On the occasion of the launch of Campi da Sapere, a project by Alce Nero combining knowledge of growing locations with that of mindful eating, Dr Franco Berrino spoke to us about honey and its properties.
A doctor and epidemiologist, formerly director of the Department of Preventive and Predictive Medicine at the National Cancer Institute in Milan, Franco Berrino has, over his forty years of research and prevention work, led experimental groups studying the relationship between diet and health.
The Alce Nero team, together with Franco Berrino and the association La Grande Via, developed a five-stage journey across as many Italian growing locations, with the aim of bringing people directly into the fields to meet farmers, discover organic products and talk about healthy, mindful eating. The first event focused on honey.
What is the connection between honey and health?
What is good for health is food as nature produces it, unprocessed. Honey has existed since antiquity: even thousands of years ago, when we were hunters and gatherers, we knew honey — people ate it by sucking the honeycomb. I once had the chance to taste wild honey straight from the comb in Nepal, and it was a wonderful thing to find it at 4,000 metres. Honey is a food that has always been part of human history; our bodies know it. It has not been processed — it is exactly as nature produces it.
What are its characteristics?
Honey is made up of 95 per cent free glucose and fructose, not bonded together as they are in sugar. We must nonetheless bear in mind that both glucose and fructose have harmful effects on health. Glucose raises blood sugar levels significantly, so honey raises them too. Fructose has a negative effect because it impairs insulin function; it is the primary cause of gout because it increases uric acid levels, which in turn prevents insulin from working properly. However, honey and fruit also contain the antidote to fructose: vitamin C and a range of polyphenols that moderate the negative action of fructose.
Honey has many health-promoting properties…
By eating honey we can benefit from its protective anti-inflammatory and antiseptic substances. Honey is also an excellent disinfectant. Studies show that rinsing the mouth with a solution containing honey is helpful when suffering from mouth ulcers. In patients undergoing radiotherapy for cancer of the tongue and cheek — which causes severe damage to the oral mucosa — honey relieves pain and helps heal ulcers. It should be used locally, in the mouth rather than ingested, since in patients receiving chemotherapy blood sugar must remain low. There are also animal studies showing that honey can lower blood sugar levels in cases of diabetes. And even in Ayurvedic medicine, honey has been used for thousands of years as a treatment for diabetes. This is remarkable, but it is not yet clear how it can happen. It is possible that the sweet stimulus of honey helps the pancreas to produce a little more insulin. It would truly be worth conducting more formal studies to understand the origin of this exceptional property of honey.
How much should we eat, and when during the day?
No more than a tablespoon a day. My advice is not to have it at breakfast, but as an afternoon snack. For children, the best time to eat it is after sport, because if blood sugar rises quickly when there is no longer any sugar stored in our muscles, it will not cause harm. Having honey at breakfast, on the other hand — after a night during which the muscles have fully replenished their glycogen stores — causes a sudden spike in blood sugar. If you want to eat honey at breakfast, use this precaution: pair it with a good-quality fat. The ideal choice is tahini, sesame butter: mix it with the honey to get a pleasant cream to spread on wholegrain bread, in which the fat slows the rate of glucose absorption. Alternatively, you can also make cecine — small flatbreads of chickpea flour, water and salt. All legumes have the property of slowing sugar absorption, so my advice is to soak a cupful of chickpea flour in a cup of water with a pinch of salt the evening before, and leave it overnight so that it absorbs the liquid well. In the morning, simply grease a pan and pour in a few spoonfuls of this batter. It sets immediately; turn it over and within a minute the cecina is ready to be spread with a thin layer of honey. We must remember that we need to train ourselves to enjoy less sweet flavours. The food industry has corrupted our palate and accustomed us to intensely sweet tastes, and we must not replicate that level of sweetness from confectionery when it comes to honey. Looking at traditional gastronomy, we see that honey is served with salty cheeses, because according to Traditional Chinese Medicine it is very yin and therefore balances aged cheese, which is very yang. Some traditional mediaeval recipes also featured mustard with honey paired with meat, another highly yang food. Honey served to bring balance to a meat-based meal.
Does honey behave like sugar in the body, or differently?
It behaves differently. The problem with sugar is that it is a product of the chemical industry — a pure chemical substance. Sugar is 99.8 per cent sucrose, plus a few impurities. Even so-called "fake wholegrain" sugar — the kind found in sachets in cafés — is 99.5 per cent sucrose. Sugar is harmful to health. The same applies to glucose-fructose syrup, produced from maize starch: the starch is broken down into glucose, and then half of that glucose is converted into fructose. This product costs less than sugar and is therefore widely used in confectionery, partly because it has the property of making things soft. It is used extensively in ice cream production. My recommendation is: if a product lists glucose-fructose syrup as an ingredient, do not buy it. In theory it is actually very similar to honey, since honey too contains glucose and fructose in free form. However, honey also contains, as we have already noted, the antidote. It can therefore be considered healthier than sugar and glucose-fructose syrup.
Alce Nero honey is organically certified. Is it important for this product to be organic?
Alce Nero produces a honey that contains no harmful substances — it is worth remembering that there can be extensive adulteration of honey. It is therefore important that honey comes from organic sources. If you trust the producer, certification is not strictly necessary, also because many small producers cannot afford the costs involved. Let us trust producers who have devoted their lives to quality, and then let us try honeys from different flowers — this is important, because they have different properties.