[HN Gopher] The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for ...
___________________________________________________________________
The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 213 points
Date : 2025-07-04 11:04 UTC (4 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.
| xandrius wrote:
| I definitely have been in some countries where their desserts
| felt from a strange land indeed: everything dried :'(. I need
| moist.
| 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.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Thanks.
| kragen wrote:
| Sure!
| 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.
| bdamm wrote:
| You can zap it in the microwave for 10-15 seconds, but I
| always feel terribly guilty for some inexplicable reason.
| jfengel wrote:
| If you're looking to have a reason.... That's probably
| going to over-heat the honey, which comes at a cost to
| flavor.
|
| But your grocery store honey is already pasteurized.
| That's more controlled than your microwave, so if you
| were looking to feel guilty about something, save it for
| when your neighbor gives you some from her hive next
| door.
| tekla wrote:
| Bloom isn't spoilage.
| LandR wrote:
| Is it eatable though ?
|
| ANytime I've had chocolate that has the white stuff I've
| binned it. Even if it isn't spoiled, doesn't it taste bad ?
| abcd_f wrote:
| It's just fat.
| xandrius wrote:
| White stuff is just either fat or sugar bloom, due to
| changes of temperature.
|
| Not harmful. It's like the white "powder" on hard
| cheeses, which is just calcium crystalizing over time.
| Totally safe.
| mhb wrote:
| No. It doesn't taste bad, but the texture might not be as
| good.
| mhb wrote:
| Also, you can melt it and use it to make frosting,
| ganache or hot fudge sauce.
| xandrius wrote:
| The white stuff is just fat or sugar blooming, so you can
| totally melt down chocolate and be good to go.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Let's see, set a jar of honey in sunlight, or get out your
| double boiler to melt down chocolate and be sure to get out
| the molds that I'm sure everyone has.
|
| yeah, that's the same thing. roughly. but you'd be good to
| go to be sure
| 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/
| Peteragain wrote:
| I've recently been embracing the idea of co-evolutionary
| pressure. Reading the article I thought that if it was just the
| dryness, bacteria would have evolved to tap such a rich energy
| source. Hence the biology of bees must have something to do
| with the preservative nature of honey. I'm feeling vindicated!
| bob1029 wrote:
| I think co-evolution should be investigated for encoder-
| decoder architecture training.
|
| The idea being that you pair multiple decoders with each
| encoder, and multiple encoders with each decoder (randomly
| sample if large populations). The selective pressure is a
| feedback loop between the encoder and decoder populations
| that requires the members to produce and interpret the latent
| vector as well as possible. In theory, this creates a form of
| generalization pressure wherein the encoders and decoders
| must perform well with a wide range of possible up/down
| stream states. I think with large enough populations, this
| could be robust to premature convergence and overfitting.
| bux93 wrote:
| I remember playing around with RapidMiner about 10 years
| ago and it had a hyper parameter optimizing primitive that
| uses evolutionary search. It was quite pleasing. RapidMiner
| doesn't do any of the modern stuff though. Asking chatgpt
| turns up mostly pretty old (abandoned) projects from around
| 2017.
| 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.
| I think it's fine to have lots of the wrong kind of
| details, but it's not fine to omit the right ones.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >I think it's fine to have lots of the wrong kind of
| details, but it's not fine to omit the right ones.
|
| Who decides which are "wrong" and which are "right?"
| kragen wrote:
| The title of the article, "The chemical secrets that help
| keep honey fresh for so long," seems like a good
| criterion in this case.
| positr0n wrote:
| Isn't the entire point of the Gell Man amnesia effect that
| _all_ news is low quality, you just only realize it for
| topics you know a lot about?
|
| And OP evidently knows a lot about honey :)
| kragen wrote:
| I had a vague memory that it had some kind of antibacterial
| properties, but no, I don't know a lot about honey; I just
| went and looked it up in Wikipedia.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Sure although I interpret it a little bit differently. All
| news is low quality but raises the overall bar of ignorance
| for people not familiar with the topic. So experts get no
| value from them on topics they are familiar while improving
| their level of baseline ignorance on topics they aren't.
| kragen wrote:
| I think reading this article could result in acquiring
| the misconception that honey stays fresh for centuries
| only because it has low water activity and low pH,
| worsening your level of baseline ignorance and leading
| you to potentially significant false conclusions; for
| example, the conclusion that honey bandages are useless
| or harmful. I think that's the usual problem that Gell-
| Mann amnesia conceals: news that is so low quality that
| it actively makes you stupider when you read it.
| gerdesj wrote:
| "which amounts to centuries in many cases."
|
| Pretty sure I read about honey found in a Pharaoh's tomb -
| that's millennia, not centuries.
|
| Quick search:
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-science-be...
