[HN Gopher] The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for ...
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The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 41 points
Date : 2025-07-04 11:04 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| cryptonector wrote:
| Really high sugar concentrations will pop the cells of any simple
| organisms.
| xattt wrote:
| </article>
| Terr_ wrote:
| I like to imagine it as humans stranded in a strange land where
| all the geography is dry cake. And _only_ dry cake.
| kragen wrote:
| No, low. High sugar concentrations mean low water activity,
| which osmotically pumps water _out_ of cells, not _into_ them,
| so they shrivel rather than popping.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The real secret is osmotic pressure.
| mhb wrote:
| Similarly, chocolate.
| dylan604 wrote:
| You can take honey that has crystalized and set it in sunlight
| to "melt" back into the gooey goodness, but you can't do that
| to chocolate that has that white powdery stuff on it.
| mhb wrote:
| Right. Once the undesirable crystals in chocolate have formed
| it has to be re-tempered to get the desirable ones to
| dominate. But it hasn't spoiled.
| quibono wrote:
| I've often wondered about this - is sunlight really all
| that's needed?
| liquidpele wrote:
| Heat is needed, not sunlight.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| The story misses that lactic acid bacteria are fairly common in
| honey and seem to be out competing other bacteria and have anti
| microbial effects.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7949542/
| kragen wrote:
| This story can be summarized as "Low water activity and low pH
| keep honey fresh permanently." The other 14 paragraphs are just
| filler. Moreover, even that summary is factually incorrect; low
| water activity and low pH don't come close to explaining honey's
| astounding shelf life, which amounts to centuries in many cases.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Preservation in particular
| mentions gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide produced by the
| bees' glucose oxidase, and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Medical_use_and_research also
| mentions its content of methylglyoxal, which damages DNA and
| cross-links proteins somewhat like formaldehyde, thus killing
| microorganisms; manuka honey is required to contain at least
| 85mg/kg of methylglyoxal, according to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81nuka_honey. I suspect that
| there is a great deal more research on the topic.
|
| It's disappointing to see such a low-quality article on the BBC
| website; I generally regard the BBC as a reliable source.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Are you sure this isn't just the Gell-Mann effect? It sounds
| like you're probably better informed about this than the
| typical person and might be expecting a lot more detail than a
| newspaper would be endeavoring to try to convey.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| I think the point is that the article is conveying too much
| of the wrong kind of details.
| kragen wrote:
| vlovich123 may be correct that I am giving the BBC too much
| credit in general. But I don't think I'm especially well-
| informed; I'd never heard of methylglyoxal before looking
| this up in Wikipedia.
|
| I agree that its focus is somewhat wrong. I don't think
| that the backgrounder on the importance of food
| preservation is _completely_ without value. It 's just that
| it's already fairly well known that food rots and why.
|
| My larger objection, though, is that there are important,
| well-established reasons for honey to be far less
| perishable than other substances of similar water activity
| and pH, and the article does not mention them even briefly.
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(page generated 2025-07-07 23:00 UTC)