"Honey is cool, cooked and warm, not cold and not dry, which can neutralize qi activity, and the diseases of twelve zang-fu organs cannot be neglected." Li Shizhen once recorded the benefits of honey in Compendium of Materia Medica.
It shows that honey can tonify the middle energizer and benefit qi, and has an auxiliary effect on many diseases.
In modern times, the efficacy of honey has been magnified a lot-
Relaxation, nourishing beauty, health care ... a small jar of honey seems to be a necessity for home travel.
The so-called "holy products for health" have been on fire for more than 50 years.
Just, is it really as "omnipotent" as the legend says?
1
You may eat "fake honey" every day
Health care products emerge in an endless stream, and the most daily and favorite product for the elderly may be honey.
This is a popular health "holy product" in mom's generation.
Beauty beauty, the miraculous effect of relieving alcoholism and treating constipation ... has given birth to various varieties.
Without special effects, you can buy a big bottle for very little money.
All this honey, is it true?
Not to mention, this problem just pokes the pain point of the honey industry.
CCTV news reported that some acacia honey on the market now, in order to save costs, added a lot of cheaper honey.
This kind of fraud, at least with honey.
According to Nanfang Daily, many manufacturers add corn syrup and rice syrup to honey for blending.
This synthetic product can not only cheat the national standard, but also meet the conditions of exporting to European standards.
People think they are drinking honey, but in fact they are probably just drinking syrup.
The fake honey production dens exposed by CCTV have a dirty environment and various means of production are placed at will.
The honey making process admitted by the suspect is even colder.
This kind of honey, under their bluff, can also be sold to 20 yuan for a catty.
According to People's Daily, the reporter found in the honey counters of many supermarkets that honey is varied, and most of them are advertised as "keeping healthy", "natural" and "wild".
Many people are deceived by such advertisements, and even supermarket shopping guides are only introduced from the perspective of origin, flower species and pure nature.
The contents of fructose and glucose are mostly vague.
2
Real honey won't work miracles.
A conclusion that subverts many people's cognition is that honey is really not as powerful as people think.
Just like many advertising slogans that affect our consumption behavior, the efficacy of honey is more about the hype and marketing of merchants.
Honey, there is nothing miraculous.
1, honey has no laxative function with high medicinal value.
The most well-known effect of honey should be to treat constipation, and many people who have tried it personally say it is very useful.
However, in fact, it is not honey that has the effect of treating constipation, but someone's body is intolerant of fructose.
Honey contains a lot of fructose, which is absorbed slowly. Eating a lot of fructose will first lead to an increase in intestinal osmotic pressure, allowing water to run to the intestine, thus wetting feces.
Secondly, fructose that is not fully absorbed will be converted into organic acids under the action of Escherichia coli, which will accelerate intestinal peristalsis.
So-called-laxatives.
However, the credit for this laxative is not honey. Any food with high fructose can relieve constipation in theory. If you are fructose intolerant, the effect will be better.
2, honey can't hangover
Scientists have long found that fructose can accelerate alcohol metabolism, and drinking honey may make alcohol metabolism faster in the body.
However, more studies have found that fructose has no effect on acute alcoholism. What is even more frightening is that the increase of uric acid and lactic acid caused by fructose with abnormal metabolism is harmful to human body.
At the same time, according to the earliest research standard of fructose accelerating alcohol metabolism, the amount of fructose that meets the hangover standard far exceeds our daily normal intake.
Honey can't prevent dental caries.
The main ingredient of honey is actually sugar.
Sugar accounts for about 60%~80% of honey, in which glucose and fructose are relatively high (accounting for 85%~95% of total sugar), and the sucrose content does not exceed 5%.
Honey that is not blown well in the market can prevent dental caries, based on the fact that some scientists have found that honey has certain antibacterial properties.
In fact, Professor Moran's research, which is often quoted in domestic propaganda, only says that honey has many discoveries in antibacterial activity, and does not directly tell us that honey can prevent dental caries.
The so-called honey prevention of dental caries is more of a marketing strategy of merchants.
In fact, more rigorous animal experiments have found that honey is caries-causing.
William studied the cariogenicity of mice by feeding them honey (10% dilution), cola, milk and human milk. The picture on the left below shows the result of feeding honey.
4. Earth honey is not necessarily safe.
Many businesses regard "nature" as one of their marketing strategies, but consumers should understand that nature does not mean safety.
People's imagination of nature comes from nature, and there is no artificial pollution. However, with the intensification of environmental pollution and pesticide use, honey collected by bees has actually been polluted from the beginning.
Moreover, some small factories that promote nature do not have strict health regulations in the subsequent processing and transportation of honey by big factories, which indirectly leads to a greater probability of honey being contaminated by bacteria.
Safety should be more important than nature.
Some people are not fit to eat honey.
Yes, honey is not suitable for everyone.
First, babies under one year old are not suitable for eating honey.
Children's intestinal flora is not as complete as that of adults, and honey may be contaminated by bacteria during transportation. Adults will have no problem drinking it, but for Xiaobaobao, it may lead to diarrhea or even more serious consequences.
