ZOE Science & Nutrition - Recap: Is honey really better than sugar? | Dr. Sarah Berry

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Today, we’re discussing sugar. It's well known that too much sugar is bad news. But for those of us with a sweet tooth, could swapping in natural sugar alternatives like honey be a healthier way to satisfy our cravings? Or are we jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire? Professor Sarah Berry is here to explain the science of sugar. 🥑 Make smarter food choices. Become a member at zoe.com for 10% off with code PODCAST 🌱 Try our new plant based wholefood supplement - Daily30+ *Naturally high in copper which contributes to normal energy yielding metabolism and the normal function of the immune system 📚 Books from our ZOE Scientists: Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati Free resources from ZOE: Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition  Gut Guide - for a healthier microbiome in weeks MenoScale Calculator - learn about your symptoms Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here Listen to the full episode here

Hello, and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're discussing sugar. It's well known that too much sugar can have a negative impact on your health. But for those of us with a sweet tooth, could swapping in natural sugar alternatives like honey be a healthier way of getting that sweet taste? Or are we jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire? Here to explain the science of sugar is Professor Sarah Berry.

There's a perception that natural sugar alternatives like honey are healthier than table sugar because they're less processed and because simply they're considered to be more natural. And a question I hit really frequently is, if I use honey or maple syrup or any of these other natural sugar alternatives in my cooking or my baking, does it mean it's healthier? So before we talk about those alternatives, can we actually maybe start with the beginning of that question, which is, isn't table sugar itself natural? Well, it depends what you term natural. Yes, it's made from sugar cane, which is a plant.

And once the cane is harvested, it's crushed to extract its juice. And the sugar cane juice is boiled until the water evaporates, leaving behind these sugar crystals. Could you just explain a bit how exactly natural sugar alternatives are different from table sugar and explain a bit what's going on there? Yeah. So let's first look at what table sugar is. So table sugar is sucrose and this is a disaccharide, which means it's made up of two sugars bound together. Hence where the word disaccharide comes from, di meaning two and saccharide meaning sugar. And the two sugars that sugars bound together, hence where the word di-saccharide comes from, di- meaning two and saccharide meaning sugar. And the two sugars that are bound together in sucrose are glucose and fructose. So are natural alternatives to sugar also made up of glucose and fructose

stuck together to make sucrose? Yeah, so typically most natural alternatives to sugar are made up of fructose and glucose. Sometimes the ratios of the fructose to glucose in these natural sugars might be different. So for example, in robinia honey, it contains more fructose and glucose. And there's also other more complex sugars found in honey, but actually in quite low concentrations. So to make sure I've got this right, Sarah, you're saying the basic contents of sugar and these natural sugar alternatives are essentially almost the same. They've got glucose and fructose inside them. But in fact, I think that they can taste quite different to us.

What's going on there? Yeah, so many of the natural sugar alternatives sometimes taste sweeter, but they're also slightly different from table sugar in that they often contain extra micronutrients. So for example, honey contains some vitamins, minerals, and polyphenols. Although it's important to say these are quite small amounts. So Sarah, could you just explain very simply what happens when I eat a spoonful of sugar or dissolved in my coffee? What happens to my body and how does that affect my health? So firstly, what happens is you have sweet taste receptors in your mouth that say,

Jonathan, this tastes super yummy. I want more. And then secondly, what happens is the sugar enters your intestine and it enters your bloodstream and it's broken into fructose and into glucose. Now the fructose is transported directly to your liver where it's either converted into glucose or if it's a very high amount might be converted into fat. So the glucose is transported in your blood and we often refer to this as blood sugar. So when we talk about blood sugar we often mean the glucose that's circulating in your blood. Now what happens is when you consume sugar then you have this quite rapid peak in circulating blood sugar or circulating blood glucose that peaks at around 15 minutes after consuming the sugar and returns to baseline around two hours and where this becomes a problem is we know that if it's excessive

in terms of the size of the peak then you can actually have unfavorable downstream effects. So it can initiate inflammation, for example. Now, this is a normal physiological response to consuming sugar, but it's when it's excessive and repeated over a long period of time that we believe it has an unfavorable effect on health. But what we've also found that's really interesting from our work, Jonathan, is that some people have dips after they have too much sugar. And so what happens is, is they have a dip in the circulating level of blood glucose, blood sugar. And this is unfavorable because people that have these dips tend to feel really hungry quite quickly. They tend to feel less alert and they actually consume a lot more energy at their next meal. So nearly about 300 calories more over a day compared to if they don't experience dips. You eat one thing, right? There's sucrose and

very rapidly your body is breaking it down into those component parts, the glucose and the fructose, as you said. Is that similar as we go and think about honey, for example? So people are asking, like, is honey better than me? It certainly seems more natural in the sense that there wasn't any of that processing. Our ancestors have probably been eating it for millions of years. Is honey, therefore, going to be better for my health? So honey contains fructose. It contains glucose, just like table sugar does.

So it's metabolized in just the same way. So it causes just the same metabolic effects in our body. And so if honey is going to have a pretty similar effect to table sugar, so it sounds like you're not saying it's a dramatically better alternative with very different health outcomes. What about the stevia that you were talking about earlier? Stevia is really much more like an artificial sweetener. So as I said earlier, though, a lot of stevia products also contain erythritol, which is a sugar alcohol. And there was a recent study in Nature Medicine that found links between erythritol and a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke and

heart attack. But this study did have really lots of limitations. So we need to study this a lot more before we draw any conclusions about the health effects of erythritol. We do know from what research has been published around artificial sweeteners that they seem to unfavorably impact our overall blood sugar control and they seem to unfavorably impact our gut microbiome. But I do think it's an area that we need more research before we can say it's safe to swap sugar for sweeteners or we shouldn't consume sweeteners at all. And so what about agave syrup? That's something else that I feel I see all the time in sort of healthy recipes where that's been used as an alternative to table sugar within the recipe. Yeah. And again, I think that's because people say it's natural. They say it's a good source

of minerals, vitamins, and polyphenols compared to some other natural sugar alternatives or compared to table sugar. But the type of agave syrup that most of us are now likely to buy in the store is typically really quite highly refined. And so this is more likely to have less of these healthy polyphenols than the unrefined agave syrup or even maybe than maple syrup. And what about the effect of agave on our blood sugar levels? Well, the body processes agave slightly differently to table sugar. And this is because agave is made up mostly of fructose. And like I mentioned earlier, fructose is metabolized slightly differently

to glucose. So it doesn't directly raise blood sugar levels, but also on the flip side, if we consume it in excess, the liver can start making fat in the form of triglycerides. It's quite clear the majority of us are consuming too much sugar. The majority of the sugar that we consume is not added at the table or added during home cooking. It's hidden in our foods. And it's this sugar that's hidden in our foods that I think we should be worrying about far more than whether we're adding a teaspoon of sugar to something at the table versus a teaspoon of honey versus a teaspoon of maple syrup. There are some people that are so fearful of sugar because of this sugar scaremongering that's kind of gone on on the last 10 to 15 years that they avoid fruit. They're like,

oh my God, it's full of fructose. It's going to cause this to my liver. It's also got, you know, some glucose is going to cause this. Actually, sugar that's packaged within the original food that it came from behaves very, very differently. And it's really important to remember this. We know that people that consume higher levels of fruits, which obviously delivers more sugar in their diet, actually have improved health outcomes, improved risk of cardiovascular disease, et cetera. That's all for this week's recap episode. If you want to learn 10 science-backed tips to improve your health for some of this podcast's

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