Your body digests and absorbs naturally occurring sugars, including those found in fruit, milk and honey, the same way it metabolizes refined sugars, such as brown sugar, evaporated cane juice and high fructose corn syrup. All sugars are carbohydrates and provide calories for readily available energy, but no additional nutrition. Honey, which is up to 1.5 times sweeter than sucrose, contains several types of sugar as well as trace amounts of minerals, proteins and acids. Sucrose, or table sugar, is the resulting disaccharide from the joining of two simple sugars, fructose and glucose.
Composition of Honey
The three main components of honey are fructose, glucose and water. Fructose and glucose are monosaccharides, or simple sugars. Honey also contains multiple disaccharides, or two simple sugar molecules linked together. Maltose, isomaltose, kojibiose, and sucrose are some of the disaccharides found in honey. Collectively, these sugars constitute less than 10 percent of honey’s makeup, with sucrose accounting for just over 1 percent of honey’s total composition. Honey also contains small amounts of oligosaccharides, or “higher sugars,” including erlose and panose, in addition to trace amounts of organic acids, minerals and proteins.
Properties of Sucrose
All plants manufacture sucrose as an end-product of photosynthesis. In its pure form, sucrose, otherwise known as table sugar, is an odorless crystalline chemical compound with a distinctive, sweet flavor. It’s composed of two simple sugar units, fructose and glucose, joined together. Sugarcane plants produce sucrose in huge quantities, which is extracted from the plant in crystalline form. Granulated sugar, confectioner’s sugar, brown sugar, turbinado sugar, molasses and evaporated cane juice are some of the various forms of refined sucrose. Products derived from sucrose are reliably consistent. One bowl of table sugar isn't discernible from the next, mostly because sucrose is a simple plant product made of a single chemical compound.
Sweetness of Honey
Honey bees biochemically process plant nectar to make honey, which is the primary source of food energy for all hive bees. It’s remarkably energy dense — 1 lb. of honey contains 1,545 calories. The plant nectar collected by the forager bees is mostly water with a small amount of sucrose. Hive bees regurgitate the nectar many times over to reduce its water content. During this regurgitation process, a salivary enzyme called invertase breaks the sucrose down into its simple sugar components, fructose and glucose. Although sucrose is slightly sweeter than glucose, fructose is 70 percent sweeter than sucrose. Because most honey contains a higher ratio of fructose to glucose, it’s noticeably sweeter than any form of sucrose.
Considerations
One teaspoon of honey contains 22 calories and 4.5 g of carbohydrate, and weighs slightly more than a teaspoon of table sugar, which contains 16 calories and 4 g of carbohydrate. Sucrose is generally considered a better flavor enhancer than honey, according to the book “Honey, I’m Homemade,” because it interacts more effectively with the tongue’s sugar receptors. However, honey comes in a variety of colors, flavors and textures and can be used in place of sugar in many recipes. Since honey is sweeter than sugar, use ¾ cup of honey for every cup of sugar in the recipe. Because you're replacing a dry ingredient with a liquid, you must reduce other liquids in the recipe by ¼ cup per cup of honey.
References
- “The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods”; Michael Murray, N.D., et al.; 2005
- “Honey, I’m Homemade”; May Baum, Editor; 2010
- “American Dietetic Association Complete Food and Nutrition Guide”; Roberta Larson Duyff; 2006
- National Honey Board: Honey: A Reference Guide to Nature’s Sweetener
- National Honey Board: Carbohydrates and the Sweetness of Honey
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