| kragen wrote:
| I edited "millennia" into "centuries" in my comment above
| because the Wikipedia article claimed those claims didn't pan
| out:
|
| > _(However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian
| tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances
| or only chemical traces.[29])_
|
| ...but the citation is from 01975.
|
| The Smithsonian page is a great link! It mentions that the pH
| of honey is 3-4.5 (another crucial fact omitted from the BBC
| article) and mentions the peroxide, but not the
| methylglyoxal.
|
| The Smithsonian article contains this link:
|
| > _Modern archeologists, excavating ancient Egyptian tombs,
| have often found something unexpected amongst the tombs'
| artifacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet
| still preserved_
|
| which goes to a Google Books page I can't see (perhaps
| because I'm in Argentina) of a book from 02006 that is
| apparently about beekeeping, not archaeology, called "Letters
| from the Hive", published by Random House Children's Books.
|
| The copy of the book that I've been able to get does talk
| extensively about the uses of honey in ancient Egypt, but,
| unless I missed it, doesn't mention pots of honey being found
| in tombs at all.
|
| Even if so, it's unclear whether the book would have evidence
| posterior to Wikipedia's 01975 citation; it isn't the kind of
| book that cites its sources.
| gerdesj wrote:
| I'm so sorry but I can't help myself: 01975 is the dialling
| code for somewhere in Aberdeenshire!
|
| WP: "(However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian
| tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other
| substances or only chemical traces.[29])"
|
| [29] is https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf - this
| does not look like a peer reviewed paper. They do look to
| be reputable and they refute some rubbish documented cases
| of ancient honey but not all of them.
|
| I'm going to call out the WP article as being factually
| wanting on that point.
| kragen wrote:
| Ha, I had no idea about Aberdeenshire!
|
| I agree that in 01975 peer review was not a given, but it
| does seem to be academic work, as opposed to a children's
| book.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| gwern FTW!
| martey wrote:
| > [29] is https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf -
| this does not look like a peer reviewed paper. They do
| look to be reputable and they refute some rubbish
| documented cases of ancient honey but not all of them.
|
| The Gwern link is just a PDF copy of an article from a
| 1975 issue of "Bee World": https://www.tandfonline.com/do
| i/abs/10.1080/0005772X.1975.11... I can't speak to the
| journal's rigor in the 1970s, but they seem like a more
| reliable source than any other mentioned in this
| discussion.
| kragen wrote:
| Also, peer review is almost unrelated to rigor. Plenty of
| sloppy crap gets peer reviewed, and, for example, none of
| Einstein's _annus mirabilis_ papers did.
| jfengel wrote:
| I don't see why anything other than low water and pH are
| necessary. Stories about ultra long lasting honey come from the
| desert, which will dessicate it further.
|
| (The stories about pyramid honey always imply that it's fresh
| and liquid. It's not. It's dried out and usually completely
| crystallized.)
|
| There may be other effects on top of that, but if you made a
| sucrose solution thick enough it too will last forever.
| kragen wrote:
| If you can get an aqueous solution of solids to completely
| crystallize (and sucrose does like to crystallize), it won't
| support microorganisms, but if it doesn't crystallize, it
| will have a critical "deliquescence relative humidity". When
| the relative humidity of the air is above the DRH+, the
| solution absorbs water from the air rather than giving up
| water to the air, and if there are crystals in it, they tend
| to shrink instead of growing.
|
| Different solutes have different DRHs, but there are many of
| them whose affinity for water is so strong that their DRH is
| so low that under normal circumstances they never completely
| dry out. Some of them are commonly used as desiccants, such
| as lye, calcium chloride, and magnesium chloride. In general,
| mixing solutes tends to impede crystallization, so more
| heterogeneous mixtures like honey tend to have lower DRH than
| more homogeneous mixtures like pure sucrose.
|
| (This is an engineering reason to add something like lemon
| juice when you make simple syrup: the citrate hydrolyzes some
| of the sucrose into glucose and fructose, greatly impeding
| crystallization and greatly improving your chances of having
| a pourable syrup when you want to use it next month.)
|
| Under many circumstances, honey will eventually absorb enough
| water from the air by this mechanism to permit the growth of
| yeasts and bacteria. But it takes a remarkably long time.
|
| ______
|
| + The DRH does vary with temperature, but in most cases only
| slightly over the human-survivable range, so you can say
| "CaCl2 has a DRH of about 40%" and be correct enough for many
| purposes.
| owenversteeg wrote:
| It'd be fascinating if something like methylglyoxal was
| responsible, but I doubt it. Molasses also has an extremely
| long shelf life, and it doesn't have any of honey's exotic
| constituents. I would bet it mostly comes down to water content
| and pH (and a sturdy, sealed container.)
