Honey: Nature's Wonder Sugar

Honey is an amazing thing. Just ask any bee. They make a ton of it. So much that humans get what bees can't use and that's a lot of honey.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
there's Chuck. Jerry's here barely and this is stuff you
should know. Well, we should explain what that means. It's

(00:21):
very ambiguous and strange sound. Jerry had a poor internet connection.
It was a few minutes later. That's it. She's barely here. Yeah,
mystery solved. Feel it feels tenuous too, that she's just
barely hanging on by her fingernails. Well, no, I think
I don't know. That internet connection just sounded dodgy, That's
what I'm saying. She came in like Houston, We're have

(00:44):
a problem. You know that internet connection sound all right?
Sounds like Apola thirteen. I'm pretty excited about this one.
Me too. I even ate some honey for lunch today.
I had a little dab at breck at brett Key, okay,
which I don't usually eat, but I ate another toast
with a a spun honey spread. Good for you man.

(01:07):
So spun honey? Are you talking about the creamed honey?
Is that what I'm hearing now? Yeah? Creamed spun or
I think there's one more word for it. But we
always called it spun honey growing up, and boy is
it good. And guess what it is just as helpful,
has just as many helpful properties as regular honey doesn't.

(01:28):
Spinning it or the process of getting into that state
doesn't change it at all. Yeah, it's like honey in
a different format. Like if you had a really great song,
like um uh play that funky music white Boy, and
you had it on eight track, but you also had
it on record. It's the same song. It's just in
two different formats, right, yeah, same thing. Yeah, I like that.

(01:49):
I really dislike that song though I really do too, actually, um,
although I have a great memory of it. Um, I
guess sometimes around Piedmont Park it must have been St.
Patrick's say this, Like car full of dudes came up.
They were wearing like green wigs and everything. They were
ready to throw down for St. Patrick's Day, and they
were blaring that song and like everybody in the car

(02:12):
was singing it, having like the best time, and then
it totally was. And then as they got out of
the car, all of them are like just like looking
down the streets, still like going to the bar, and
one of them like stopped kind of and like turned
around and made eye contact with me. It was I
think he'll be embarrassed for the rest of his life
about that. I didn't even stare him down. He just

(02:35):
he initiated that embarrassing situation. So he you could tell
he felt some shame because you were just looking at
him a little bit and again not staring them down.
You know, me, I'll stare somebody down, but not these guys.
This was this was he initiated it. But hey, good
for them. I bet they had a blast. So honey,
I think is what we were originally talking about, right, Yeah,

(02:57):
and the Grabster helped us with this one. And this
was my commission because Emily is very much into you know,
she's gotten very much into her herbs and growing herbs
and natural remedies and things, and honey is a big
part of that. And although we are not bee keeping yet,
that could be on the docket for us. I hope. So, man,

(03:17):
I think bee keeping is one of the neatest things
you can do all but it's so relaxing. Yeah, she's
she's interested in it, and uh so that might happen.
Tell me how it goes, because she doesn't I will Okay, yeah,
I'll follow it. Um. We've actually done an entire episode
on bee keeping. H It was one of our best,
if you ask me, certainly our most homespun episode by far. Um.

(03:40):
So we're not going to talk too much about bee keeping,
but you pretty much can't discuss honey without also talking
at least a little bit about bee keeping. It's so
bee keeping adjacent it would be weird to not mention it.
But I just want to say, if you have not
heard our bee keeping episode, or you haven't heard it
in a while, go listen to it, because it's a
really really good app Do we do bees and be

(04:02):
bee keeping? Yes? Yeah, we've done bees beekeeping now honey. Yeah,
and one of our TV show episodes was about bees.
It was one of the sillier episodes. I think it was. Yeah,
that's probably what was silly. I think you had a
good eye for the absurd for that show. And I
mean that in a complimentary way. Oh I took it

(04:24):
that way. Okay. I love absurdist comedy and you nailed it. Um,
So let's talk a little bit about Honey. Ed helped
us with this one. I think you just said and
I think he did about the best most clinical description
of honey that you could possibly come up with. Where's
that was that? Like his definition? Yeah, I mean he

(04:45):
talks about basically what honey is and how it's made.
Oh so you're just saying start from take it from
the top basically. But I thought the way he did
it was like, here's here. It's totally unambiguous, completely understandable,
and it's just a it's a good descriptor of honey
and how it's made. Yeah, this is this is good
stuff by the grabster. Uh So yeah, a bit of

(05:06):
a refresher though. But we all know that bees like
to fly around to different flowers and stick their face
in them and dance all over them and do kind
of fun things. Uh. And there is a sugary liquid
called nectar in flowering plants, and bees are wild about
the stuff for a lot of reasons. One reason is,

(05:28):
like you know, sometimes they just drink it, Like they
want to save that stuff and what's called their crop
or their honey stomach to bring back to the hive.
That's their main job. But when they're out there working
all day, they're also like, let me take a little
bit of this sweet stuff down for me. I wonder
if there's any bees out there seriously that have like
a bit of a problem with Yeah, it goes from

(05:49):
one for me, three for you, two, three for me,
one for you kind of. I wonder if there's some
that like just kind of drink it more than others.
There's gotta be sure. Yeah, so um yes, But for
the most part, when out there harvesting and foraging for nectar,
they're using their crop a honey stomach which they can
store I think a thousand flowers worth of nectar in

(06:12):
that is a lot, a lot of nectar um, which
is weird because I saw that it can grow to
about a hundred times that size, So a hundred times
it's initial size. Holding a thousand flowers worth of nectar,
that's just a that's a very efficient um organ. And
it just sits there. It's not doing anything. It's not
digesting um. It's just basically for carrying back to the hive.

