

flowers they're dancing with. If they're dancing with one flower and you know, it points out bees or bees, so it may be hard to make sure that's the only thing, but they're very usually they are. If it's labeled monofloral honey, that probably means that they have this farm has planted a very very large area of one thing, so it's really likely that the bee is eating almost all of that. Or you can like the wild flore honey, it's just multiflorals, like, hey,

whatever is in the area, have at it. Uh. There can be different flavors, but it's not exactly like there are notes of things. It's not like if you eat orange blossom honey, it tastes like you scored to orange in it, but there will be like notes of citrus and things like that. I actually saw on a site um of different types of honey that they warn you that if your orange blossom honey smells like orange fragrance, then you've got some sort of fake honey that it's

been counterfeit in some way. It's not like that, like you said, it's notes, but orange blossom honey is citrusy notes. Pumpkin blossom honey has pumpkinny notes. Um. I think sour wood is herbal and woodsy or no, that's um, what is that? Chuck Linden Linden Hunt herbal and woodsy. Eucalyptus honey has like a slight mental note to it. Um buckwheat honey. I don't think I've ever had it, but it's almost like black in color. It's definitely the dark

amber side of the fun scale. Um. But it also has like kind of like a slight bitter note to it too. I want to try it. It sounds almost like tortuous, but I would still try. I'll try basically any honey at least once. Yeah, And they're all kinds of great honey um, sort of like flavored honeys and the honey is still in it, so it's still great for you and delicious, but like bourbon honeys and like uh sort of spicy chili pepper honey and stuff like that,

all sorts of delicious things out there. One of our favorite things to do is go to the our local farm co op and get that local honey. And you know, it costs a little bit more, but like they're doing the right thing and not like Will Ferrell and Lebron James. Did you see that? Did they get into honey? They are. Actually it's a pretty cool thing. They partnered, along with some other celebrities with a company called Flamingo Estate, which

is listed here as an urban farm and lifestyle brand. Okay, sells you know, all kinds of stuff, so urban straw hats, but they serve curated farm boxes. But what they've done is, I think they've gone to some of these celebrities who have large properties and said, hey, how do you like your own honey? We can make we can keep bees on your property and it will be called Will Ferrell honey and it will cost two hundred and fifty dollars a jar, but it goes to charity. Okay, I pulled

it out at the end. There you know where they should go is the magnum's estate. He has big avocado um farms and apparently, yeah, and apparently avocado honey is a thing too. Okay um. Interesting, Before we end this chuck, if you'll indulge me, I just wanted to rattle off the properties that have been found among some of the compounds that you find in honey. If you indulge me,

you're ready, m hm. That these compounds found in honey are shown to possess these properties antibacterial, anti viral, antifungal, antioxidant, anti inflammatory, anti neo plastic, anti microbial, anti carcinogen, anti rhythmic, anti leashman il, uh, anti thrombotic, anti mutesinogenic, mutagenic, anti no susceptive, anti microbacterial, anti proliferative, and immune boosting properties, not to mention that it's hypo cholester emic, cardioprotective, anti hypertensive,

hypato protective, hypoglycemic, and UH neuroprotective, nephroprotective, gastro protective, so on, so forth, and it can improve sperm count and their motility and protects against vaginal and uterine atrophy. Plus it improves the normal estros cycle. Wow, and that amazing. Did you see anti Christ in there? I think so. It's miraculous. But in like the reverse manner, are you got anything else? I have nothing else. I don't either, and that means,

of course everybody's time for listener mail. I'm gonna make this one very short because I just wanted to shout out that we got a I got an email from well, we got one from our old buddy Aaron Myzelle, who helps hut up the stuff you should know five K. I'm glad you. But Aaron, I think, was trying to locate this English professor that taught my Shakespeare class. I don't think she landed on it, but someone else did and said was it Dr Vance? And I was like, oh,

it totally was. As soon as I heard the name, I remembered and uh, I believe Aaron though, or now I feel bad because I can't remember it was Aaron or the other person who wrote in UM was still in touch with Dr Vance got in touch with him and said, hey, Chuck took your classes. You may have even taken some classes from Vans who knows. Do you remember me? No? I didn't Okay, um, you know, I guess I was an English major, so I was always

over there. But r vans Uh send in an email which I haven't responded to, but I'm gonna do that today. It said, Chuck can't tell you how honored I was by remarks on the podcast. I thank you so very much. Always well here, loving retirement, traveling grandchildren. And here's my website in case you want to see what I've been publishing.

And I think everyone should go check it out. It's a mystery, thrillers, literary horror, humorous romance, historical fiction, all kinds of fun stuff and you can find all this at author John Vance dot com. Very nice. That was short, and Chuck appropriately sweet for this episode. Good stuff. That was nice. Man. I got a pat on your head from your old your old English teacher. He was the best man, had a you know, one of the few college professors who really impacted me, like Robin Williams. Yeah,

don't get that joke. You don't know from um oh dead boats. Okay, thank you for saying that, because I was about to say, from oh captain, my captain. It's ultra working title. So if you want to be like Dr vance and let us know how retirements going for you. You can wrap it up in an email spanking on the bottom and send it off to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a

production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.