We all know that honey is delicious. It is perfect for sweetening tea, pouring over Greek yogurt and combining with peanut butter for an easy sandwich. For thousands of years, honey has been used all over the world and in just about every culture.
A toast with honey. That is a perfect way to start your day. Apart from its great taste, honey has lots of health and nutrition benefits. Honey is a great natural source of carbohydrates which provide strength and energy to our bodies. If you are suffering from fatigue, then honey can help you a lot. Honey is known for its effectiveness in instantly boosting the performance, endurance and reduce muscle fatigue of athletes. The glucose in honey is absorbed by the body quickly and gives an immediate energy boost. It is known that honey has also been found to keep levels of blood sugar fairly constant compared to other types of sugar. So, it’s time to include honey in your diet.
Now, scientists have found a substance in honey that is crucial for the health of bees and that may explain the use of the sweet food throughout history as a folk medicine.
Tobias Olofsson and Alejandra Vásquez, researchers at the Department of Medical Microbiology at Lund University in Sweden, have discovered the importance of a bacterial group called the lactic acid bacteria (LAB), so named because they produce lactic acid as their main end product.
LAB contribute to the health of the bee itself and produce the healing effect of honey.
“We made this discovery. Honey actually contains millions of beneficial lactic acid bacteria that none have ever seen before. The bacteria live in symbiosis with the honeybee in their honey stomach. They are used by the honeybee to protect the nectar that becomes honey. They are also used to protect themselves and their larvae from diseases. It’s a big part of the immune system of the honeybee,” Olofsson says.
Wild fresh honey has been used by many different cultures for thousands of years for its health benefits and as a therapeutic agent. It is used as a cure for sore throats and wounds healing, for example.
Olofsson believes it could be used as a natural antibiotic alternative, not only for bees but also for humans.
Since the 1970s, scientists have found that honeybee communities have declined worldwide. They call this phenomenon “colony collapse disorder.”
In recent years they have observed a drastic increase around the world, and scientists offer different reasons. Olofsson believes that beekeepers are responsible for the situation.
“Commercial beekeepers give the bees synthetic food all the time, and antibiotics three or four times a year. We have come to a place where we can’t treat them any worse,” he said.
The mature honey that is sold in stores, with less than 20 percent water content, does not contain the viable, beneficial bacteria found inside the honey crop, a special part of the insect’s body used for honey production, Vásquez and Olofsson write in an article published in Microbiology Today.
Today, the only way to obtain honey with healthy LAB is by collecting honey in the wild, which can be dangerous, or by getting fresh honey directly from beekeepers.
What a spoon ful of noney can do for you