(06:36):
By the way, I had the most amazing dad joke
that I failed to tell what it should I tell
it now. Of course when you said it just popped
into my head. That's why I that's why I know
that I'm just on the way down comedically. Well that
means the podcast is on the way down too. Oh yeah,
for sure. Uh you were talking about the bees having

(06:57):
the problem with drinking too much honey. I said, well,
you know, they could always just go to a B
B meeting. Boy, that was good. That wasn't bad. That
was a really good one. I don't know, all right, Well,
I would love to hear from people terrible or borderline genius. Okay, Well,
I'm registering the first vote, and I'm going to say
somewhere in the middle of those. I was about to say,

(07:19):
there's no one between, but of course there is. All right,
So you where'd you leave off with eating pollen? That
they take the nectar back to their their their nest
they're hot. Okay, Well, then I'll chime in here with
a pollen part. Bees are obviously accidentally transferring this pollen,
but you know, some of this pollen is getting eaten
and mixed in with that honey too, because they love it,

(07:41):
because it's got protein and fat. And so what you
end up with when you go back to the hive
is a gut or crop or a honey stomach full
of this nectar, a little bit of pollen. There's probably
like just dust and things from the air, and they
start puking it up into each other. There's mouths chewing
on it, some puking it around, transferring it to one

(08:04):
another until it's ready for storage, right, which sounds gross
it is, But Ed makes a really good point here
that um, they're not actually it's not actually be vomit.
Honey is not be vomit. And I've I've said that before,
so I think I'm kind of being inadvertently taken to
task by Ed because again, oh yeah, definitely, I've said

(08:26):
that every chance I've ever had. But the again, the
the b crop, the honey crop, um is not um digesting.
So what they're regurgitating is virtually the same thing that's
going in, so it's not really puke, it's just something else.
But yes, they are transferring it from mouth to mouth,
and as each bee takes another mouthful of nectar and

(08:49):
then passes it around, they're chewing it for a little bit,
and one of the things they're doing is absorbing some
of the moisture inside. They're also mixing in their own enzymes,
and what they're doing doing in that sense, they're they're
transforming nectar into honey. So honey is a mixture of
b enzymes, flower, nectar, pollen, and um that's dehydrated and

(09:15):
combines to form brand new compounds. And that's that's what
honey is. Yeah, and as we'll see there there can
be other things in there because it's nature and these
are sort of messy although beautiful processes, so as well
as you'll see when we talk about like completely raw
and filtered honey, there may be some be legs in
there and some other little beep, but there may be

(09:36):
a piece of a wing because you know, this is
just how things go out there in the wild. And
sometimes some bees have really bad days. Yes, that's when
they go to the bb meetings. So um, there's there's
another way that what we've been talking about is blossom
honey what most people think of when they think of honey.
There's actually one other way to make honey. And do

(09:57):
you remember in our Aunt episode where ants are ranchers
of aphids and the aphids suck the juice out of
plants and produce honeydew. Well, bees go find that honeydew
in some cases and can actually make honey from the
sap of the stems leaves and like bark of trees
and other plants, and they basically harvest that like they

(10:19):
harvest nectar from flowers, and so there's a there's an
entirely different way to produce honey that comes straight from
the plant, not even from the flowers, and that's called honeydew. Honey, honeydew, honey.
Have you ever had that? I don't think I have.
I was looking it up to see like what some
types of honeydew honey are, and I couldn't find many,
and nothing that I found sounded like anything I've had before. Okay, Uh,

(10:44):
we should point out that not all bees produce honey. Obviously,
there are a lot of different species of bees, and
we went over those in great detail in to be episode.
But the honey bee is from the genus APIs, and uh,
there are some other bees that do make make honey,
But like the chief honey bee is the western honeybee.

(11:07):
This is the the stud when it comes to making
great honey. This is the one we domesticated. This is
the one that makes so much honey. They have enough
for them, Uh, they have enough for us, and everybody
is happy, basically, which is one of the things I
love about beekeeping. It seems like one of the she's

(11:27):
a few things where we extract something from nature for
ourselves where there's enough to go around, and if you
do it in the right way, it's uh, it doesn't
harm the thing that that gave it to you. Yeah,
that is kind of a beautiful thing about it. And
as we'll see, the fact that honey exists is kind
of miraculous. And that's just kind of like the cherry

(11:48):
on the top chuck, that we can harvest honey without
harming or um, the bees or taking some of their
head stash for us, Like they just make a little
extra for us. And when we can take that, I
think it's wonderful too. So yeah, you know, you mentioned
we have a whole episode on beekeeping, but um, as
a short refresher, this has been happening for a long time.

