It seems to me that I have to add more honey to food in order to get the sweetness I experience with cane surgar. Hot tea, for instance, tastes fine with a single rounded teaspoon of sugar, whereas , I find myself using a full rounded tablespoon of honey to get the same effect. It is a little confusing to compare sucrose levels honey/sugar, but my reading seems to suggest that honey has a lot more sucrose/fructose per volume. Honey has been "inverted" to allow immediate use in the bloodstream, I wonder if the inversion required with sugar causes us to consider sugar sweeter?
I don't eat white sugar, so maybe I'm all wet, but I always thought honey tasted sweeter to me.
Honey is actually mostly a 50/50 mix of Glucose (which does go straight into the blood) and Fructose (which had to be converted by the body and is more complex than Sucrose). After that is a small amount of sucrose and smaller amounts of maltose and other complex sugars.
I am a diabetic, so I pay attention to some things.
Honey is absorbed into the bloodstream LESS rapidly that white sugar. If I break my diet, a little honey on toast is better for me than a peppermint candy because honey IS digested more slowly!
As for sweetness, that is a little harder to answer. I think honey tastes sweeter because it has more flavor. Also, if I put honey into my home-made bread instead of sugar, the yeast eat the sugar and leaves the honey flavor, which to me gives the bread a sweet, rich taste.
Perhaps the statement that "there is no accounting for taste" applies here? I find honey tastes sweeter, and you find sugar tastes sweeter.
The fact that glucose hits your system a little faster than Sucrose and Fructose hits it a lot slower than Sucrose makes a more even blood sugar because it absorbs over a period of time. Some fast, some slow with that little bit of sucrose in the middle. Sucrose all hits you a little later than the glucose but hits you all at once.
Like most type 2 diabetics, I do produce insulin, just not a lot and not real quickly.
Digesting slowly is good. If the food hits my bloodstream in a slow, steady stream then I only need to produce insulin in a slow, steady stream. I can do that.
The glycemic index, which tells how fast foods are digested, gives sugar a rating of 100 and honey a rating of 58. That means white sugar is absorbed almost twice as fast as honey.
Different strokes for different folks: for me honey is a little safer than sugar.
Terri, it is refreshing to see that a natural food like honey is especially beneficial to diabetics. I find the taste of honey more flavorful and sweeter on the tongue, but it seems to loose its "punch when mixed with foods. I guess it must be due to a childhood of "trumped-up" sugar cereals that overwhelmed the senses rushing into the bloodstream. Bread, on the otherhand is completely different. I can really taste the sweetness and the moistness engendered by honey is wonderful. Interestingly, most whole wheat recipees will tell you that the more honey you add-the less the bread will rise. I don't understand why since they usually tell you to start your yeast out in the sweetener. ??
Actually, the more of ANYTHING you add the less the bread will rise!
It is the gluten in the wheat flour that makes bread rise when the yeast gives off CO2. Adding too much potato flour, or rye flour, or ANYTHING will dilute the gluten and the bread will be heavier.
And, like most living creatures, you CAN kill yeast with kindness. Sweet breads like banana bread don't use yeast. Yeast does not grow well if there is too much sweetening. A LITTLE sweetening will get the yeast off to a good start, but yeast just won't grow well if there is TOO much sweetness. I use about a tablespoon of honey in each loaf.
My recipe is 2 cups flour, 1 cup white whole wheat flour, heaping teaspoon of salt, heaping teaspoon of yeast more or less, 1 cup water, and roughly 1 tablespoon of honey (I estimate, it's easier).
If you add less yeast, the bread rises slowly, so for home use exact measurements don't matter.
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