Why Sugar Sickens and Honey Heals
I believe white sugar is just as habit forming as narcotic drugs - and just as bad for you. This sweet saboteur is systematically destroying our health and depressing our appetite for healthy food - but it is not alone. Sugar is getting plenty of help from the processed food industry. Sugar used to be available to our ancestors only as fruit or honey, and only for a few months of the year. Today, these sugars are available in hundreds of foods, many of which you would not normally think as sugary.
Commercial or white sugar is made from sugar cane, beets, corn, etc. it's absolutely void of nutritional value. During the refining of white sugar anything worth consuming is stripped away or destroyed, including enzymes and vitamins, organic acids, protein, nitrogen elements and healthy fats. Worse, added during the process are hydrochloric, phosphoric and sulphuric acids, lime and other foreign substance. And the newly renamed infamous high fructose corn syrup - now called "fructose" - is likely to contain mercury. This was discovered in a study by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. They tested 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products that listed high fructose corn syrup as the first or second ingredient and found a third of them had Mercury from corn syrup.
Knowledge of sugar's adverse effects on our health is nothing new. Dr. Frederick Grant Banting, Nobel laureate and discoverer if insulin, wrote in 1929 in regard to the cause of diabetes: " In the United States the incidence of diabetes has increased proportionally with the per capita consumption of white sugar. One cannot help but conclude that in the heating and recrystallization of the natural sugar cane something is altered which leaves the refined product a dangerous foodstuff." Dr. Banting would probably roll over in his grave if he knew how prevalent diabetes is in the U.S. today. Mountains of peer-reviewed literature has demonstrated that sugar:
Weakens your immune system; worsens mental functions and behavior; accelerates aging of skin and connective tissue; leads to or accelerates most cancers; contributes to obesity; can cause arthritis; contributes to lung and allergy problems; increases systolic blood pressure; promotes atherosclerosis; can cause headaches, including migraines; perpetuates irritable bowel syndrome; etc.
Honey is also sugar. So is it really that much better for you? A thousand times yes! Honey is the original sugar, and the original healer. It's been used by the oldest system of medicine on earth, Ayurveda from India, for more than 5,000 years. One of the reasons honey is so much better is because it's a more complex sugar. It also contains trace elements minerals and vitamins. Because raw honey is not processed, these ingredients actually are of nutritional benefit. And the health benefits of honey are mounting. Raw honey applied topically to the skin causes healing and is now used to treat wounds, inflammation, swelling, burns and skin ulcers in many hospitals. In fact, in many cases raw honey has been shown to be superior in treating infected lesions that were not responding to standard antibiotic/ antiseptic therapy.
So do yourself a favor. Keep some honey on hand to satisfy your sweet tooth. Manuka honey for example has high levels of methylglyoxal, the antimicrobial that protects against infections and colds. But any of the darker raw honeys are good. Darker honey has more antioxidants than light-colored honey. One good tip for buying pure, unadulterated honey that you will not get from honey manufactures is to look at the HMF level. Honey with too much HMF can mean it is adulterated with inverted sugars - i.e. White sugar or fructose. These processed sugars are heated with acid, and industry calls them "inverted sugars." The heating creates HMF. (Are you paying attention)? Foods with with added sugar of high fructose corn syrup can have levels of HMF up to 1,000 mg/kg. Look for a dark raw honey with less than 100 mg.kg of HMF.