(12:10):
They were people were collecting honey, um, you know, in
the Mesolithic period, so they're like cave drawings that depict
this stuff. So we've always liked the honey as humans. Uh.
And then you know, there's a belief that it may
have just like beekeeping, may have happened by accident when
a hive maybe set up in a jar or basket

(12:32):
or something that was outside at somebody's place and they went, hey,
wait a minute, like this awesome honey is now in
this jar on my back porch. Like I wonder if
we could do this like intentionally and do it on purpose,
and they kind of just started doing it. That's what
the thought is at least. Yeah, and they think that
originally maybe some of the earliest earliest artificial hives were um,

(12:56):
some sort of clay pod or something that they were
purposed for that. Um. Sometimes maybe they came across the
hive and they're like, this is pretty firmly attached to
this stick. I'm just gonna take the whole stick home
with me farm it like that, you know. Um, Yeah,
there's there's regardless. At some point, somebody probably just stumbled
upon this and then in very short order, um, it

(13:17):
started to spread. Um. They think that bee keeping at
least goes back, um about five thousand years ago. Um
there's evidence of it in Egypt, the Indus Valley, and Mesopotamia,
and then China. About eight hundred years after that, evidence
of bee keeping uh starts up and you would guess
the people of China and the people of Mesopotamia may

(13:40):
not have been in contact at the same time or
at that time, So it's really possible that bee keeping
just kind of independently grew up or evolved in different
societies and cultures around the world independently. Yeah, and it
was something because you're using like clay jars and things
like you were saying you didn't need to forge metal

(14:01):
that wasn't super expensive. It was something that uh there
was a low barrier to entry, I guess is what
you would say these days. So and it was really
delicious and as we'll soon find out, super beneficial. So
it became a big deal. Yeah. Um. One of the
earliest artificial hives is still um pretty much the symbol

(14:22):
for a bee hive. If you look at any uh
a a Milan Winnie the Pooh illustrations. Yeah, um, like
it's called it's it's basically a cone, a basket e
cone turned upside down. So you take an ice cream cone,
turn it upside down on the ice cream part, make
it kind of bubbly and there you go. That's a skep. Yeah,

(14:43):
it's great. That's why where you get your beehive hair
do is named after these things, and you know, things
just advanced from there. Uh. And we'll talk a little
bit about that later, but I say we take a
break now and then talk about what's in honey and
what makes it so good for us? It sounds good

(15:14):
learn it's stuff with Joshua John Okay. So the question

(15:36):
of what is in honey is very easy to answer
because it's almost all sugar. Uh. There is some water
in there, although you know, like we mentioned, part of
the process of getting uh to the honey state is
to remove as much moisture as possible, but you still
need some moisture. Um. So it's you know, something that
you can squirt out of a plastic bear sure, uh,

(16:00):
which you can later make a bong out of. I
think most everyone that was in college when True Romance
came out probably tried that totally. And by the way,
so long sixth grade classes that were just listening to
this episode. Poor teacher who just ran to the front
of the class. Nothing, nothing, nothing, I'm sorry. What's a bong? Um?

(16:24):
Was that Ralph Wigham? It was? It was a pretty
good win. So it's mostly sugar, and it's believe it
or not, it's mostly simple sugar, fruit toast, and glucose.
There are some complex sugars. But that's not to say
just because honey is mainly just sugar and simple sugar
that it's not complex, because it really is. It is

(16:44):
super complex. It's again, the word miraculous just keeps bringing
to mind, and I'm definitely not one of those intelligent
design people. I just think honey is something really special though,
and so like, yes, it does have the simple sugars,
it has very complex sugars. Let me throw out a
couple of these names just to kind of blow your mind.
There's malto pentaos. I didn't add the extra tea in there.

(17:09):
I wanted to so bad. Galactose, that's an amazing name.
There's also iso malto trios. These are not your average
everyday sugars like fruit, toast and glucose, both of which
are found in honey. But that's just the sugars. And again,
the simple sugars combined with other enzymes and the bees
mouths to create these much more sophisticated sugars, some of

(17:31):
which have like actual protective health properties we found, But
that's just the sugars. There's also amino acids enzymes, polyphenols, flavonoids.
And when you start looking at all of the different
things that pop up in honey that's in honey, and
you look at each one individually and you look them up,
you will find that they do all sorts of amazing things.

(17:54):
And when you put all of it together, you just
can't help but step back and say, honey is miraculous. Yeah,
and let's have a spoonful. Yeah, exactly. That's the second
thought that follows uh it is. It has, in fact,
you mentioned amino acids. It has all nine all nine
essential amino acids, which are the ones that we need
that we don't make in our own body, so we

(18:16):
have to eat them. Um it is. And we'll get
to the healthy stuff in like twelve seconds. But we
do need to mention that one of the other great
things about honey is that it's I don't know about
last forever. Maybe I know they've pulled honey out of
like Egyptian tombs and reconstituted it to where it was fine,
so maybe it does last forever. But it is acidic.

(18:37):
It has antibacterial properties, so that means honey will last
you a long long time. And if you find an
old hard you know, lump of honey in a jar
in your house that you forgot about. You can probably
make that honey awesome again with very little effort. Yeah, supposedly,
what you do is you just throw it in that jar,
and you take that jar and you put it in

(18:59):
like a bath of very hot tap water. Do not
heat it up on the stove. Just put it in
hot tap water and very slowly that that chunk of
honey will turn back into liquid gold a k A. Honey. Yeah,
there's there's a lot of mixed messaging around um, honey
being toxic if it's heated beyond a certain point because

(19:21):
the you know, there there's ancient wisdom that says it
becomes toxic. Other people these days say now it doesn't.
So I was like, you know, I mean, surely there's
a study about this, and I didn't really find one.
I found one about lab rats and honey heated with gee,
but that wasn't only honey that sounds and has done it.

