Stuff You Should Know - Honey: Nature's Wonder Sugar

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet feel like a nightclub. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the story of MySpace.

I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it. Listen to Main Accounts, the story of MySpace on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart 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 very ambiguous and strange, though. Should we, though? Jerry had a poor internet connection and was a few minutes late. That's it. She's barely here. Yeah. Mystery solved. Joke killed. 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, where I have a problem. You know that internet connection sound. Sounds like Apollo 13. I'm pretty excited about this one. Me, too. I even ate some honey for lunch today. Had a little dab at Brecky, which I don't usually eat, but I ate another toast with a spun honey spread. Good for you, man. So a 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 call 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. It doesn't spinning it or the process of getting it to 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 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. I really dislike that song, though. I really do, too, actually. Although I have a great memory of it. I guess sometime around Piedmont Park, it must have been St. Patrick's Day, this car full of dudes came up. They were wearing green wigs and everything. They were ready to throw down for St. Patrick's Day. And they were blaring that song. And everybody in the car was singing it, having the best time. That's right on the money. It totally was. And then as they got out of the

car, all of them are just booking down the street still, going to the bar. And one of them stopped kind of and turned around and made eye contact with me. He'll be embarrassed for the rest of his life about that. I didn't even stare him down. He initiated that embarrassing situation. So 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. 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. 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 beekeeping yet, that could be on the docket for us. I hope so, man. I think beekeeping is one of the neatest things you can do. I'll bet it's so relaxing. Yeah. She's interested in it. And so that might happen. Tell me how it goes, if she does it. I will. Okay. Yeah, I'll follow it. We've actually done an entire episode on beekeeping. Yeah. It was one of our best, if you ask me. Certainly, our most homespun episode by far. So, we're not going to talk too much about beekeeping, but you pretty much can't discuss honey without also talking at least a little bit

about beekeeping. It's so beekeeping adjacent that it would be weird to not mention it. But I just want to say, if you have not heard our beekeeping 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 beekeeping? 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. I wrote that episode. Yeah. That's probably what was silly. I think you had a good eye for the absurd for that show. Thanks a lot. And I mean that in a complimentary way. Oh, I took it that way. Okay. I love absurdist comedy and you nailed it. 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. Well, where's that? Was that like his definition? Yeah. I mean, he 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, it's totally unambiguous, completely understandable. Agreed. And it's just, it's a good descriptor of honey and how it's made. Yeah. This is good stuff by the Grabster. So, yeah, a bit of 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.

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 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 nectar. Yeah, it goes from one for me, three for you to 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 got to be. Maybe, sure. Yeah. So, yes, but for the most part,

when they're 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. That is a lot. A lot of nectar. That is a lot. Which is weird because I saw that it can grow to about a hundred times its size. So, a hundred times its initial size, holding a thousand flowers worth of nectar, that's just a very efficient organ. And it just sits there. It's not doing anything. It's not digesting. It's just basically for carrying back to the hive. By the way, I had the most amazing dad joke that I failed to tell. What was it? Should I tell it now? Of course. When you said it, just popped into my head. 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. Okay. You were talking about the bees having the problem with drinking too much honey. I said, well, you know, they could always just go to a bee meeting. Oh, 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 there's no in between, but of course there is. Okay. All right. So, where did you leave off with eating pollen? That they take the nectar back to their nest. They're hot. Okay. Well, then I'll chime in here with the pollen part. Okay. Bees are obviously

accidentally transferring this pollen, but some of this pollen is getting eaten and mixed in without honey too because they love it 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's mouths, chewing on it some, puking it around, transferring it to one another until it's ready for storage. Right. It sounds gross. It is, but Ed makes a really good point here that they're not actually, it's not actually bee vomit. Honey's not bee vomit. And I've said that before. So, I think I'm kind of being inadvertently taken to task by Ed because,

again- Did you really? Oh, yeah, definitely. I've said that every chance I've ever had. But again, the bee crop, the honey crop is not 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 mouth full of nectar and 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 in that sense, they're transforming nectar into honey. So, honey is a mixture of bee enzymes, flower nectar, pollen, and that's dehydrated and combines to form brand