|
| Personally, I would bet that certain wines have a longer shelf
| life than honey. The evidence for honey's stability on extreme
| time scales is scanty, lots of very poor quality sources and
| hearsay. Meanwhile, we have countless wines that are hundreds
| of years old and in excellent shape. It only takes a fairly
| small amount of degradation of one small component of honey to
| taste "off", and many of the components of honey are in their
| non-oxidized, non-heat damaged states. Contrast that with a
| wine such as Madeira, where the entire wine is intentionally
| heat-damaged and oxidized to produce the final product. I would
| put my money on the Madeira any day.
| kragen wrote:
| Can you make molasses bandages to speed wound healing,
| though? Honey really seems to have antimicrobial properties
| that go way beyond just low water activity and low pH, and in
| particular the peroxide production seems to be important.
|
| It does seem plausible that some wines might last longer than
| honey.
| owenversteeg wrote:
| After doing some more reading, I think you might be right.
| I've been looking at various sugary solutions such as
| molasses and it seems that it's not uncommon for them to be
| sold with mold inhibitors such as propanoic acid. I suspect
| the hydrogen peroxide might play a role, but it's not very
| stable, I wonder how long it lasts in the honey.
|
| I'm still putting my money on the wine as far as long term
| storage goes, but I think honey might have a solid second
| place above any other common foods. I've been trying to
| find others that might last a while but obviously most
| results these days are contentless slop or straight up
| fabrications. I did find one report of Irish chef Kevin
| Thornton trying 4,000 year old butter, unfortunately he
| described it as "rancid":
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p03yf4kj
| kragen wrote:
| I didn't know that about molasses! It wouldn't be
| surprising actually if bees were synthesizing
| specifically propanoate to add to the honey and that
| nobody had noticed yet. But there are probably other
| molecules that would work at lower doses that they might
| use instead.
| panabee wrote:
| Thank you both for an illuminating thread. Comments were
| concise, curious, and dense with information. Most
| notably, there was respectful disagreement and a
| levelheaded exchange of perspective.
| kragen wrote:
| Thank you! I try, but often I fail.
| kragen wrote:
| Oh, I should have mentioned that (according to, IIRC, the
| children's book cited in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44495658) some
| glucose oxidase remains in the honey, and when enough
| water gets into the honey for it to become active, it
| produces more hydrogen peroxide at that point. So the
| peroxide itself doesn't have to remain stable for
| centuries.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| Osmotic pressure? Ok I'll read the article.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Recently went through first aid training and the instructor
| claimed putting honey on wounds would help them heal faster.
|
| (Sample size 1) I tried it on myself and a wound that was
| stubborn about healing was better very quickly.
| carabiner wrote:
| Medical grade honey:
| https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/medical-grade-honey-...
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Which is ironically just honey that is filtered to remove
| plant pollen (a potential antigen), AFAIK.
| nullwarp wrote:
| I've had great success with using propolis[0] on burns and
| wounds. Definitely anecdotal but the ones I've used it on have
| definitely healed faster.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propolis
| filterfish wrote:
| https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD.
| ..
| filterfish wrote:
| I had a planter wart surgically removed which they packed with
| Manuka honey and because it's a deep open wound it needs to
| heal from the inside. I changed the dressing and repacked it
| every few days for weeks and the wound was absolutely pristine
| ever time.
|
| I live in the tropics where people die because due to infection
| which makes it even more interesting that they use honey.
| fsckboy wrote:
| _plantar_ wart. all wart removals should heal pristinely,
| warts are on only the outermost layers of skin above where
| scarring occurs.
| filterfish wrote:
| The wound was about 6mm deep on my heel and took months to
| heal properly. And yes I did check those homophones :-)
|
| And thanks for the other homophone correction!
| octo888 wrote:
| Surgical wart removal can involve some pretty deep
| incisions and month long recovery. Scars aren't unheard of
| as I understand it
|
| (And it can be futile ! The wart can easily come back)
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Pristine implies not only a lack of scarring, but no
| infection during the healing process.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >Honey in wound healing: An updated review
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8496555/
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| This article is missing what I think is a pretty important PSA on
| the topic of bacteria in honey:
|
| Honey commonly contains small amounts of the anaerobic bacteria
| Clostridium botulinum, which causes botulism.
|
| This is why you should not feed honey to infants, because their
| immune systems cannot safely handle any amount of it yet. Even
| though the levels apparently are small enough for the rest of
| humans to consume worry-free.
| repeekad wrote:
| same with immunocompromised folks, though all that only applies
| to raw honey; pasteurized honey is more common in grocery
| stores and totally safe
| AbortedLaunch wrote:
| I would not expect this to make a difference as
| pasteurization does not inactivate Clostridium endospores.