(19:44):
But I don't know if I just didn't have time
to find the study because it seems like a simple
enough thing to research, Like you heat the honey and
and feed it to a monkey, and see if it dies.
So I'm kidding, by the way, but the thing is
chuck as you raised something that came up for me
later on, UM that I'll just put here, like the

(20:05):
stuff we do to animals is unconscionable. A hundred years
from now, our cohort is going to be looked at
as just so barbaric. And one of the things that
kind of raised my hackles was UM. As as we'll
see later on, one of the things they think honey
can help with is UM neurological disorders or mental imbalances

(20:26):
and UM. They test that stuff on rats and one
of the things they found was that UM in rats,
it recovers hopeless behavior, sorry, in mice that have undergone
restraints stress for twenty one days. And I was like,
restraints stress doesn't sound very good. What is that? They
put the mouse in a tube where it can't move

(20:47):
any of its limbs or body or anything, and they
kept it there for twenty one days. And you think
being put in a tube as a human being for
twenty one days where you couldn't move, like I can
bear breathed, just saying that out loud, right, that's twenty
one human days. Imagine what twenty one days is in
the length of a mouse's life. And then, by the way,

(21:09):
after they studied the mouse after taking out the tube,
they probably killed it shortly after that, so that mouse's
entire life was spent under restraint stress in a tube.
And this is just one of the myriad things that
we do to animals. And the more I just kind
of come across the stuff casually mentioned in this really dry,
clinical tone and pure reviewed papers, the more I'm just like,

(21:31):
this is, I don't know that we can justify this.
And yes, we've come up with so many amazing things
to help humanity along, but I really think we should
be we should be allocating a significant amount of our
research efforts to figuring out how to not use animals
to come up with those same amazing breakthroughs, because it's
just wrong. It's cruel and wrong, and there's there's really

(21:55):
basically no justification for it in the greater scheme of things.
And that's my soapbox. I think that's your first soapbox moment. Oh,
it definitely is, now that you mentioned it. Sure, all right?
That means we're going to toast uh some tomorrow. That
is good for your body as well. H what's your
tomorrow that you like? Congratulate? You know, I got a

(22:17):
few of them. That's going to be a future, like
very near future topic, by the way, Okay, cool, I've
gotten very into tomorrow. Mine is Montenegro. Montenegro is is
so good and it's really good to mix cocktails with two.
It sure is a little bourbon and to tomorrow you're
some rye and tomorrow. A little bit of that it'll fix.
It'll fix a mouse that's been in um restraints stress

(22:40):
for twenty and one days. Right up, some orange bitters,
A little shake of that. Yeah, it's good stuff even
just also choked, by the way, just a little bit
of amorrow Montenegro, like I think it ounces of that
and some good seltzer is really good on its own too.
That's a digestive and a half. It definitely is. Yeah,

(23:00):
that's great. Uh. You know what. Recently I went to
l A just for the day to see our friend
Ben Harrison and our our friend and uh booking agent
Josh Lingren and are my friend Adam Pranica. You'd love Adam.
You just haven't hung out with them much. But we
went to Musso and Frank and I'll just say this,
and I haven't been drinking much lately, but we had

(23:21):
a day and we're way too drunk to be and
Musso and Frank I could tell from your Instagram posts
from it. Yeah, it just looks really happy in this
great big meal and drinks and all this stuff at
one of the oldest restaurants in Hollywood. And at the
very end, Ben Harrison just shouts out, is that it.
We're like, yes, nothing else, and Ben went four tomorrows.

(23:44):
Oh yeah, so that's how we ended our meal. We're
just supposed to put a hangover, so let's not blow
all of our knowledge on tomorrow right here, Chuck j alright,
So health qualities of honey is where we left off
ten minutes a. Uh. There are lots of health benefits
and there are lots of studies that back this up,

(24:05):
which is great. Um. There are medicinal uses that have
been academically studied and and verified. So this isn't like
you know, witchy hocum or woo woo stuff like that.
Honey is really really good for you. And we've known
this for a long time. And one of the things
that honey is great for is if you have allergies, uh,
if you. They did studies where they looked over the

(24:27):
course of a couple of months during allergy season, and
it had significant reductions in what's called rhinitis rhinitis, which
is you know stuff you know, sneezing, allergy, allergic sort
of qualities fear of. And this was like quite a
bit of honey. I think it was one gram of

(24:48):
honey per kilogram of body weight. A lot of funny,
it's a lot of honey, but it works, and you
know it's better than uh, some dumb allergy medication. So
you remember our immunotherapy episode from very early on, we
talked a lot about eating honey to get over allergies,
and it totally makes sense because you're exposing yourself to
the local pollen. That's why people who say this actually

(25:10):
works to get yourself over allergies say it won't. It
won't work unless you are eating local honey, meaning like
within twenty or I think thirty miles of where you live,
because you're you're exposing yourself a little by little to
that pollen and your body' is like, oh this is
this stuff is not that bad. We won't give you
any more allergies. Yeah, And there's a lot of reasons

(25:31):
to eat local honey and eat locally period, not the
least of which is that's just how it was for
gazillion years. Uh what was near you because you couldn't
get anywhere else, and that's just sort of the better
way to eat. Yeah. I've really gotten into green grapes lately.
They're just so good and they're so good for you.
Just always have like a bowl of them out. And

(25:52):
we just left grape season and this stuff that's out
now is just it's so bad. It's just like you're
put in your mouth and there's no like pop to it.
It just MUSHes, and I'm like, this is not any good. Yeah,
it is like an eyeball. It's really, it's like a
rotten eyeball basically. So I'm off a grape So I'm

(26:12):
trying to find a grape replacement until they come back
in season. Grape replacement is not a bad band name.
Actually it is a bad band name, But I could
see someone naming their band that. That seems like a
side project band name. Right. Uh, what about inflammation, that's
you know, inflammation We've talked a lot about. That's it's
not the root cause of every problem humans have, but