new compounds. And that's what honey is. Yeah. And as we'll see, there can be other things in there because it's nature. And these are sort of messy, although beautiful processes. So, as you'll see when we talk about completely raw and filtered honey, there may be some bee legs in there. Sure. And some other little bee, but there may be a piece of a wing because 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 bee bee meetings. So, 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 you remember in our ant 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 harvest nectar from flowers. And so, 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. We should point out that not all bees produce honey, obviously. There are a lot of different species of bees and we whenever those in great detail in the bee episode. But the honey bee is from the genus Apis. And there are some other bees that do make honey, but like the chief honey bee is the western honey bee. This is 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. 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, geez, 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

doesn't harm the thing 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 on the top, Chuck, that we can harvest honey without harming or the bees or taking some of their head stash for us. They just make a little extra for us and we can take that. I think it's wonderful too. So yeah, you mentioned we have a whole episode on beekeeping, but as a short refresher, this has been happening for a long time. People were collecting honey in the mesolithic period. So there are cave drawings that depict this stuff. So we've always liked the honey as humans. And then there's a belief that beekeeping may have happened by accident

when a hive maybe set up in a jar or a basket or something that was outside at somebody's place. And they went, hey, wait a minute, this awesome honey is now in this jar on my back porch. I wonder if we could do this 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 artificial hives were some sort of clay pot or something that they repurposed for that. Sometimes maybe they came across a hive and they're like, this is pretty firmly attached to this stick. I'm just going to take the whole stick home with me. I hope. Farm it like that. Yeah, regardless, at some point somebody probably just stumbled upon

this. And then in very short order, it started to spread. They think that beekeeping at least goes back about 5,000 years ago. There's evidence of it in Egypt, the Indus Valley, and Mesopotamia. And then China about 800 years after that evidence of beekeeping starts up. And you would guess the people of China and the people of Mesopotamia may not have been in contact at the same time or at that time. So it's really possible that beekeeping 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. It wasn't super expensive. It was something that there was a low barrier to entry,

I guess, is what you would say these days. Yeah, totally. So and it was really delicious. And as we'll soon find out, super beneficial. So it became a big deal. Yeah. One of the earliest artificial hives is still pretty much the symbol for a beehive. If you look at any A.A. Miln, Winnie the Pooh illustrations. Yeah. It's basically a cone, a basket-y 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, it's great. Totally. And that's why where you get your beehive hairdo is named after these things. And you know, things just advance from there. And we'll talk a little bit about that later. But I say we take a break now. Okay.

And then talk about what's in honey and what makes it so good for us. Sounds good. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill. And we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists. We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS Team Supreme. They're like a second family to me. You're a fan of deep diving and music everything, all monacking your musical history, and learning things about hip hop artists and

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Okay, so the question of what is in honey is very easy to answer because it's almost all sugar. There is some water in there, although, like we mentioned, part of the process of getting to the honey state is to remove as much moisture as possible. But you still need some moisture, so it's something that you can squirt out of a plastic bear. Sure, 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 six-grade classes that we're 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? Was that Ralph Wiggum? It was. It was a pretty good one. So it's mostly sugar and it's, believe it or not, it's mostly simple sugar, fructose 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 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. Did you practice? All right. There's maltopentose. Okay. I didn't add the extra tea in there. I wanted to so bad. Galactose. That's an amazing name.

There's also isomaltotreose. Nice. These are not your average everyday sugars like fructose and glucose, both of which are found in honey, but that's just the sugars. And again, the simple sugars combined with other enzymes in the bees mouths to create these much more sophisticated sugars, some of which have, like, actual protective health properties we've 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. 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. 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 have to eat them. It is, and we'll get to the healthy stuff in like 12 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 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. 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 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, aka honey. Yeah. There's, there's a lot of mixed messaging around honey being toxic. Mm-hmm. If it's heated beyond a certain point. Sure. Because the, you know, there, there's ancient wisdom that says it becomes toxic. Other people these days say, no, 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 the honey heated with ghee, but that wasn't only honey. That sounds kind of good. And it does, doesn't it? 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 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 that I'll just put here, like the 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, as we'll see later on, one of the things I think honey can help with is neurological disorders or mental imbalances. And they test that stuff on rats. And one of the things they found was that in rats, it recovers hopeless behavior, sorry, in mice that have undergone restraint stress for 21 days.

