Putting honey in tea is a much healthier choice than using sugar. You may be wondering why, considering that honey has just as high of a sugar content as the sugar that you would add to your tea. The makeup of honey and sugar are slightly different. Both have fructose and glucose.
Though honey is high in sugar and calories, it's still a better choice than refined sugar. While refined sugar brings little to the table in terms of nutrition, honey provides antioxidants — including phenolic acids and flavonoids ( 3 , 4 ).
Honey Health Benefits
"Honey's advantages over sugar include a slightly lower glycemic index (i.e. it doesn't affect your blood-sugar levels as much)," Dr. Dixon says. "It also contains more vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, such as calcium, potassium, vitamin C, zinc, phenolic acids, and flavonoids."
Sweetening tea with honey is a common practice. Honey is a natural and unprocessed product and has 30% more sweetening power than conventional sugar. So a small amount of honey in your tea will have the same sweetening effect as table sugar.
Honey has many benefits, both when consumed on its own and when added to tea. Honey is a natural antibacterial, so it can help fight off infection. It's also a great source of antioxidants and can help boost your immune system. honey is also thought to help relieve coughs and sore throats.
Regular consumption of green tea with honey exterminates toxins from the body, replacing it with healthy minerals and vitamins. Both honey & green tea are rich in antioxidants that help renew skin cells giving it a glowing and younger look.
Using Honey In Your Tea
Honey tastes sweeter than sugar, and a little goes a long way. One teaspoon of honey per cup of tea is a good rule of thumb. Make sure to add the honey after the leaves have had a chance to steep and the water has cooled slightly.
Honey, when mixed with hot water, can become toxic
Turns out, honey should never be warmed, cooked, or heated under any condition. A study published in the journal AYU found that at a temperature of 140 degrees, honey turns toxic.
You can use honey, xylitol, liquorice root, milk, agave nectar, or molasses to sweeten your tea. Each of these sugar alternatives has its unique flavour and health benefits.
At around 22 calories per teaspoon, honey is slightly higher in calories than sucrose. It consists primarily of sugar and should be used sparingly. This is especially true if you have health concerns such as diabetes, heart disease, or obesity. Honey may be dangerous for infants younger than a year.
Is it better than sugar? Honey has a lower GI value than sugar, meaning that it does not raise blood sugar levels as quickly. Honey is sweeter than sugar, so you may need less of it, but it does have slightly more calories per teaspoon so it's wise to keep a close eye on your portion sizes.
Brown sugar is definitely a healthier option than refined white sugar. It is processed in a completely natural way to maintain as much of the sugarcane's natural nutrition as possible, including vitamins and minerals.
Honey is still a form of sugar and intake should be moderate. The American Heart Association recommends that women get no more than 100 calories a day from added sugars; men no more than 150 calories a day. This is a little over two tablespoons for women and three tablespoons for men.
05/7It can lead to weight gain
If you are on a weight loss diet, it's extremely essential to control the amount of honey you eat. As the excess calories, sugar and carbohydrates present in honey can backfire your weight loss goals.
Can honey reduce belly fat? Yes. Drinking honey with warm water mixed with lemon juice or cinnamon helps in losing belly fat. You can do a few exercises to lose belly fat for more effectiveness [9].
Almost any type of tea offers nutritional and antioxidant benefits for your body, but additives like sugar and milk can offset these natural advantages. Sugar in any beverage adds empty calories, and studies have shown that added milk (even from non-dairy sources) actively reduces recorded health benefits.
Add milk to give your tea more body and creaminess. Unsweetened milk alternatives like almond milk allow the flavor of the tea to shine through without being overshadowed by sugar. Save your sweet tooth for a side of tea cakes and keep the sugar out of your mug.
Cancels out any benefits of tea
Sugar cancels out the benefits of tea. Tea is good for your body because it has antioxidants in it. But when you add sugar to your tea, you are adding empty calories. This means that sugar doesn't have many good things in it for your body.
First, let's assuage the most serious concern – no, heating honey will not turn it toxic and kill you. Heating up raw honey will change the makeup of the honey, and potentially weaken or destroy enzymes, vitamins, minerals, etc (more on this in a second) but it will not give you a horrible disease or poison you.
Heating honey higher than 140 degrees F for more than 2 hours will cause rapid degradation. Heating honey higher than 160 for any time period will cause rapid degradation and caramelization. Generally any larger temperature fluctuation (10°C is ideal for preservation of ripe honey) causes decay.
As per the National Center for Biotechnology, heating honey causes adverse effects. Cooking honey lowers its quality, and it loses essential enzymes and nutrients. In fact, heated honey has high chances of affecting the body and can be fatal as well.
Drinking a cup of tea is counted as a water intake and just to make sure that you are on the healthy side of drinking it, drink it without any added preservative or processed sugar.
Refined sugars
However, refined sugar, or white sugar, has zero nutrients.
Fructose in processed foods may be the worst for health
Your body converts fructose to glucose in the liver to use it for energy. Excess fructose from processed foods and beverages places a burden on your liver, which may lead to a series of metabolic problems ( 16 ).