(26:33):
inflammation is one of the leading causes of a of
a lot of problems that humans have. Definitely, I think
we need to do an episode on that. Yeah, totally,
but yeah, I mean it's behind cardiovascular issues. Your blood
pressure might be high. Um, you might have gut problems, arthritis,
some types of cancer, and it's your body basically mounting
this immune response that is overblown and so you're suffering

(26:56):
as a result, and it has all these terrible UM effect. Well,
the flavonoids that I mentioned UM are there's a ton
of flavonoids, like thirty different flavonoids found and basically all
types of honey, just to varying degrees depending on what
flowers it came from. And they are antioxidants. We've talked
about antioxidants um and whether or not they actually work

(27:19):
or not, the jury is still kind of out, but
there are some things that flavonoids do that are like
this is just demonstrably effective. One of the things they
do is go to the genes that produce inflammatory proteins
and say, nope, not today, you just you just rest easy,
stop making those things. So they block expression of inflammatory proteins.

(27:40):
That's just one of the things that you can find
in honey. Yeah, a pretty big one if you ask me, uh,
if you want, kind of one of the king Daddy's
of healthful honeys. You've probably heard of Manuka honey. Um.
It seems to have I don't know about exploded, but
it seems to have really garnered a lot more um

(28:01):
popularity and popularity, garnered popularity whatever, you know what I'm saying.
Sure in more recent years, partially because of marketing in
pr but partially because Manuka honey is really good for you.
This is a monofloral honey, which means, as as we'll
talk about a bit more later, that it comes from
a single flower as much as possible from New Zealand,

(28:24):
and it's got a pretty short period in which this
flower flowers, and that makes it a more rare honey.
That makes it more expensive, of course, but Manuka honey
kind of does all the things that honey does times,
you know, with a plus afterward. Yeah. Supposedly, the active
ingredient for Manuka honeys anti microbial properties is um methyl

(28:47):
glyoxyl um. It's a word as ugly as it sounds
spelled out, but it has about a hundred times the
amount that other types of honey have, and um, that's
one of the reasons why they're everybody is so bully
on manuka honey. I think the other reason is because
it is very rare. The manuka shrub grows in fairly remote,

(29:08):
isolated regions of New Zealand, so it's hard to get
and that means it's very expensive, so you can sell
it for a lot of money. So anything you can
say is minuka honey, you can kind of hype, but
there does seem to be some some actual like reality
behind the hype. Yeah, like there there are people who
do this and uh who just like take a spoonful

(29:28):
of minuka honey every day as if they're taking their
vitamins in the morning or something like that. For sure.
And there's another one that's kind of come up recently
that has been rivaling Menuka's too alloying honey. It grows
in Malaysia. The thing is, Manuka honey is a monofloral honey.
As we'll see, it's just made from the manuka, the
flowers of the minuka shrub. To allaying um is called

(29:50):
jungle honey, like it's just made from whatever is flowering
in Malaysia. But supposedly the flowers that are growing in
the jungles of Malaysia have a lot of them using
properties too. Because people are saying this to a laying
it's the hot new product and so long Manuka, you're
so over and done with. Yeah, jungle honey is a
good song title, yeah, for sure, or maybe I'm just

(30:12):
thinking jungle boogie. No jungle honey sounds good. You put
honey with any other word and it's gonna make it
more appealing. For sure. I love the word jungle. It's
one of my favorites. Yeah. You said earlier you were
starting your honeyfile, and I was like, you should call
all files your honeyfile. Maybe I will. Honey is also
good topically, Um, you can put honey, especially something like

(30:36):
manuka honey on a skin, knee or something like that. Uh,
cuts any kind of stubborn wounds. Uh, it's gonna help
out with Um. They've done meta studies on putting honey
on topically and a lot of these were Uh it
seems like from studies on diabetic foot wounds. This is
what ED found. But you know, it healed faster, those

(31:00):
less inflammation. Apparently it can reduce nasty odors, and even
in diabetic foot wounds, helped reduce the need for amputation. Yeah. Um,
apparently that's with just about any honey you could use
for wound healing, not just manuka. I saw a paper
that said, actually you might not want to use menuka

(31:20):
because that methyl glyoxal is something that might actually prevent
um a diabetic foot ulcer from healing because it's so
potent it might actually like kill off like this the
new cells that are trying to form. But other honey
has been shown in is honey in general that it
actually does help heal diabetic foot ulcers in really any

(31:41):
kind of wound. But the reason they say diabetic ulcers
because they have so much trouble healing because there's so
little circulation being led to that wound site that it
just basically just persists. And if you slather some honey
on there, you can say goodbye, stubborn wound. Goodbye. We
already talked about blood pressure some but we should note

(32:03):
that some of the studies have found that it reduces
hypertension and women and not men, and that's not to
say that it can't in men, but it's in you know,
Ed points this out very astutely that honey is just
there's a lot of studies and meta studies and things,
but you know, it's something that bees make in nature, uh,

(32:23):
and that humans collect, So they aren't always the most
consistent results when it comes to studies. And there's so
many varieties and so many kinds of bees and where
they live and then the flowers that they're pollinating and
getting that nectar from that. It's uh, just because a
study says something, it doesn't mean like that's the end,
full stop. Yeah, one way or the other, Like didn't

(32:46):
find this property actually helpful or did? Yeah, there just
needs to be more studying that. Yes, they need to
refine the study of honey, which I think we're in
the in the midst of, like right now on this podcast,
we're helping move it along. I think what about cancer
cancer it's another one they think that um Basically there's

(33:07):
there's properties in honey that um create apoptosis, which is
programmed cell death, and that they help target cancer tumors
to um to go ahead and die, just die, die
die tumor um and that's basically how chemotherapy works in
a lot of ways. So, yes, it does seem to
have some sort of effect on cancer. I saw that. Um.

(33:30):
Not only has it has it been shown to work
in the lab, like in in cell lines of cancer cells,
but that it's it's had some clinical um results as well.
But apparently when they go after cancer cells there's something
that's called blebbing. And blebbing is where, um, a cell

(33:51):
gets pulled away like it's membrane gets pulled away from
the cytoskeleton, and there's like a bulge and at that point, um,
you have called blebbing, and that cell is in very
big trouble. So honey goes after to cancer cells, it
makes them bleb Well, you know how I knew it
would be something that makes you in trouble is that

(34:13):
it's called blebbing. Yeah, exactly. Can't that can't be good. No,
Oh my god, I'm blebbing. That's not a good No
one ever say oh, that's fantastic, good for you. Yeah,
high bleb Right. You mentioned neurological problems earlier a little bit. Um.
Obviously this can be a whole host of things. But
they have found and this is another you know area

(34:34):
that there needs to be a lot more testing, but
the clinical trials have shown some pretty good results and
things like uh, you know, depression, dementia in any kind
of age related like mental neurological deterioration basically, but even
things like convulsions. Uh, they did there was one study
in some uh, some senior adults that where they had

(34:57):
a placebo control group which had a about greater incidents
of dementia than the group that took a daily tablespoon
of honey. That is astounding, that's huge. Yeah. Um, that's
the kind of study where it's like, no, that's the end.
Nobody else needs to do any more, researchers. Everybody eat
a tablespoon of honey, and that's actually that raises a

(35:17):
good question that a lot of people have. It's like,
wait a minute, honey is a sweetener. Yes, it's natural,
but it's got tons of sugar in it. So is
it really okay to eat a tablespoonful honey a day?
And the answer is in the West, especially um, you
you should, yes, go ahead and eat a tablespoonful honey
a day, but make sure that what you're doing is

(35:40):
exchanging the added sugars that you're eating in your diet normally.
For that tablespoon, don't just add it to your normal diet.
Figure out where you can cut down some sugar and
use honey instead. And yes, you will probably be much
better off of it long right, because sugar is really
not good for us at all. That's great. I think
we take our second break here, we come back and
we talk about honeycombs, grades of honey. We still got

(36:04):
a lot to go over, so let's get to it.
Learning stuff with Joshua John. Okay, Chuck, this suddenly turned

(36:41):
into a short stuff Go well, I mean we can
talk about the honeycomb briefly again. That's in our bee
keeping episode, in our b episode, um and with a
lot of detail. But uh, basically, you know this, the
honeycomb is like that hexagonal cell structure that you see
inside the hive, uh, made of that wax that the

(37:04):
bees produce. Uh. And they you know, they make cells
for storing honey or for housing that queen and the brood.
But the important thing as far as the honeycomb goes
is that humans came along as far as beekeeping is concerned,
and said, you know, let me let me build the
framing your house for you and you can come in
and add the detail. So we started making these, um,

(37:27):
you know, what would you call it, like a form substrate, Oh,
look at you, which gives the bees a little bit
of a head start. Uh, And then you know the
honey is in there. They extract that honey in a centerfuge. Uh,
leaves that that honeycomb intact. Although you can get that

(37:48):
natural honey if you've seen it in the store with
that or maybe at a farmer's market, local farmer's market
with a honeycomb floating in that honey. Uh, you can.
You can eat that stuff. It's wax. It's not gonna
hurt you. Yeah, train it probably makes you feel like
Martha Stewart or something. It makes my teeth feel gritty.
So I don't like it, but I do know that
it is edible for sure. Yeah. One of the things

(38:09):
I saw Chuck though, I was like, well wait a minute,
beekeepers are like making basically fully formed honeycombs for the
bees to to use. This is going to produce some soft,
lazy bees. But it turns out there's actually a really
good reason to do this, and that is that with
bees produce their own wax. They have to eat honey
to produce the wax, and they they consume six pounds

(38:32):
of honey to make one pound of wax. So by
giving them the wax to begin with, you're saving all
of that extra honey. They're just gonna keep making that
honey and you're gonna get more for it. Yeah, I mean,
maybe that's one of the reasons we had that surplus. Probably,
I would think. So. Yeah, if you're if you're keeping
bees and you're not giving them preformed bees, wax, bees

(38:53):
wax cells, you're a chump. Uh. There are lots of
different ways to rate or grade honey. We're gonna go
over a lot of those now, one of which is
how much it's processed. We talked about right out of
the hive. It's gonna have some some bead legs and
pieces of winging and some yeast in there, some bacteria,

(39:13):
some pollen, maybe some dust, some honey crystals. You know,
you generally want to I'm sure they're purists that just
love that stuff, but if you're selling it in a story,
you probably want to remove um some of that or
a lot of that, uh, to make it a food. Product. Uh.
The other reason why is because if there's something floating
in your honey, that just gives the honey a solid

(39:36):
thing in there to crystallize around. And generally the honey
buying public sees crystallization is like, uh, that I don't
want to buy that honey. I saw that. That was
mostly Americans that have an aversion to crystallized honey, and
it's because we think that it's gone bad somehow. And again, yeah,
all it is is like, yeah, there's been some crystallization

(39:58):
of the sugars and all have to do is put
in a nice tap water bath and it'll go back.
But yes, you can just totally eat crystallized honey. There's
no problem with it whatsoever. But because they know they're consumers,
honey producers are like, we've got to get the solids
out of there. Um. So basically, any honey you buy
in the United States is going to have at least