Now it's like restraint stress doesn't sound very good. What is that? They put the mouse in a tube where it can't move any of its limbs or body or anything. And they kept it there for 21 days. And you think being put in a tube as a human being for 21 days where you couldn't move, like I can barely breathe just saying that out loud, right? That's 21 human days. Imagine what 21 days is in the length of a mouse's life. And then by the way, 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 in peer reviewed papers, the more I'm just like, 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 basically no justification for it in the greater scheme of things. And that's my soapbox. I think that's your first soapbox moment of 2023. Oh, it definitely is. Now that you mentioned it, sure. All right. That means we're going to toast some Amaro. Cling. That is good for your body as well.

What's your Amaro that you like? Congratulations. And you know, I got a 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 Amaro. Mine is Montenegro. Montenegro is fantastic. Amaro Montenegro is so good. And it's really good to mix cocktails with too. It sure is. A little bourbon and some Amaro. Or some rye and Amaro. A little bit of that. It'll fix it. It'll fix a mouse that's been in restraint stress for 20 to 21 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 Amaro Montenegro, like I think an ounce of that. And some good seltzer is really good on its own too.

That's a digest, Steve, and a half. It definitely is. That's great. You know what, recently I went to LA just for the day to see our friend Ben Harrison and our friend and booking agent Josh Lindgren and my friend Adam Pranicka. You'd love Adam. You just haven't hung out with him much. But we went to Musso & Frank and I'll just say this, and I haven't been drinking much lately, but we had a day and we're way too drunk to be in Musso & Frank. I could tell from your Instagram posts from it. Yeah. I was like, Chuck looks really happy in these photos. 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, for amarrows. Oh yeah. So that's how we ended our meal. Wow. Very nice. We're just supposed to up with a hangover. So let's not blow all of our knowledge on Amaro right here. Well put, Chuck. All right. So health qualities of honey is where we left off 10 minutes ago. There are lots of health benefits and there are lots of studies that back this up, which is great. There are medicinal uses that have been academically studied and verified. So this isn't like, you know, witchy hokum 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. They did studies where they looked over the course of

a couple of months during allergy season and it had significant reductions in what's called rhinitis. Rhinitis. Rhinitis, which is, you know, stuffy nose sneezing, allergic sort of qualities. Fear of rhinoceri. And this was like quite a bit of honey. I think it was one gram of honey per kilogram of body weight. It's a lot of honey. It's a lot of honey, but it works. And, you know, it's better than 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 works to get yourself over allergies say it won't work unless you are eating local honey,

meaning like within 20 or I think 30 miles of where you live. Because you're exposing yourself little by little to that pollen and your body's like, oh, this stuff's not that bad. We won't give you any more allergies. Yeah. And there's a lot of reasons to eat local honey and eat locally period. Not the least of which is that's just how it was for gazillion years. 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 we just left grape season. And the stuff that's out now is just it's so bad. It's just like you put in your mouth and there's no like pop to it. It just

mushes and 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 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 seems like a side project band name. Right. 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 inflammation is one of the leading causes of all 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. 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 as a result. And it has all these terrible effects. Well, the flavonoids that I mentioned are there's a ton of flavonoids, like 30 different flavonoids found in 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. And whether or not they actually work or not. The jury's 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 rest easy, stop making

