Honey, white sugar, brown sugar: This is the healthiest way to sweeten your tea

In our society, we cannot avoid sugar. It is omnipresent and even contained in many baby food products.

Sweet seduction

Focus Gesundheit Arztsuche reports that in the 7955 products examined in Budapest, Haifa, Sofia and Vienna, around a third of the calories contained in the products came from added sugar and also contained fruit juice concentrates or other sweeteners.

If the taste buds of babies under six months of age become accustomed to rewarding sweetness,the urge for sweetness later in life is no surprise. Deutschlandfunk Nova reports:

The human body basically reacts to sugar by releasing dopamine, which triggers our body's own reward system.

Read more:80 cl of soda a day is enough to double your fat production, new study shows

Sugar vs. honey

But let's get back to honey. It has a better reputation than white sugar because, after all, it is 'more natural'. According to Utopia, however, a distinction must be made here.

If you look at the composition of the various sweetening options, it becomes clear:

There is therefore no difference between beet sugar, cane sugar and honey in terms of the type of sugar we consume.

Honey consists of almost 80 percent fructose and glucose, the rest is water. The chemistry school explains that normal, white sugar consists of the disaccharide sucrose, which is obtained from sugar beet, sugar cane and the sugar palm, among other things. This sugar also contains fructose and glucose - hence the double sugar.

In terms of composition, honey is therefore not significantly different from white sugar. According to Ökotest, it does contain minerals, proteins, enzymes, amino acids, vitamins and presumably antioxidant secondary plant substances, but in small quantities.

Read more:The amount of sugar in your favourite chocolates and candies

Is brown sugar better?

And what about brown sugar? The sobering answer is that it is even worse for the environment. This is because it is obtained from sugar cane, which only grows in tropical regions. This means longer transport routes, the use of environmentally harmful fertilizers and resource-intensive processing.

Unfortunately, the bottom line is that both sugar and honey are converted in the body in the same way, i.e. broken down into fructose and glucose. This is more a matter of personal preference than a health issue.

Read more:Here are the health benefits of adding honey in your cup of green tea

This article has been translated from Gentside DE.

Sources used:

focus-arztsuche.de: WHO: zu viel Zucker in Babynahrung

deutschlandfunknova.de: Zucker - Warum Süßes unser Gehirn glücklich macht

utopia.de: Ist Honig gesünder als Zucker?

oekotest.de: Warum Honig nicht wirklich gesund ist