| cess11 wrote:
| It's pasteurised to stop you from making mead, not because it
| does anything to Clostridium spores.
| abcd_f wrote:
| Pasteurization doesn't in any way prevent honey from
| remaining fermentable.
| cess11 wrote:
| OK. So?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| So your claim is refuted
| hnfong wrote:
| Spores of Clostridium botulinum require temperatures way
| above boiling point to destroy. Pasteurization doesn't do
| anything to them.
| sl-1 wrote:
| In Finland honey is rarely pasteurized. It is seen as a
| quality defect if honey is heated after extraction from the
| hive. Heating is thought to destroy some of the beneficial
| compounds in honey.
|
| Similarly one should not put honey to too hot tea if one
| wants the benefits instead of just sugar.
| bregma wrote:
| Pasteurization would also destroy the delicate honey taste.
| It takes almost nothing to do that, and heating honey above
| about 40 C even for 30 seconds will kill any honeyness and
| all you have left is the sweet.
|
| I'll bet only the imported Chinese honey is pasteurized on
| the supermarket shelf. Most of that goes to industrial use
| anyway.
| johncole wrote:
| I remember having small kids we took this very seriously. I
| always wondered if this was just another overprotective order,
| or could really be an issue.
| loeg wrote:
| https://parentdata.org/honey-botulism-babies/
|
| > Infantile botulism is extremely rare. There are an
| estimated 100 cases per year in the U.S., among approximately
| 4 million children in the age range under 1. That's a risk of
| 1 in 40,000. This is somewhat less likely than the chance of
| visiting the ER for a blanket-related injury in a given year
| (yes, I looked that up, and I do think it's a good
| comparison).
|
| > ... In an estimated 20% of cases -- that's about 20 cases a
| year -- honey is one of the exposures. This doesn't
| necessarily mean that the botulism actually came from honey;
| it's just that because we know the spores can live in honey
| ... it seems possible.
|
| > At best, this suggests that by avoiding honey, you could
| lower the risk of infantile botulism from 1 in 40,000 to 1 in
| 50,000.
| wtvanhest wrote:
| I don't think these probabilities are correct. Every parent
| is told not to feed their under 1 year olds honey, many
| times.
|
| In an extreme example... only 20 parents fed their kids
| honey and 20 kids contracted botulism.
|
| That would be a 100% risk. Obviously in real life it's not
| 100% of kids, but still could be a meaningful percentage
| and likely higher than 1 in 50,000 for babies that eat
| honey.
| elmomle wrote:
| It is correct. They are considering the most extreme
| case; in the most extreme case, no non-botulism-infected
| infants eat honey, and honey was the cause of botulism
| for those 20 infants.
|
| If that is so, then completely removing honey exposure
| for infants would mean that 80 rather than 100 infants
| get botulism poisoning.
|
| So the new probability of contracting botulism is (80 /
| 100) * (old probability), and (80 / 100) * (1 / 40000) =
| 1 / 50000.
| yorwba wrote:
| There are no errors in the calculation, but it's wrong
| anyways because it calculates the answer to the wrong
| question. "At best" suggests this is the largest possible
| effect, but it is the smallest possible. To get an upper
| bound estimate on the usefulness of avoiding honey, you
| would need to know how many parents of 1-year-olds are
| avoiding honey.
| wtvanhest wrote:
| Thanks! You said that much better than I did.
| mkbkn wrote:
| Feeding honey to newborn babies is a common practice in
| India. Sometimes it's their first ever food.
| mrweasel wrote:
| We waited until our kid was four, just to be safe, but
| it's was also honey from our own bees, so I somehow felt
| it less safe.
|
| Kid went full Winnie-the-Pooh on the jar.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| "OK, sister bees, now remember: this season we'll be
| feeding the hu-man's child, so wipe your feet before
| entering the hive, and if you feel the sniffles coming
| on, Don't Make Honey!"
| AyyEye wrote:
| It's more about the below minimum wage people harvesting,
| bottling for transport, transporting, then bottling for
| sale than the bees themselves. More intermediate steps to
| introduce contamination and more potentially contaminated
| sources all mixed together.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Yeah, and their infant mortality is on par with Sub-
| Saharan Africa.
|
| "The second most common prelacteal feed is honey, a
| delicious natural sweetener. Numerous studies [29,30]
| have shown that the ingestion of honey under one year of
| age is linked with infant botulism, a disease that
| results in a blockade of voluntary motor and autonomic
| functions. Apart from this, other prelacteal feeds get
| contaminated due to unhygienic environment, especially in
| rural India and in urban slums, resulting in infantile
| diarrhea. Thus, a wide range of prelacteal feeds and the
| introduction of early supplements result in recurrent
| diarrhea with multiple illness finally ending lives
| because of inaccessibility and unaffordibility of
| treatment and delayed or inappropriate care seeking
| behavior."