those things. So they block expression of inflammatory proteins. That's just one of the things that you can find in honey. Yeah. A pretty big one, if you ask me. Sure. If you want kind of one of the king daddies of healthful honeys, you've probably heard of manuka honey. It seems to have not about exploded, but it seems to have really garnered a lot more popular in popularity, garnered popularity, whatever, you know what I'm saying. Sure. In more recent years, partially because of marketing and PR, but partially because manuka honey is really good for you. This is a monofloral honey, which means, as we'll talk about a bit more later, that it comes from a single flower as much as possible from New Zealand. 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 with a plus afterward. Yeah. Supposedly the active ingredient for manuka honey's antimicrobial properties is methylglyoxal. It's a word as ugly as it sounds spelled out, but it has about 100 times the amount that other types of honey have. And that's one of the reasons why everybody's so bully on manuka honey. I think the other reason is because it is very rare that manuka shrub grows in fairly remote 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 manuka honey, you can kind of hype, but there does seem to be some actual reality behind the hype. Yeah. There are people who do this and who just like take a spoonful of manuka 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 manuka's tulang honey. It grows in Malaysia. The thing is manuka honey is a mono floral honey, as we'll see. It's just made from the manuka, the flowers of the manuka shrub. Tulang is called jungle honey. Like it's just made from whatever's flowering in Malaysia, but supposedly the flowers that are growing in the jungles of Malaysia have a lot of amazing properties too, because people are

saying this tulang, 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. For sure. Or maybe I'm just thinking jungle boogie. No, jungle honey sounds good. You put honey with any other word and it's going to make it more appealing, I think for sure. I love the word jungle. It's one of my favorites. Yeah. You said earlier you were starting your honey file and I was like, you should call all files your honey file. Maybe I will. Honey is also good topically. You can put honey, especially something like manuka honey on a skin knee or something like that, cuts, any kind of stubborn wounds. It's going to help out with. They've done meta studies on putting honey on topically.

And a lot of these were, it seems like from studies on diabetic foot wounds. This is what Ed found, but it healed faster. There was less inflammation. Apparently it can reduce nasty odors and even in diabetic foot wounds helped reduce the need for amputation. Yeah. Apparently that's with just about any honey you could use for wound healing, not just manuka. Yeah. I saw a paper that said, actually, you might not want to use manuka because that methyl glyoxal is something that might actually prevent a diabetic foot ulcer from healing because it's so potent. It might actually kill off the new cells that are trying to form. But other honey has been shown, is honey in general, that it actually does help heal

diabetic foot ulcers and really any 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 that some of the studies have found that it reduces hypertension in 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 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 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 find this property actually helpful or did, yeah, there just needs to be more study. And yes, they need to refine the study of honey, which I think we're in the midst of. Like right now in this podcast? We're helping move it along, I think. What about cancer? Cancer is another one. They think that basically there's properties in honey that create apoptosis, which is programmed cell death,

and that they help target cancer tumors to go ahead and die, just die, die, die tumor. 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 not only has it been shown to work in the lab, like in cell lines of cancer cells, but that it's had some clinical results as well. But apparently, when they go after cancer cells, there's something that's called blebbing. And blebbing is where a cell gets pulled away, like it's membrane gets pulled away from the cytoskeleton. And there's like a bulge. And at that point, you have what's called blebbing, and that cell is in very big trouble. So honey goes after cancer cells and makes them bleb. Well, you know how I knew it would be

something that makes you in trouble? What? Is that it's called blebbing? Yeah, exactly. That can't be good. No. Oh my god, I'm blebbing. That's not a good sign. No one ever say, oh, that's fantastic. Good for you. Yeah, high bleb. Right. You mentioned neurological problems earlier, a little bit. Obviously, this can be a whole host of things, but they have found and this is another, you know, area that there needs to be a lot more testing. But the clinical trials have shown some pretty good results in things like, you know, depression, dementia, any kind of age related like mental neurological deterioration, basically. But even things like convulsions, they did, there was one study in some senior adults that where they had a placebo control

group, which had about 400% greater incidence of dementia than the group that took a daily tablespoon of honey. That is astounding. That's huge. Yeah. Yeah. That's the kind of study where it's like, no, that's the end. Nobody else needs to do any more research. It's everybody eat a tablespoon of honey. And that's actually, that raises a 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 tablespoon of honey a day? And the answer is in the West, especially, you should, yes, go ahead and eat a tablespoon of honey a day, but make sure that what you're doing is 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 in the long run because sugar is really not good for us in 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 a lot to go over, so let's get to it. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill, and we, you know, at Questlove Supreme like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists. We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking

about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS Team Supreme. They're like a second family to me. You're a fan of deep diving and music everything, all monacking your musical history and learning things about hip hop artists and things you never thought, then you're a lot like me. But you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme. One of the things I love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters. I look at being on this show as my graduate program in music. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio app. Have a podcast wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup?

Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen

to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. Narcissists are everywhere, and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was love bombed by the Tinder swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did. And that's even way worse than the money he took. But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life. Each week, you will hear stories from

survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, this suddenly turned 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 Bee episode, and with a lot of detail. But basically, the Honeycomb is like that hexagonal cell structure that you see inside the hive, made of the wax that the bees produce. And 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 bee keeping is concerned and said, you know, let me, let me build a frame in your house for you, and you can come in and add the detail. So we started making these, you know, what would you call it, like a form? A substrate. Ooh, look at you, which gives the bees a little bit of a head start. And then, you know, the honey is in there. They extract that honey in a centrifuge. It leaves that, that Honeycomb intact. Although you can get that 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, you can, you can eat that stuff. It's wax is not going to hurt you.

Yeah. And 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 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 when bees produce their own wax, they have to eat honey to produce the wax. And they, they consume six pounds 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

going to keep making that honey and you're going to 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 wax cells, you're a chump. There are lots of different ways to rate or grade honey. We're going to 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 going to have some, some bead legs and pieces of wing and some yeast in there, some bacteria, 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 store, you probably want to remove some of that or a lot of that to make it a food product. The other reason why is because if there's something floating in your honey, that just gives the honey a solid thing in there to crystallize around. And generally, the honey buying public sees crystallization as like that, I don't want to buy that honey. I saw that that was mostly Americans that have an aversion to crystallized honey. That doesn't surprise you. 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 of the sugars

and all you 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 got to get the solids out of there. So basically any honey you buy in the United States is going to have at least undergone macro filtering with the USDA 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 raw honey, which is a bit of a misnomer, because every honey type that isn't pasteurized and pasteurized honey is just 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. I looked it up. I was like, why would you pasteurize honey? Because you typically think of pasteurization for more of like a dairy product. 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, or more freely. It's smoother apparently. It's going to alter the flavor, obviously, because you're heating this honey up. But that's the only thing I found why you would pasteurize

honey. I saw that honey has all these antimicrobial, antiviral 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. It's totally fine. You basically just have a free little mini shot of mead right there in your honey. But people don't like that kind of thing. So I think pasteurizing it kills off any of those potential microbes or yeast or mold or anything. I'm at a hippie once in, I think, West Virginia that made his own mead. I think I might have told the story before, but he gave me some mead. Yeah, somebody mailed us mead years and years and years ago. It's the

only mead I've ever had in my life. I'm not a fan. 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 mead. This is a nice guy, despite the fact that he was a fish fan. 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. They're 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 they had talking points they shared. But I know fish fans wouldn't share talking points.

That's not the fish way. No way. Back to the filtering. We're jumping back to the other USDA designation, which is filtered honey. And that is basically just more filtering. The filters are finer and it's going to remove almost all those solids that you're going to see. And it probably does require some heating because to get through those filters, you got to have it a little more viscous or less viscous. Yeah, a little bit. 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 quite reverse osmosis membranes, but something not too far off where it is getting everything out of the honey. So much so, the USDA says this isn't honey. You can't call it honey,

honey. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. So there's another way to basically achieve the same end without blasting it through an ultra filtered membrane. And that's using diatomaceous earth. And diatoms are fossilized micro algae with silica shells. And this is the shells left over. 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 that would have passed through that filter that's catching the diatoms. Does that make sense? Yeah. And it's pretty amazing. You might remember diatomaceous

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 dries fleas out too. If you have a flea problem, you can spread diatomaceous earth on your carpet and it will help. Yeah, I've been through that. 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 still doesn't lose any of those helpful properties. You can also rate honey by color, of course. You know, honey has a great range of color. And they, you know, technically it's called optical density. But would they use the the Puffund color scale? I think it's just fun. No, really, like Fister, the fabulous faucet

