Honey Helps Weight Loss, Immune Response, Memory

Available at Your Pharmacy Now: Honey
By Julia Griffin, Miller-McCune, 4/3/2009

It's increasingly known that honey can act as a salve on the outside of the body, but tests performed on rats show honey's traditional healing properties really do work from the inside, too — aiding weight loss, immune response and even memory.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that two-thirds of Americans over the age of 20 are overweight. An Antipodean academic sees the shift toward diets high in sugar and fat, but low in actual nutrition, as a key factor in these rising rates.

Lynne Chepulis, who recently earned a Ph.D. from the University of Waikato in New Zealand (home of the highly regarded, and tasty, manuka honey), has spent the last 15 years researching the potential health benefits of honey — a natural associated with increased risks of Type II sweetener high in vitamins, minerals and antioxidants with a low glycemic index. And she's just published a book on her findings, Healing Honey.

Foods with a high glycemic index contain carbohydrates that are easily broken down and absorbed more quickly into the blood stream than foods with a low GI. Diets containing large amounts of high GI foods are diabetes, cardiovascular disease and hyperglycemia. Because GI carbohydrates in the American diet primarily come from sugars, refined starches and grains, high GI diets also place individuals at risk for obesity.

Chepulis believes switching the "sweetness" of diets from sugar (high GI) to honey (low GI) may improve overall health, and her extensive research of rat diets has unveiled multiple benefits of honey previously unknown to science.

On multiple occasions, Chepulis found that rats fed honey-based diets had lower body weights and 10 percent less body fat than rats fed sugar diets — an effect observed in both juvenile rats given the diets for six weeks and adult rats fed the diets for a full year. The weights of honey-fed rats were similar to but still slightly less than the weight of rats given a sugar-free diet...

Chepulis also found that rats fed a honey-based diet had 15 to 20 percent higher HDL ("good") cholesterol. More research is needed to determine what factors are responsible because neither the observed weight loss nor the low GI value of honey can fully explain this effect…

In a 2007 study, Chepulis found a 12-month honey diet induces a significant boost to an adult rat's immune system in two similar but distinct ways…

An experiment on honey's impact on behavior found that honey-fed rats had better spatial memory and lower anxiety than rats fed either a sugar-based or sugar-free diet…

Chepulis said future studies are needed to determine the optimal fructose, antioxidant and enzyme content of honey, which varies depending on region and pollen type, and how food processing affects the health benefits of the sweet substance.

While her research has only dealt with rodents, Chepulis believes her results indicate that switching human diets from sugar to honey could have numerous health and cognitive benefits — especially since the rats in her experiments were all fed diets proportional in caloric and nutritional content to those of people…