Honey May Combat Effects of Aging

Honey Study Gets Sweet Results
South Florida Sun-Sentinel (USA), 10/14/2007

Perhaps Winnie the Pooh knows something we don't. Honey could soon be marketed as a way to combat the effects of aging.

Lynne Chepulis and Nicola Starkey of the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand, raised rats on diets containing 10 percent honey, 8 percent sucrose or no sugar at all for 12 months. The rats were 2 months old at the start of the trial, and were assessed every three months using tests designed to measure anxiety and spatial memory.

Honey-fed rats spent almost twice as much time in the open sections of an assessment maze than sucrose-fed rats, suggesting they were less anxious. They were also were more likely to enter novel sections of a Y-shaped maze, suggesting they knew where they had been previously and had better spatial memory…