Second, people with diabetes are not suitable for eating honey.
Diabetic patients need to strictly control blood sugar, and as mentioned above, honey mainly contains sugar, which has obvious hypoglycemic effect and is not suitable for diabetic patients.
three
How to distinguish fake honey
The harm of fake honey cannot be ignored.
To understand the harm of fake honey, we must first understand how fake honey is produced.
According to the main components of honey by Yue et al. and its identification technology, the common adulteration methods of honey are as follows.
Among them, adding syrup is the most common method of counterfeiting.
The national standard GB 18796-2005 for honey was once formulated, and the existence of corn syrup was detected by detecting C4 plant sugar.
However, the way of adding C _ 3 syrup to honey, such as rice slurry, began to rise, and the honey added with rice slurry made the existing standard detection methods at home and abroad powerless.
Although there is a third-party detection method such as SM-R to detect rice syrup, it has not been included in the national standard for the time being, and the third-party detection will lead to higher costs, which makes many enterprises have no incentive to do so many tests.
Honey is divided into single nectar and mixed nectar. The former refers to honey brewed by bees from a single nectar, while the mixed nectar refers to honey brewed by bees from different plants at the same time.
In the market, the price of single nectar is higher than that of mixed nectar, and some merchants will add mixed nectar or even pretend to be single nectar.
There are endless ways to help consumers identify true and false honey in the market, but with the more advanced counterfeiting technology, there will be fewer and fewer fake honey visible to the naked eye.
So as a consumer, what are the ways to distinguish honey?
Sometimes, if consumers pay more attention, they can actually avoid buying some fakes. For example, whether the flower source is polluted or not and whether the flower seeds are of high quality are all identification methods.
And from the name honey, sometimes you can see something fishy.
Some nectar, for bees, is impossible to collect. Bees generally collect pollen nectar from plant nectar, but the stamens and pistils of roses have degenerated and there are no nectaries.
Honeysuckle, however, has a slender corolla and a short bee kiss, which is also difficult to collect.
At the same time, bees can't collect honey in the high altitude area where Saussurea involucrata lives, and the honey resources such as "motherwort honey" which is very popular in the market are very limited.
Consumers often pay more attention to the price when buying honey, but the quality is the most important.
Take mature honey and immature honey, the cost of immature honey is less than half of that of mature honey, and the cost of fake honey is even lower.
Further thinking, it is necessary to ensure that the flower source is not polluted, the filling and transportation process is hygienic, and no sugar is added for counterfeiting. In addition, the time cost of bees brewing mature honey can also be passed through these various costs. Can honey brewed according to these requirements really be cheap?
Yang Jianjun, president of Nanning Honey Association, said that many honey production and processing enterprises do not have their own beekeeping bases, so the source of honey cannot be guaranteed.
It is suggested that the manufacturer and the seller should be the same company to avoid buying branded products.
In daily shopping, you can also choose honey by watching, shaking, smelling and pulling.
The color of high-quality honey is generally white, light yellow to platinum amber. There won't be a lot of bubbles on the surface after shaking, and there won't be too much smell after opening the bottle. Chopsticks can be used to draw filaments, which are not easy to break.
In fact, in the army of buying honey, many of them are elderly grandparents, who want the effect of health preservation and low and suitable prices, which also provides sufficient motivation for the army of fake goods.
If it is only for efficacy, then whether you buy honey or other health care products, you should ask a few more questions about why it is rational consumption.
References:
Yue, Xu Yuxin, Fan Jiahui, et al. Main components of honey and its identification technology [J]. Journal of Food Safety and Quality Inspection, 20 18( 19).
[2] Molan P.C. The potential of honey to promote oral health. [J]。 General dent, 200 1, 49(6):584-589.
[3] blog post,? Comparison of cariogenic effects of cola, honey, milk, human milk and sucrose [J]. Pediatrics, 2005,116 (4): 921-926.
[4] carpenter t.m. Li Ruichun. Effect of fructose on human ethanol metabolism [J]. Journal of Pharmacology and Medicine. Experimental therapeutics,1937,60 (3): 264-285.
[5] Levi r? Elo T？ Hu Xiaoming. Intravenous fructose for acute alcoholism [J]. Archives of Internal Medicine, 1977,137 (9):1175-177.
[6], Su Qing, Wang, et al. Food safety problems and countermeasures of bee products in China [J]. Bee Journal, 2013,33 (2):15-16.
Wei Ying. Discussion on National Standard of Honey [J]. Food and Fermentation Industry, 2015,41(10): 235-239.
Gao Ying, Chen Lei, considerate. "SM-R": there is no place to hide rice slurry in honey [J] Bee Magazine, 2012,32 (8): 45-46.
[9] China honey net, eat honey must eat naturally mature honey, 20 18.
[10] Zhao Can I buy special honey? [J]。 Bee Magazine, 20 13(4):46-46.
[1 1] Common methods and identification methods of honey adulteration come from: Yue, Xu Yuxin, Fan Jiahui, etc. The main components of honey and its identification technology [J]. Journal of Food Safety and Quality Inspection, 20 18( 19).