|
| Rohini Ghosh - Child mortality in India: a complex
| situation (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12519-012-0331-y)
|
| The paper lists a bunch of other traditional practices
| that have deleterious effects on the infants' health,
| such as putting unsanitary herbal concoctions on the
| babies navel while it's still healing, etc.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > result in recurrent diarrhea
|
| This mind-blowing statistic stays in my head:
|
| " _Diarrhoea is a leading killer of children, accounting
| for approximately 9 per cent of all deaths among children
| under age 5 worldwide in 2021. This translates to over
| 1,200 young children dying each day_ " -
| https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/diarrhoeal-
| diseas...
|
| Almost one per minute.
| furyofantares wrote:
| > Every parent is told not to feed their under 1 year
| olds honey, many times.
|
| Huh, I think this might be my first time hearing it.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I'm not sure that number is meaningful without knowing how
| many parents are giving their infants honey. Granted I'm in
| a high-income, high-education area, but at least in my
| bubble, "don't give babies honey" seems to be common
| knowledge, so it's possible there are relatively few
| instances and a high percentage result in complications.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Whole food crunchy Instagram grifters push that infants
| should eat honey
|
| Though tbh do people really eat that much honey? I only
| have some in my kitchen to have with tea when I have a
| cold. Other then that I almost never use it.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Breakfast buns go well with honey. Often switched up with
| jam every few days. Also pancakes and waffles are great
| with honey from time to time when I'm tired of maple
| syrup. Jam works too.
| alwa wrote:
| Oh man buttered toast with honey... English muffins...
| But most controversially, and most deliciously, it
| dresses up a pizza something lovely...
|
| For me the shift happened when I stopped thinking of it
| as a sweetener for liquids and started thinking about it
| as a condiment to deploy conservatively but frequently.
| borski wrote:
| Hot honey on pizza is the BEST
| coldtea wrote:
| The United States is the second largest honey consumer
| behind China according to the latest data available from
| the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization
| (FAO) in 2019. In 2021, consumption increased 8 percent
| from the previous year. Between 1991 to 2021, the average
| rate of growth is 10.7 million pounds per year. This
| translates to about 1.9 pounds per capita of honey
| consumption in 2021 compared with 1.2 pounds per capita
| in the early 1990s.
| borski wrote:
| Yes. I literally collect different honey (including from
| my own hives) and my love of it is very strong.
|
| And no, I don't have diabetes yet. I'm not insane about
| it, but I do have it frequently.
| loeg wrote:
| (Diabetes isn't caused by sugar intake.)
| borski wrote:
| Not directly, no. But indirectly, by increasing weight
| gain and eventual metabolic syndrome, if eaten in
| excess... which was my point :)
| loeg wrote:
| Type 1 isn't caused by any of this stuff. Type 2 is
| caused by excess body fat -- consuming too many calories
| in total over a long period of time. It doesn't matter
| what the composition of those calories is. You can eat
| mostly sugar, at maintenance levels, and never be at risk
| for T2D.
| cjrp wrote:
| No honey with greek yoghurt?
| loeg wrote:
| I think the rate was similar before we told parents not
| to give their infants honey. So we sort of have an A/B
| comparison.
|
| > Some people have pointed out that botulism cases
| haven't fallen over time despite parents being told not
| to give kids honey.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| A truncated version of Bayes used here:
|
| A=Infantile botulism
|
| B=Kid eats honey
|
| P(A|!B) = P(A) * (1 - P(B|A))
|
| Not sure it is correct!
|
| The ACX signature says:
|
| P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B)
|
| So
|
| P(A|!B) = [P(A)*P(!B|A)]/P(!B)
|
| = (1/40000) * .8 / ???
|
| ??? Is very small though if people take the medical advice.
|
| Their number assumes nobody follows the advice!
| ByteDrifter wrote:
| When my kid was under one year old, we were especially careful
| about this we didn't let her have even a tiny bit of honey. It
| really drove home the idea that everything has two sides. Honey
| can sit on a shelf for years without spoiling, but it can still
| be dangerous for the most vulnerable. It's a reminder that just
| because something is natural and long lasting doesn't mean it's
| safe for everyone.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Honey contains _spores_ of Clostridium botulinum, not live
| bacteria. And as such, honey cannot in itself cause botulism.
|
| But the intestinal microbiot of infants (not their immune
| system) is not necessarily developed enough, and as such
| Clostridium botulinum can colonize their intestine (it strives
| in anaerobic environment) and then they can develop a special
| kind of botulism where the toxin is actually produced in their
| own body (as opposed to ingested, like in regular botulism).
