Excellent health benefits of Honey
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Let’s know how honey is made and how we use it in our everyday lives before we start talking about the health benefits of honey. Honey is a natural, nutritious sweetener, a concentrated energy source, and an ancient health and healing folk remedy. Honey is also an active ingredient and the focus of medical studies in beauty and skin-care products.
Honey is a sweet liquid produced from flowers by bees using nectar. It is graded by colour, sometimes fetching a more significant retail price than the darker varieties with the bright golden amber honey.
In grocery stores, much of the honey you find is pasteurised. The high heat destroys unwanted yeast, can enhance the colour and texture, prevents any crystallisation, and increases the shelf life. In this process, many of the beneficial nutrients go missing.
History of Honey
Honey is as ancient as history itself is. On a rock painting which is 8,000 years old, one of the earliest signs of honey harvesting, this one found in Valencia, Spain, depicts a honey seeker robbing a colony of wild bees. The bees were subdued with smoke, and the territory was killed by the opening of the tree or rocks.
It is hard to understand honey’s importance in today’s world of convenience, high tech wizardry, junk food, and sugar substitutes. Ever since history was known, humans have consumed it, bathed in it, patched their wounds with it, and traded with it. In Egypt, archaeologists found honeycomb buried with the pharaohs in their tombs, preserved the honey, and still eatable.
Honey has been used for several thousands of years, and there are references to much of Mans’ history. Not unexpectedly, however, it is an organic natural sugar, has no additives, easy on the stomach, also has an infinite shelf life if stored correctly and efficiently adapted to cooking processes.
Here are some excellent health benefits of Honey.
1. Honey is rich in Antioxidants
Many major antioxidants are found in pure honey which is one of the benefits of honey. These include organic acids and flavonoid-like phenolic compounds. By combining these compounds gives honey its antioxidant strength.
Interestingly, some scientific studies have shown that buckwheat honey improves the blood’s antioxidant content.