(40:20):
undergone macro filtering what the usc A called straining, and
what that produces is raw honey. It's just they're getting
out the biggest of the big solids. But then that's it.
There's no more filtration whatsoever, and it's it's raw honey,
which is a bit of a misnomer because every honey,
uh type that isn't pasteurized, and pasteurized honey is just

(40:41):
one small subset. Every other type of honey is technically
raw honey. It's not been heated, there's nothing that's been
killed off in it. It's all still raw. But I
think what they're basically using the word raw for is
like rustic honey. Right, yeah, I agree. You mentioned pasteurization.
We might as well talk about that. Uh. I looked
it up. I was like, why why would you past

(41:03):
your eyes honey? Because you typically think of pasteurization for
more of like a dairy product. Um, it's basically just
there is no reason to do it that I found,
other than making it look and like pour out of
the bottle or jar or whatever, um more freely. Um,
it's smoother apparently. Um, it's gonna alter the flavor obviously,

(41:26):
because you're heating this honey up. But that's that's the
only thing I found why you would pasteurized honey. Um.
I saw that. You know, honey has all these anti microbial,
anti viral properties. That doesn't mean there's no such thing
as bacteria in honey or there's no such thing as mold.
Spores in honey, and mold in particular can cause honey
to ferment slightly. Again, nothing wrong with that, totally fine.

(41:48):
You basically have a free little mini shot of mead
right there in your in your honey. But people don't
like that kind of thing, so I think pasteurizing it
kills off any of those potential microbes, are yeast or
old or anything. I'm at a hippie once in I
think West Virginia that made his own meat. I think

(42:09):
I might have told the story before, but he gave
me some meat. Yes, somebody mailed us meat years and
years and years ago. It's the only meat I've ever
had in my life. I'm not a fan. It was
it was fine. Yeah, It's not something I could drink
regularly or anything like that. But yeah, if I were
in West Virginia wearing nothing but a pair of overalls,
I could probably drink a little meat. This is a

(42:29):
nice guy, despite the fact that he was a fishman.
I'm getting killed for knocking fish, by the way, Just
keep it up though it doesn't matter. Well, you know
what's funny is all the people that have written in
are trying to talk me into liking fish right there, Like,
surely you clearly haven't listened to fish and you don't
know what you're talking about. They do it. It's all
almost verbatim. It's funny. It's almost like that talking points

(42:52):
they shared. But I know fish fans wouldn't share talking points.
It's not the fish way. Uh. Back to the filtering.
We're jumping back to the other the U s d
A designation which is filtered honey, and that is basically
just more filtering. The filters are finer and it's gonna

(43:12):
remove almost all those solids that you're gonna see. Uh.
And it probably does require some heating because to get
through those filters, you gotta have it a little more
viscous or less viscous. Yeah, a little bit um. But
if you're ultra filtering, not only do you have to
warm it up, you combine it with a lot of
water because you're pushing it through not not quite reverse

(43:33):
Osmoses membranes, but something not too far off where it
is getting everything out of the honey. So much so
the U s d A says, this isn't honey. You
can't call it honey honey. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, so
there there's another way to basically achieve the same end
without blasting it through a um ultra filtered membrane, and
that's using diet tomaceous earth and dietms are fossilized microalgae

(43:58):
with silica shells and this is the shells left over
UM and they are super tiny, but they pick up
even tinier particles. They are attracted to them. They get
stuck in the shells, and then you filter out the diatoms,
and then you've also filtered out the stuff even further,
so you don't have to use quite as fine a
filter because the diatoms have sucked up all the stuff

(44:21):
that would have passed through that filter. That's catching the
diet tooms. Does that make sense, Yeah, and it's pretty amazing.
You might remember toomacious earth from our cockroach episode because
that's the stuff that you can spread around that they
eat that kills them from the inside out. It also
drives fleas out too. If you have a fleat problem,
you can spread diet tomacious earth on your carpet in

(44:42):
it will help. Yeah, I've I've been through that. Uh.
We talked about spun honey already and just want to
reiterate that spun honey or creamed honey or whipped honey,
it's all the same thing, and it's still doesn't lose
any of those helpful properties. You can also rate honey
by a color, of course, Um, you know, honey has
a great range of color, and they you know, technically

(45:05):
it's called optical density. But would they use the fund
color scale? I think it's fund not really like Fister,
the fabulous faucet with a funny name. Yeah, but I
always say the Fister just because I think it's funny. Okay, well,
then yes, this would definitely be fun And this is
a scale from zero, which is water white all the

(45:26):
way to one fourteen and above, which is dark amber.
Very nice. Uh. And then what's the deal with organic honey?
So organic honey is a different type of classification. Any
of the stuff we've talked about, ultrafiltered, pasteurized, raw, microfiltered, creamed,
all of that stuff could also be organic honey basically,
as long as the organic techniques that the U s

(45:47):
d A requires were used to um create the honey,
and also on the plants that the bees are harvesting
nectar from. That's right, So that's it. So from what
I can tell based on all this information, grade a
raw organic honey is probably top of the pops for anybody,

(46:08):
top of the pops. And then when it comes to flavors, Uh,
this is where we get into sort of the last
piece we mentioned monofloral. The other end of the spectrum
would be multifloral, and that is just simply what these
bees are flowering on, or what they're what kind of
flowers they're dancing with. If they're dancing with one flower

(46:29):
and you know, it points out bees or bees, so
it may be hard to make sure that's the only thing,
but they're very usually they are. If it's labeled monofloral honey,
that probably means that they have this farm has planted
a very very large area of one thing, so it's
really likely that the bee is eating almost all of that.

(46:50):
Or you can like the wild flore honey, it's just multiflorals, like, hey,
whatever is in the area, have at it. Uh. There
can be different flavors, but it's not exactly like there
are notes of things. It's not like if you eat
orange blossom honey, it tastes like you scored to orange
in it, but there will be like notes of citrus
and things like that. I actually saw on a site

(47:11):
um of different types of honey that they warn you
that if your orange blossom honey smells like orange fragrance,
then you've got some sort of fake honey that it's
been counterfeit in some way. It's not like that, like
you said, it's notes, but orange blossom honey is citrusy notes.
Pumpkin blossom honey has pumpkinny notes. Um. I think sour

(47:31):
wood is herbal and woodsy or no, that's um, what
is that? Chuck Linden Linden Hunt herbal and woodsy. Eucalyptus
honey has like a slight mental note to it. Um
buckwheat honey. I don't think I've ever had it, but
it's almost like black in color. It's definitely the dark
amber side of the fun scale. Um. But it also

(47:55):
has like kind of like a slight bitter note to
it too. I want to try it. It sounds almost
like tortuous, but I would still try. I'll try basically
any honey at least once. Yeah, And they're all kinds
of great honey um, sort of like flavored honeys and
the honey is still in it, so it's still great
for you and delicious, but like bourbon honeys and like
uh sort of spicy chili pepper honey and stuff like that,

(48:18):
all sorts of delicious things out there. One of our
favorite things to do is go to the our local
farm co op and get that local honey. And you know,
it costs a little bit more, but like they're doing
the right thing and not like Will Ferrell and Lebron James.
Did you see that? Did they get into honey? They are.
Actually it's a pretty cool thing. They partnered, along with

(48:39):
some other celebrities with a company called Flamingo Estate, which
is listed here as an urban farm and lifestyle brand. Okay,
sells you know, all kinds of stuff, so urban straw hats,
but they serve curated farm boxes. But what they've done is,
I think they've gone to some of these celebrities who

(48:59):
have large properties and said, hey, how do you like
your own honey? We can make we can keep bees
on your property and it will be called Will Ferrell
honey and it will cost two hundred and fifty dollars
a jar, but it goes to charity. Okay, I pulled
it out at the end. There you know where they
should go is the magnum's estate. He has big avocado

(49:23):
um farms and apparently, yeah, and apparently avocado honey is
a thing too. Okay um. Interesting, Before we end this chuck,
if you'll indulge me, I just wanted to rattle off
the properties that have been found among some of the
compounds that you find in honey. If you indulge me,
you're ready, m hm. That these compounds found in honey

(49:45):
are shown to possess these properties antibacterial, anti viral, antifungal, antioxidant,
anti inflammatory, anti neo plastic, anti microbial, anti carcinogen, anti rhythmic,
anti leashman il, uh, anti thrombotic, anti mutesinogenic, mutagenic, anti

(50:06):
no susceptive, anti microbacterial, anti proliferative, and immune boosting properties,
not to mention that it's hypo cholester emic, cardioprotective, anti hypertensive,
hypato protective, hypoglycemic, and UH neuroprotective, nephroprotective, gastro protective, so on,
so forth, and it can improve sperm count and their

(50:29):
motility and protects against vaginal and uterine atrophy. Plus it
improves the normal estros cycle. Wow, and that amazing. Did
you see anti Christ in there? I think so. It's miraculous.
But in like the reverse manner, are you got anything else?

(50:50):
I have nothing else. I don't either, and that means,
of course everybody's time for listener mail. I'm gonna make
this one very short because I just wanted to shout
out that we got a I got an email from well,
we got one from our old buddy Aaron Myzelle, who

(51:12):
helps hut up the stuff you should know five K.
I'm glad you. But Aaron, I think, was trying to
locate this English professor that taught my Shakespeare class. I
don't think she landed on it, but someone else did
and said was it Dr Vance? And I was like, oh,
it totally was. As soon as I heard the name,

(51:32):
I remembered and uh, I believe Aaron though, or now
I feel bad because I can't remember it was Aaron
or the other person who wrote in UM was still
in touch with Dr Vance got in touch with him
and said, hey, Chuck took your classes. You may have
even taken some classes from Vans who knows. Do you
remember me? No? I didn't Okay, um, you know, I

(51:56):
guess I was an English major, so I was always
over there. But r vans Uh send in an email
which I haven't responded to, but I'm gonna do that today.
It said, Chuck can't tell you how honored I was
by remarks on the podcast. I thank you so very much.
Always well here, loving retirement, traveling grandchildren. And here's my

(52:17):
website in case you want to see what I've been publishing.
And I think everyone should go check it out. It's
a mystery, thrillers, literary horror, humorous romance, historical fiction, all
kinds of fun stuff and you can find all this
at author John Vance dot com. Very nice. That was short,
and Chuck appropriately sweet for this episode. Good stuff. That

(52:38):
was nice. Man. I got a pat on your head
from your old your old English teacher. He was the
best man, had a you know, one of the few
college professors who really impacted me, like Robin Williams. Yeah,
don't get that joke. You don't know from um oh
dead boats. Okay, thank you for saying that, because I

(53:00):
was about to say, from oh captain, my captain. It's
ultra working title. So if you want to be like
Dr vance and let us know how retirements going for you.
You can wrap it up in an email spanking on
the bottom and send it off to stuff podcast at
iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,

(53:23):
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
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