how much honey is too much honey?

i effing love honey.. i'm definitely a honey snob though, but that's rather here nor there..

my parents have bees on their land (not their bees but the people who own the bees give them loads of free honey each year) and i have them send me that honey from montana to california whenever i run out.. lol like i said, total snob. but it's SOOOO good and so much better than store bought honey I can find anyyyywhere, even the super fancy raw organic local stuff in my grocery store..

so back to my original question.

i drink a lot of tea (3-4, sometimes 5 big cups a day (not all caffeinated, but all honeyified)) and I usually do about a teaspoon-ish in each cup.. maybe sometimes a bit more. and i'm wondering if this is a little bit much. i don't really have any health problems (a bit of acne, ew, i know, sorry) but other than that, i'm basically a super human. so i just wanted to double check with you smarty pants i guess and make sure my current honey consumption is alright..

maybe there are some nutritionists on here that could answer?

thanks!

Consume away!!


http://www.self.com/flash/nutritionnews/2011/09/7-surprising-things-you-didnt/

Cassie,
It sounds like honey is good for you.
It's the portion control that might get us older folks in trouble. "I wonder if those teaspoons of honey are supposed to be level?" Lol
I totally understand the snobbery, I grew up in Iowa consuming Sue Bee honey. I tried horehound honey in AZ... Yuck! http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/s/ref=is_s?k=sue+bee+honey

I think honey needs to be considered in the context of how much other concentrated sweeteners are in the diet. If you don't eat sugar or lots of dried fruit etc then 5 tsps honey a day doens't sound that much. But if you are eating lots of other sweet thing, then maybe.

I also look at honey from a permie perspective. To what extent is it a seasonal food? Can the bees locally produce enough honey for the amount we are eating? What if they weren't being fed sugar? A bee person once told me that humans are damaging bees as a species by expecting to have honey all the time on demand as much as we want. They're not really designed to do that. How much honey production is factory farming? These questions affect my food choices about honey too. On the other hand, it's a beautiful food and a good way to bring sweet into the diet in a local food way (compared sugar or maple syrup which doesn't grow here).

Rose Pinder wrote:I think honey needs to be considered in the context of how much other concentrated sweeteners are in the diet. If you don't eat sugar or lots of dried fruit etc then 5 tsps honey a day doens't sound that much. But if you are eating lots of other sweet thing, then maybe.

I also look at honey from a permie perspective. To what extent is it a seasonal food? Can the bees locally produce enough honey for the amount we are eating? What if they weren't being fed sugar? A bee person once told me that humans are damaging bees as a species by expecting to have honey all the time on demand as much as we want. They're not really designed to do that. How much honey production is factory farming? These questions affect my food choices about honey too. On the other hand, it's a beautiful food and a good way to bring sweet into the diet in a local food way (compared sugar or maple syrup which doesn't grow here).

Honey stores indefinitely, so while there are good and bad times to harvest, the glut that you collect can be eaten year round. For a beekeeper, especially one with multiple hives, there is no reason not to have honey to consume in the home year round.

A bee person once told me that humans are damaging bees as a species by expecting to have honey all the time on demand as much as we want

That is a gross simplification of a rather complex dynamic between bees and beekeepers. Most of the "problems" bees face are due to western commercial beekeeping. In parts of the world where beekeepers do not have access to, or funds for, western medications and methods for maintaining their bees problems like varroa have pretty much passed already. Medicating bees has, over a few decades, weakened the gene pool of the bees and bred for strong and more virulent varroa mites. There are ways to keep bees that let bees evolve in harmony with their pest species.

Rose Pinder wrote:I think honey needs to be considered in the context of how much other concentrated sweeteners are in the diet. If you don't eat sugar or lots of dried fruit etc then 5 tsps honey a day doens't sound that much. But if you are eating lots of other sweet thing, then maybe.

Especially if there might be concerns about diabetes. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19817641

I think that it depends on your body. Conventional thinking (active, fit people are virtuous, while obese people are lazy with no will power) is putting the cart before the horse IMHO.

Do you have tons of energy? Then your body is telling you that you have excess calories and need to burn them. Eating a decent amount of honey should be fine.

On the other hand, if you feel run down all the time, then honey is really problematic. Your body believes (true or not) that you are at a caloric deficit and that it needs to conserve energy.

Well my sugar intake besides honey is rather low. i don't eat much fruit (bad cas) and am not a huge fan of sweets in general so i'm probably good on that front.

thanks for all of your feedback folks. i will continue to enjoy my honeyed out tea in peace.

mankind has only identified a small fraction of the beneficial properties of honey. only thing I might add is that over 118 degrees wet some of those properties (enzymes) are ruined/reduced. If I add honey to a hot beverage I try to let it get down to drinking temp before adding the honey for best results. our family goes through loads of honey!

John Master wrote: only thing I might add is that over 118 degrees wet some of those properties (enzymes) are ruined/reduced. If I add honey to a hot beverage I try to let it get down to drinking temp before adding the honey for best results. our family goes through loads of honey!

oh wow! never knew that! thanks for the tip! on my second cup of lemon ginger green tea w/ honey today!

I assume that honey contains a sampling of the agricultural poisons used in the production region. My friend John has many hives that are taken to deep forest locations in northern British Columbia. There's virtually no agriculture there, and it's not economic to spray the forest for bugs. About the cleanest environment that can support bees. I would never consume honey from California, the corn belt, China, or most of the U.S. outside of the PNW.

Dale, this puts me in mind of a post I made about risk tradeoffs in another thread. You, having access to some pretty fine deep-forest honey, don't need to consider whether the unknown risks from ag chemicals might outweigh the known-but-nebulous benefits of eating honey. Somebody who is choosing between Sue-Bee supermarket honey from China or nothing, they don't have that luxury, they have to make the call. Eat it or not, there's risk on both sides of the equation.

And of course we don't have good data on either side of the dilemma. You never know what's in the untested honey on your table. Even if you did know, you wouldn't have firm information on the resulting medical risks. Likewise the putative benefits from eating honey are somewhat nebulous and difficult to translate into reliable predictions about health outcomes for a particular consumer.

And still we all have to choose. There's no option not to play the game.

I don't know anywhere that a person cant find actual honey if they want to, the generic stuff in the store from what I know is about half corn syrup, pasteurized, and ultrafiltered to conceal it's origin. Whether that's true or not that's the assumption I make from what I have studied. either way, I stopped buying honey from the store and instead found a beekeeper.

Interesting question. From what I've read, sugar is sugar, whether in the form of raw, forest raised, pristine bee honeycomb, or grocery store shelf white sugar, it makes no difference. Now the ADDED benefits of both are probably vastly different.

Sugar does not so great things to your teeth and your body. And unless you are very active, consuming straight sugar on a regular basis may not be super great for you.

Our ancestors rarely had access to honey. It was a big
treat in Paleolithic time so they didn't consume too much. They also had to battle the bees for it without the gear modern bee keepers have.

With that being said, honey is my biggest weakness and I probably have at least a tablespoon a day. But I am working on weaning myself off of it and trying to only consume in summer months when I am more active.

The main concern I have about sweets is not total sugars but spikes in blood sugar. Lots of fat, fiber and protein will protect you, oh smiley one.

For the acne, raw honey can be directly applied!