Dear Bossy

I try to watch what I eat but let’s face it – sometimes a girl’s gotta sweeten up her food. Which is healthier, honey or brown sugar?

– Sweet tooth
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Dear Toothsie,

Honey is the sweet nectar that bees collect from flowers and later regurgitate into their honeycomb. Honey doesn’t spoil because its low moisture content makes it inhospitable to most organisms and airborne yeasts. So it’s incredibly safe to consume. Unless you’re an infant, in which case ingesting honey with even the smallest amount of bacteria can result in a little side effect called infant death.

Honey is made up of fructose, glucose, sucrose, and water – but each specific composition is determined by the type of flowers consumed, and by the many hive sources which are blended together to make the honey you purchase.

• The good thing about honey: Honey contains the vitamins and antioxidants that sugar does not!
  
• The bad thing about honey: Unless you buy raw honey these good nutrients have already been heated out of your honey so your honey can have that clean Bees Who? look.

Contrary to Health Food Store belief honey has the same amount of calories as the other sugars – although you probably use less because it’s a little sweeter than table sugar. Of course the properties of honey decay your teeth faster than table sugar.

Meanwhile

Brown sugar is a sucrose sugar that is brown because it contains molasses. The distinction between light brown sugar and dark brown sugar is directly related to the percentage of molasses present:

Brown sugar has more water in it, which means it has slightly less calories than the white sugar equivalent. Of course brown sugar’s crystals are smaller which means it packs more densely which means it has a higher calorie content by volume which means even though you think you are virtuous your brown sugar ass will still be working the Spin Classes alongside the white sugar asses.

Like honey, sugar’s production process strips the raw sugar of all good nutrients. But unlike honey, sugar’s production process also adds harmful elements like hydrochloric acid, phosphoric acid, sulfuric acid, and really all we need is more acid.

There is also evidence that table sugar is more harmful to the body systems than honey, causing stomach irritation, indigestion, and acid reflux. And people who handle large quantities of sugar have been known to experience bizarre skin irritations and eruptions!

The final difference between honey and brown sugar lies in folklore. In the Old Testament the Promised Land flowed with milk and honey, in Jewish tradition apples are dipped in honey to bring a sweet new year, the Muslims believe rivers of honey flow in Paradise, and during the time of the Roman Empire taxes were paid in honey instead of gold.

Whereas Brown Sugar is just a song.

This Bee-Atch Pretends To Know A Thing Or Two About Sugar And Giving Advice.

And These Are Funny Song Facts About The Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar