That’s because honey is sugar syrup with a liberal sprinkling of marketing. The sugar syrup they are blending it with doesn’t have the right marketing and is therefore not honey.
No, it's not. Honey is defined by the USDA as being flower nectar that's been processed by bees[1]. Artificial honey can not be called honey[2]. If they're mixing it with high fructose corn syrup, then there should be a way to scientifically determine that.
Oh, the USDA publishes a rule! Surely everyone will follow that and the problem is solved.
Unfortunately we get the behavior that we let people get away with. Regulators are asleep, courts let companies weasel their way around everything, and reality doesn't care about published rules and standards.
A 90s percent of honey is fructose, glucose, and water. A very high 90s percent of corn syrup is fructose, glucose, and water. Getting the ratios the same is trivial. There is nothing magical about fructose or glucose from different sources, they’re exactly the same simple molecule.
If you had very clean corn syrup, you could undetectably dilute honey and it would be quite the same. Lab tests being what they are these days, someone could probably make a part per billion analysis that would be very hard to evade, but the difference is emotional not practical.
People have wrong ideas that honey is so much healthier than corn syrup when it is indeed very similar. Not that i support selling corn syrup as honey, but it wouldn’t make any actual difference other than diluted flavor.
Orange juice is more than 90% water, but you would need to get your sense of taste checked if you confused it with sugar water.
By the same token if you can’t taste the difference between sugar syrup and honey, then you need to get your taste checked, or perhaps you’ve never had real honey.
The flavors in honey are also deeply affected by what the bees eat. Buckwheat honey is a totally different thing than Tupelo honey, and neither are anything like clover honey.
Even if you ignore all of the health claims, saying honey is just sugars and water, you are ignoring the fact that humans want more than nutrient paste.
Hoboy, don't get started on orange juice. The commercially-prepared stuff is also rather distantly-related to fresh-squeezed:
Once the juice is squeezed and stored in gigantic vats, they start removing oxygen. Why? Because removing oxygen from the juice allows the liquid to keep for up to a year without spoiling. But! Removing that oxygen also removes the natural flavors of oranges. Yeah, it’s all backwards. So in order to have OJ actually taste like oranges, drink companies hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that make perfumes for Dior, to create these “flavor packs” to make juice taste like, well, juice again.
And that's for product actually marketed as orange juice, rather than, say, a sweetened citrus-flavoured beverage, for which the first ingredient often is sugar and/or corn syrup, e.g.,
"True Orange Mango Orangeade":
Ingredients: Cane sugar, crystallized orange (ctiric acid, orange juice, orange oil), natural flavor, stevia leaf extract, beet juice and beta-carotene.
(Beet juice and stevia are both sweeteners, the first is effectively liquid sugar, the second is a non-caloric / low-caloric non-sugar sweetener.)
Take a holiday to New Zealand and try honey here. It’s definitely not adulterated because we don’t allow any honey imports. Try clover, Rewarewa, Manuka, and multiflora, you can taste a clear difference between each.
Of course they’ll likely be creamed honey rather than pourable, but that’s just a preference.
Oh absolutely, real honey has flavor differences en masse!
The worst we ever tried was pure Buckwheat honey. Very distinct. Sorta "refreshingly different" the first time you try it. For us personally, after that: toss.
We share more than 90% of our DNA with rats. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’d like to suggest there are some qualitative differences between myself and a literal rat.
Numerous studies have concluded that honey does have a better effect on health than the same amount of simple syrup, at least.
> It has been demonstrated that honey consumption can influence plasma lipid, glucose, and insulin levels through different biochemical mechanisms. The decrease in blood glucose may be due to the fact that honey has a stimulatory effect on insulin secretion and improves insulin sensitivity
If I'm rich in time and money enough to routinely take the time to wander down to my friendly beekeeper and buy their small-batch artisanal honey, for so many reasons I will live longer than someone who isn't.
Someone should randomize people to honey vs fake-honey-sugar-mix and settle the issue.
> Forty-eight articles published in 42 different journals were analyzed, with a total of 3655 subjects with 29.51 ± 21.51 years of age, of whom 1990 consumed or were treated with honey. Of the 3655 subjects, at least 1803 were women (two studies did not specify). The studies included different population groups (healthy subjects, overweight or obese subjects, diabetic subjects, subjects with cancer, children, etc.) and included more than 30 different types of honey. Although it is not a systematic review, the results of the PEDro scale regarding the quality of the articles were in the range of 6–10, with articles scoring 6 or higher being considered of good methodological quality.
