The most nutritious natural food — honey

What is honey?

Bees gather nectar from the flowers of flowering plants, brew it in the hive, and finally form honey. Bees take nectar or secretions with a water content of about 80% from the flowers of plants, store them in their second stomachs, ferment them for 30 minutes under the action of invertases in their bodies, and return to the hive to spit them out. Since the temperature in the hive is often maintained at about 35 ℃, after a period of time, the water evaporates and becomes honey with a moisture content of less than 20%, which is stored in the hive cavity and sealed with beeswax.

Honey is produced by bees gathering plant nectaries. The best honey is thick, sweet, free of impurities and unfermented. The main components of honey are sugars, of which 60% to 80% are glucose and fructose that are easily absorbed by the human body. Honey is mainly used as nutritional tonic, medicinal, processed candied food and brewing mead, and can also be used as a condiment in place of sugar.

Honey is a natural food with a sweet taste. The monosaccharide contained in it can be absorbed by the human body without being digested. It has a good health care effect on women, children, especially the elderly, so it is called "the milk of the elderly".

Honey is a nutrient-rich natural nourishing food and one of the most commonly used tonics. According to analysis, it contains a variety of inorganic salts that are similar to the human serum concentration, contains vitamins, contains iron, calcium, copper, manganese, potassium, phosphorus and other organic acids, contains trace elements beneficial to human health, and contains fructose, glucose, Amylase, oxidase, reductase, etc. Honey has nourishing, moisturizing and detoxifying properties.

Honey is a supersaturated solution of sugar, and it will crystallize at low temperature. The part that generates crystals is glucose, and the part that does not crystallize is fructose. Not just in the refrigerator, honey will crystallize even if you store it indoors in winter.The crystals turn back to liquid when heated, so the crystals are not a quality issue.When honey contains many impurities, it will not crystallize. People sometimes distinguish pure honey from sugar-sweetened honey by whether it crystallizes at low temperature. However, filtering out the impurities in the honey can also cause the honey to crystallize, so this method is not reliable.

The preservation of honey is very good. American archaeologist T.M.Davis once found in the pyramids of Egypt that the bottled honey about 3300 years ago has no record of deterioration at all, so some people say that honey is the only food that will not spoil.

Bacteria and yeast cannot survive in honey because of its low moisture content, but some anaerobic bacteria (such as botulinum) can exist in inactive spore form. Infants have underdeveloped gastrointestinal digestive organs and poor gastric acid secretion. Therefore, babies under one year old should not eat unsterilized honey. The spores in honey do not reproduce to produce toxins. Under normal circumstances, the anaerobic bacteria in honey are not in danger of multiplying in the human body.

Honey is easier to be absorbed by the human body than sucrose (the main component of granulated sugar), because honey is composed of the monosaccharides glucose and fructose, which can be directly absorbed by the human body without enzymatic decomposition.

At present, honey is the most comprehensive nutritional content of natural food. We hope everyone can drink truly natural, pure and healthy honey.