Is Honey better for you than Sugar?

It’s funny, now that I’m a mom, I find myself reaching for the honey jar constantly when I'm making food for my family. I guess it’s just in my bones. Growing up, honey was just… always there. I have these hazy memories of long family road trips, stopping at little farm stands on the side of the road and always, always coming home with a jar of local honey.

My mom had this crazy concoction she’d make. She’d slice up raw onions and garlic—yeah, you heard me—and just drown them in honey in a cup. She’d let it sit on the counter for a day or even longer, then pour it into a little bottle. Whenever we got a cold or a cough, out it came. I can still feel myself holding my nose so I wouldn't have to smell it before she gave me a spoonful. It sounds absolutely disgusting, I know, but the crazy thing is, it worked. Every time.

They never really talked about why honey was good for you, my parents. It was just an unspoken truth in our house. My mom would make this warm Colombian oat drink, 'Avena', for breakfast, with milk and cinnamon and cloves, and there was always a big swirl of honey in it. It was in our tea, our coffee, everything. It was just our sweetener.

So lately, I’ve been trying to figure it all out for myself. Like, what’s the actual difference between honey and plain old sugar? They’re both basically sugar and water, right? Both have fructose and glucose. But it turns out honey has all this other stuff going on inside it, just in tiny amounts.

This is the little list I try to keep in my head:

• Enzymes

• Amino Acids

• Vitamins C, B1, B2, B3, B5, and B6

• Minerals like potassium, calcium, and zinc

• Antioxidants

And those antioxidants are apparently something called flavonoids. I read somewhere that they have anti-inflammatory properties, which is something you’re just not going to get from a spoonful of white sugar.

They’re both carbs, and they both have calories, obviously. But the part that really got me was how our bodies handle them differently. I mean, this is where it gets interesting. Table sugar is made of these two parts, glucose and fructose, that are sort of locked together. Your stomach can't really do anything with it. It has to travel all the way to your small intestine before your body can even start to break it down. It’s a whole process.

But honey… honey is different. Because the bees add their own enzymes to the nectar, they basically unlock the fructose and glucose for us. They’re already separated. So our bodies can just absorb them directly. It’s so much easier on our system. I guess that’s why I’ve heard honey has a lower GI, or Glycemic Index, which I think just means it doesn’t spike your blood sugar as fast.

So yeah, if you look at the label, honey has a few more calories and grams of sugar. I used to think that meant it was six of one, half a dozen of the other. But when you think about all those other little things it has—the vitamins, the antibacterial stuff—it just feels different. It feels more like a real food, you know?

I don’t know. Maybe I’m overthinking it. But when I’m stirring a little honey into my kid’s oatmeal in the morning, I think about my mom and her weird onion potion. She probably didn't know about GI values or flavonoids, but she knew it was better. Sometimes you just know.