|
| It's not the only way a child can stumble upon the bacteria's
| spore though.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| You state honey cannot cause botulism, and in the very next
| sentence explain how it can.
|
| I think you're making a novel semantic difference, which is
| irrelevant to anyone puking their guts out from botulism.
| alanpearce wrote:
| I for one found the technical difference interesting
| RataNova wrote:
| It's one of those things where honey is both a wonder of nature
| and a reminder that biology doesn't always play nice with
| everyone
| OJFord wrote:
| Americans/people on the internet worry far far far too much
| about botulism.
| Jun8 wrote:
| Same principle, reducing water activity (aw), is how Nutella
| keeps fresh for so long without refrigeration: its water activity
| is even lower than honey. Most bacteria need an aw of around 0.85
| to thrive, Nutella's aw is around 0.4, honey's around 0.5-0.6.
| Peanut butter is 0.7, so it stays fresh for relatively long, too.
|
| Here's the definition of water activity from
| FDA:https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-
| and-c...
| bob1029 wrote:
| Managing moisture levels is probably the #1 way to control
| microbial activity.
|
| You see the exact same idea in HVAC - if you can keep the
| relative humidity below 50%, mold growth becomes nearly
| impossible.
|
| In laundry care, the dryer does all of the sanitizing action.
|
| Etc.
| computerphage wrote:
| Why is it relative humidity that matters here instead of
| absolute humidity?
| bob1029 wrote:
| Relative humidity is an easier unit to work with because it
| auto scales with temperature.
| OJFord wrote:
| I think GP knows that and it's exactly their point: why
| do you need slightly less water to stop mould growth as
| the temperature slightly drops? (If anything, one might
| expect the opposite anecdotally - it's e.g. hot _and_
| humid bathrooms that are particularly prone.)
| stinos wrote:
| In the end drying grass to create hay is also the same
| principle: dry enough (say < 15% water) and it doesn't do much
| at all, being pretty dead. Higher and you get all kinds of life
| having its go at it.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| i grow weed( legal here) and its the same. last two weeks
| moisture and temp down because of fungi. and when harvesting
| the goal is getting the humidity of the buds down to 12%
| fast. the difference is so obviuos. sometimes in the summer
| heat and humidity are out of controll and thats when buds
| rotten :/
| cjrp wrote:
| > Higher and you get all kinds of life having its go at it.
|
| Yep, and you end up with silage if it's stored anaerobically.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| This is something that I think about sometimes. Life on Earth
| has had billions of years and expanded to fill so many niches,
| but they're nearly all damp niches. Nothing has ever really
| managed to really thrive in deserts. Sure, there are a few
| cacti, succulents, a bit of scrub, a few palms and rodents and
| a few birds that eke out an existence. But really it's mostly
| barren, compared to temperate or tropical climates where nature
| takes over land entirely within years. Yes, the soil in deserts
| is poor, but that's a consequence: it was poor everywhere
| before plants conditioned it. It's just that evolution has
| never in a billion years hit on a way to capitalise on all that
| sunlight and those day/night temperature gradients without
| enough water to float all the microbiology in.
|
| Probably just as well (invoke some kind of anthropic principle
| here if you like) or we'd have, say, fungus there can quickly
| eat dry things and storing food or building anything with
| longevity would be much harder.
| ViscountPenguin wrote:
| Cacti aswell, mostly thrive because of desert floods. They've
| evolved to quickly suck up as much water as they can, then
| they use a special acidic form of photosynthesis to make it
| last as long as possible.
|
| Different desert plants use similar ideas, the Aussie outback
| for example blooms for about a month after a given flood,
| reproduces, then dies out near completely except around the
| occasional waterhole.
| highfrequency wrote:
| More counterintuitively: why hasn't any major bacteria
| evolved to feast on lipids like oils? Much denser source of
| energy than desert dirt.
| meindnoch wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipophilic_bacteria
| jxf wrote:
| There are many such bacteria, some of which are living in
| and on your skin right now.
| boilerupnc wrote:
| Related good read[0] - "I contain Multitudes"
|
| [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27213168-i-contain-
| multi...
