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The color of honey: a sweetener that bee-devils food spoilage

Science News, Sept 12, 1998 by Janet Raloff

Honey comes in varying shades--from almost colories to darker than molasses--reflecting the particular nectars that bees harvested to make this natural sweetener.

Many people--including a number of nutritionistsm--"dismiss honey as nothing more than sugar water," says May R. Berenbaum. "Biologically, however, that makes no sense."

A concentrated form of nectar, honey is the principal source of nutrition for adult bees, observes Berenbaum, an entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mixed with pollen, it also serves as the dietary staple of bee larvae. Indeed, honey supplies the insects with a wealth of vitamins, minerals, and other plant-derived nutrients.

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Chemical analyses by Berenbaum's team now show that some honeys also possess surprising quantities of antioxidants--non-nutritive agents that can retard biologically destructive chemical reactions that cause rancidity in foods and that have been linked to many chronic diseases. When honey is cooked, it appears to acquire additional, functionally important antioxidants, according to related studies now under way at Clemson (S.C.) University.

These new data suggest that substituting honey for refined sugar in foods might provide health and storage benefits. Honey also offers a natural source of antioxidants to manufacturers of skincare products such as sunscreens.

All of this sounds mighty sweet to the United States' beleaguered beekeepers. As their hives have succumbed to blights, the cost of honey production has skyrocketed (SN: 8/8/98, p. 84). At the same time, foreign honey has flooded the U.S. market, keeping the commodity's wholesale price relatively low.

If findings from the antioxidant studies are confirmed, U.S. producers may see substantially greater demand--and prices--for their honey, especially the darker varieties that have often been considered second-rate.

The low status of one honey provided a major impetus for the Urbana studies.

The state of Illinois issues grants for research into ways of increasing the value of existing crops and commodities. "Soybean honey, which is what a lot of Illinois beekeepers produce, is not highly prized," Berenbaum notes. It tends to be darker than honeys from bees foraging on clover or orange blossoms, and it lacks their fruity taste. "It has no cachet," she adds, which may explain why this sweetener is usually labeled as deriving from wildflowers, which the bees also visit.

Although honey has been used as a folk remedy for burns, cataracts, ulcers, and wounds--all conditions in which oxidation can play a role--no one had systematically surveyed different honeys to determine whether the antioxidant capacity varies with the nectar source, the Illinois team observes, or even whether antioxidant concentrations in honey are sufficiently high to be of biological significance.

So Berenbaum's group assayed 19 honeys from bees in widely varying geographic locations: Hawaii, Florida, Arizona, Illinois, California, and Washington State. The syrupy sweeteners represented 14 different primary floral nectars--from fireweed and mesquite to star thistle and sunflowers.

The activity of all water-soluble antioxidants in each honey was compared to that of ascorbic acid, or vitamin C--the gold standard. Because one molecule of ascorbic acid can neutralize two molecules of an oxidant, a micromole of vitamin C is defined as having a potency of 2 microequivalents ([micro]eq).

In the summer JOURNAL OF APICULTURAL RESEARCH, Berenbaum and her Illinois colleagues Steven M. Frankel and Gene E. Robinson report finding a clear trend. Although honeys vary widely in the quantity of water-soluble antioxidants they contain, the scientists found that the darker a honey's color, the higher its antioxidant activity.

A milliliter of Illinois buckwheat honey, by far the darkest tested, contained 4.32 x [10.sup.-3] [micro]eq, which is 20 times the antioxidant activity in the same quantity of California sage honey, one of the lightest-colored samples. Sunflower, christmasberry, and water-tupelo honeys, also at the dark end of the color range, were the next richest sources of antioxidants, although their antioxidant content was only 25 to 40 percent as high. Soybean and clover honeys, which fall in the middle of the color range, had only 10 to 12 percent of buckwheat's antioxidant potential.

A few honeys buck the trend, however. Though fairly light, sweet-clover honey is antioxidant-rich, while a darkly golden mesquite version possesses relatively little antioxidant activity. Overall, however, the analysis concludes that color predicts more than B0 percent of the variation in a honey's antioxidant capacity.

While the Illinois scientists did not identify the antioxidants in any given honey, previous studies have shown that nectar tends to contain large quantities of flavonoids--plant pigments and flavoring compounds with antioxidant properties. "My guess is that these flavonoids are not only contributing to the honey's antioxidant activity but are probably the principle contributors," Berenbaum told SCIENCE NEWS.

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The color of honey: a sweetener that bee-devils food spoilage

Science News, Sept 12, 1998 by Janet Raloff

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