Antioxidant-Rich Honey a Healthy Alternative to Chemical Additives

Honey Adds Health Benefits, is Natural Preservative and Sweetener in Salad Dressings
Eureka Alert, 12/9/2008

Antioxidant-rich honey is a healthy alternative to chemical additives and refined sweeteners in commercial salad dressings, said a new University of Illinois study.

"To capitalize on the positive health effects of honey, we experimented with using honey in salad dressings," said Nicki Engeseth, a U of I associate professor of food chemistry. "We found that the antioxidants in honey protected the quality of the salad dressings for up to nine months while sweetening them naturally."

Engeseth's study substituted honey for EDTA, an additive used to keep the oils in salad dressings from oxidizing, and high-fructose corn syrup, used by many commercial salad-dressing producers to sweeten their salad dressing recipes.

"We chose clover and blueberry honeys for the study after an analysis of the sweetening potential, antioxidant activity, and phenolic profiles of 19 honeys with varying characteristics," said the scientist…

The article was published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Co-authors are Carolyn Rasmussen of Kraft Foods, Sophia Leung of Newlywed Foods, Lia M. Andrae-Nightingale, a former U of I graduate student, and Xiao-Hong Wang and Shelly J. Schmidt of the University of Illinois.