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| If there were an evolutionary advantage for more things to
| being in an arid region over being in a place with abundant,
| easily accessible water, I reckon the niche would have been
| filled. the natural world isn't really "interested", for lack
| of a better term, in maximal efficiency outside the context
| of following the path of least resistance in any given
| domain. Lightning might strike your chimney even tho there's
| a giant metal tower 300 feet in the air a quarter mile down
| the road that appears to be a much better path to ground.
| loudmax wrote:
| There is plenty of natural selection pressure on not being
| eaten. If a mold or something could evolve to live off of a
| dry atmosphere plus sunlight and whatever minerals it can
| eek out of rocks, it could blanket millions of square
| kilometers of desert. Presumably other living things would
| find it hard to digest because its protein and chemical
| structures are so different. Nature is constantly finding
| weird little niches at the edge of sustainability.
| Waterless deserts should present an enormous opportunity
| for something to fill, but it hasn't happened.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Except in science fiction (so far); see, for example,
| "Dragon's Egg," Robert L. Forward's superb 1980 novel of
| life on a neutron star with surface gravity 67 billion
| times that of Earth:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg
| barrenko wrote:
| May be unrelated, but it's also kinda funny how to cut /
| process / shape stone and rock you need a crap load of water,
| all the drills and saws for stone are wet in a way.
| felbane wrote:
| You can cut and shape rock with chisels. Isn't the water
| used primarily for dust control in powered stone
| drills/saws?
| bookofjoe wrote:
| And, WAY back in the day, other rocks.
|
| >The models estimated that Oldowan stone tools originated
| 2.617-2.644 million years ago, 36,000 to 63,000 years
| earlier than current evidence. The Acheulean's origin was
| pushed back further by at least 55,000 years to
| 1.815-1.823 million years ago.
|
| https://www.kent.ac.uk/news/science/28246/the-worlds-
| earlies...
|
| >Statistical inference of earlier origins for the first
| flaked stone technologies
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00
| 472...
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Cooling, lubrication, debris removal and dust control.
| Mostly in that order.
|
| But yeah, you're completely right about the chisel.
| Hammer and chisel is how we've processed rocks for most
| of history (all the way back to flint knapping).
|
| Wet processing for tile/stone is really only about 100
| years old, since we didn't have a usable cutting abrasive
| until diamond blades came around in the late 1800s.
|
| ---
|
| All that aside, the problem with a hammer & chisel is
| that it's hard to be precise. It's not impossible, but
| it's definitely a skill requiring mastery.
|
| If we expand the scope a little and include ceramics -
| then yes, we did need quite a bit of water.
|
| Brick, Clay, Cement, etc - they were all good
| alternatives to chiseling stone to get a very hard,
| stone-like material in a very specific shape, and they
| all require good amounts of water.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| These days, with high-power cutting tools also for
| cooling. If you have a 50 HP saw, that energy has to go
| somewhere, and it doesn't all go into the dust and get
| carried away. If carbide blades get too hot, the solder
| melts and the brazed inserts fall out, and for steel,
| carbide and diamonds, the hotter they get the softer they
| get and and the faster the tool wears.
|
| And other than the cost of the tools, there is one thing
| harder to drill than a rock, and that's a rock with the
| previous drill bit's carbide insert stuck at the bottom
| of the hole!
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| Even then, you don't have to spend much time in a desert to
| realise that what does grow is in low lying places where
| there's water underground, or where brief rains collect.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| > Life on Earth has had billions of years and expanded to
| fill so many niches, but they're nearly all damp niches.
| Nothing has ever really managed to really thrive in deserts.
|
| By definition, the desert "niche" IS filled. It has as much
| life as it can support. That doesn't mean wall-to-wall
| forest; you wouldn't expect to find that covering a field of
| barely weathered granite, either.
|
| All life on Earth uses water to transport chemicals and ions
| across its cells. Period. It's one immutable requirement of
| life on Earth.
|
| I wonder if there's some general mathematical description one
| could form of the biomass per acre versus water content of
| the "surface soil". The oceans provide the extreme, but even
| then there are "biodeserts" far from land where there are
| insufficient nutrients (organic chemicals, probably) to keep
| even algae going.
| some_random wrote:
| How do you know that that "It has as much life as it can
| support"? What would an unfilled niche look like?
| serf wrote:
| an unfilled niche would have the known properties of life
| with resources so bounding that there isn't a strict need
| for competition for survival. (a brand new uncovered dish
| of agar media)
|
| a populated biome has an active +- exchange of resources
| between participants that facilitates the need for
| competition due to resource bounds. (the rain forest,
| most of the biological world)
|
| a sterile biome has no known properties of life, and no
| known participants. The participants that are there
| struggle to exist or are in some form of stasis to
| survive the condition. (a brand-new sealed blood vacuum
| vial.)
|
| as for 'as much as it can support', i'm unaware of how to
| determine an optimal maxima for biological growth
| independent of species or environment. Maybe some exotic
| sphere-packing type idea might work with a reward
| function for 'resources' ? I don't know.
| some_random wrote:
| Thank you, and I knew all that time studying spherical
| cows would come in handy one day!
| BobbyJo wrote:
| I think you missed the point of parent's comment.
|
| > All life on Earth uses water to transport chemicals and
| ions across its cells. Period. It's one immutable
| requirement of life on Earth.