with a funny name. Yeah, but I always say Puffister just because I think it's fun. Okay, well then yes, this would definitely be fun. And this is a scale from zero, which is water white all the way to 114 and above, which is dark amber. Very nice. 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 USDA requires were used to 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. Top of the pops. And then when it comes to flavors, this is where we get into sort of the last piece. We mentioned monofluorol, the other end of the spectrum would be multifluorol, and that is just simply what these bees are flowering on or what kind of flowers they're dancing with. Sure. If they're dancing with one flower, and Ed points out bees are bees, so it may be hard to make sure that's the only thing, but usually they are. If it's labeled monofluorol honey, that probably means that a 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. Or you can like the wildfire honey, it's just multifluorols like, hey, whatever's in the area, have at it. 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 squirt orange in it, but there will be like notes of citrus and things like that. I actually saw on a site 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's been counterfeited 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 pumpkin-y notes. I think sour wood is herbal and woodsy, or no, that's, it's, what is that Chuck? Linden honey, herbal and woodsy. Eucalyptus honey has like a slight menthol note to it. 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 puffin scale, but it also has like kind of like a slight bitter note to it too. I want to try it. It sounds almost like torturous, but I would still try. I'll try basically any honey at least once. Yeah, and there are all kinds of great honey, 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 sort of spicy chili pepper honey and stuff like

that, all sorts of delicious things out there. One of our favorite things to do is go to our local farm co-op and get that local honey and, you know, cost 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 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. Sells urban straw hats. But they sort of curated farm boxes, but what they've done is I think they've gone to some of these celebrities who have large properties and said, hey, how'd you like your own honey? We can

keep bees on your property, and it will be called Will Ferrell Honey, and it'll cost $250 a jar. No. But it goes to charity. Okay. They'll hold it out at the end there. You know where they should go is the Magnum Estate. He has big avocado farms and apparently avocado honey is a thing too. Okay. 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're indulging me. You ready? Mm-hmm. That these compounds found in honey are shown to possess these properties. Anti-bacterial, anti-viral, anti-fungal, anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-neoplastic, anti-microbial, anti-carcinogen, anti-erythmic, anti-leishmanile, anti-thrombotic,

anti-mutagenic, mutagenic, anti-nosusceptive, anti-mycobacterial, anti-proliferative, and immune-boosting properties, not to mention that it's hypocholesteroemic, cardioprotective, anti-hypertensive, hepatoprotective, hypoglycemic, and neuroprotective, nephroprotective, gastroprotective, so on, so forth, and it can improve sperm count and their motility and protects against vaginal and uterine atrophy, plus it improves the normal estrus cycle. Wow. Isn't that amazing? That's amazing. Did you say antichrist in there? I think so. It's miraculous, but in, like, the reverse manner. You got anything else? I have nothing else. I don't either, and that means, of course,

everybody, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to 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 Mazelle, who helps head up the stuff you should know 5K. I'm glad you thought of this. But Aaron, I think, was trying to locate this English professor that taught my Shakespeare class. Yeah. 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, I remembered. And I believe Aaron, though, or now I feel bad because I can't remember if it was Aaron

or the other person who wrote in, 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 Vance, who knows? Do you remember? Me? No, I didn't. Okay. Well, I guess I was an English major, so I was always over there. But Dr. Vance sent in an email, which I haven't responded to, but I'm going to do that today. It said, Chuck, can't tell you how honored I was by your remarks on the podcast. I thank you so very much. All is well here, loving retirement, traveling, grandchildren. And here's my website in case you want to see what I've been publishing.

And I think everyone should go check it out. It's mystery, thrillers, literary horror, humorous romance, historical fiction, all kinds of fun stuff. And you can find all this at authorjohnvance.com. Very nice. That was short and Chuck appropriately sweet for this episode. Good stuff. That was nice, man. Got a pat on your head from your old English teacher. He was the best, man. Had one of the few college professors who really impacted me. Yeah, like Robin Williams. Yeah. Don't get that joke. You don't? No. From, um...

Oh, Dead Boats. Yes. Okay. Thank you for saying that because I was about to say from Oh, Captain, My Captain. That was an ultra working title. So if you want to be like Dr. Vance and let us know how retirement's going for you, you can wrap it up in an email, spank it on the bottom and send it off to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app,

Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. This season, we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before they spot you. Each week, you'll hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and their process of healing. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. MySpace was the first major social media company.

They made the internet feel like a nightclub. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it. Listen to Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.