|
| They were pondering this. With billions of years of
| evolution, life has found no way around this, and that's
| interesting.
|
| That's all they were saying.
| Daisywh wrote:
| I'd be curious to see if similar principles could be applied to
| non food preservation. Nature's solutions often scale better than
| synthetic ones, especially when stability over long timeframes is
| needed.
| RataNova wrote:
| Imagine a honey-inspired environment for stabilizing sensitive
| compounds or preserving biological samples without
| refrigeration
| IAmBroom wrote:
| That's what honey-preserved foods are: biological samples
| without refrigeration.
| ethan_smith wrote:
| Honey's hydrogen peroxide production and hygroscopic properties
| have already inspired antimicrobial coatings for medical
| devices and water-resistant biomaterials for tissue
| engineering.
| montakaoh wrote:
| reminder that there's a lot of fake honey that gets put on shelf
| out there! probably doesn't last as long either
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej6WVP7cxXQ
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> This doesn't mean that honey can withstand all challenges to
| freshness. Once a jar of honey is open, its surface is being
| regularly exposed to the air, and dipping licked spoons in will
| bring bacteria and moisture that weren't there when the jar was
| sealed.
|
| I have plenty of observational, empirical data that contradicts
| this apparently theoretical statement. Not just licked spoons but
| breakfast knives with bits of toasted bread and peanut/butter,
| Greek yogurt, French moldy goat's cheese, bits of tart,
| croisssants or other confectionary, etc. All of those can be
| detected in significant concentrations in my honey jars. Not to
| mention that simply screwing a lid on an already-opened jar
| doesn't quite seal it, certainly not firmly enough to cut off the
| oxygen from it.
|
| Yet I have never known honey to spoil. I mean it's quite
| remarkable. I think I have seen honey that has stayed at the
| bottom of a jar for years and it just doesn't go bad. I wouldn't
| _eat_ it, because it tends to look a bit bleugh, but it won 't go
| off (and that's how it ends up staying in the jar for so long).
| xandrius wrote:
| Definitely give a little love to your honey jars, it does sound
| like the relationship is quite one-directional. Even cleaning
| the spoon/knife before interacting with the jar would increase
| the long-term stability of the relationship and it's just a
| nice thing to do for a SO.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Indeed it is. I'm not the one not cleaning the utensils
| before dipping them in btw ;)
| pyman wrote:
| > toasted bread and peanut/butter, Greek yogurt, French
| moldy goat's cheese, bits of tart, croisssants or other
| confectionary
|
| You turned your kitchen into a bed and breakfast, though
| you make it sound like a microbiology lab :)
| RataNova wrote:
| My honey jars basically turn into forensic time capsules of
| breakfast past, and still nothing grows
| amelius wrote:
| But the same holds for my sugar jar.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Are you all barbarians?
|
| Nothing but clean spoons go in my sugar jar, and I rarely
| dip out honey with anything but its own dipper - which
| never touches food.
|
| Reginald, bring me my fainting couch, stat!
| AdamN wrote:
| We are truly surrounded by heathens. A soiled yogurt
| spoon in the honey jar?!?!?
|
| [I'm kind of being whimsical here but c'mon - get a
| squeeze bottle of honey if you can't handle keeping the
| jar clean plz]
| n4r9 wrote:
| Likewise. For some reason the article ignores the raft of
| antibacterial compounds found in honey:
|
| > Various components contribute to the antibacterial efficacy
| of honey: the sugar content; polyphenol compounds; hydrogen
| peroxide; 1,2-dicarbonyl compounds; and bee defensin-1. All of
| these elements are present at different concentrations
| depending on the source of nectar, bee type, and storage. These
| components work synergistically, allowing honey to be potent
| against a variety of microorganisms including multidrug
| resistant bacteria and modulate their resistance to
| antimicrobial agents.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8071826/
| RataNova wrote:
| Pretty wild how bees basically invented a biochemical
| preservation system thousands of years before we had food science
| labs
| filterfish wrote:
| Millions of years!
| pyman wrote:
| The fact that they navigate by memorising visual landmarks
| like trees, buildings, and flowers to recognise familiar
| routes is unbelievable
| jsilence wrote:
| Amazing what well trained small neural networks can
| achieve.
| pyman wrote:
| Associative learning
| mr_toad wrote:
| I think the most interesting thing about them is that they
| can communicate the location of flowers to other bees.
| SeanDav wrote:
| I used to keep a few bee hives until I started getting
| increasingly severe reactions to bee stings, so reluctantly quit
| before I had an anaphylactic reaction.
|
| Utterly fascinating and wonderful hobby and contributes towards
| the environment, while having a delicious outcome. Could not
| recommend enough!
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