Bob Harrison said:

> I quote from page 45 of the book "Honey and your Health" by Beck and Smedley
> a quote by Dr. F.G. Banting in 1929.

> "In the U.S. the incidence of DIABETES has increased proportionately with
> the per capita consumption of cane sugar. In the heating and
> recrystalization of the natural sugar cane, something is altered which
> leaves the refined product a DANGEROUS FOODSTUFF".

The quote above is 100% fact-free pure poppycock.
It exceeds the FDA-recommended minimum daily adult allowance
for "unadulterated horse manure" by a wide percentage.

I don't care who might have said it.  It's wrong.  Completely wrong.

Refined cane sugar is no more or less "dangerous" than pure honey.

Refined cane sugar is nothing but crystallized sucrose.
Sucrose is glucose and fructose, bound together by chemical bonds.

The sugar refining process "alters" nothing.  In fact, the refining process is
an excellent way to insure that one removes everything except the sucrose.
If there were impurities, one would not get tidy little consistent white crystals.

Honey is also mostly glucose and fructose, but in the form of separate sugars
rather than bound into sucrose. Honey also contains a small amount of
sucrose (larger percentages of sucrose result from specific nectar sources,
such as orange blossom honey).

From your body's point of view, there is absolutely no difference between
the glucose and fructose found in honey, and the glucose and fructose that
results when it breaks down cane sugar.

There is also no difference at all from your body's point of view between the
glucose it gets from cane sugar, the glucose from honey, or the glucose from
a bowl of pasta, a potato, a beer, or any other form of carbohydrate.

Carbohydrates are starches, which your body breaks down into (surprise!) glucose.

The hydrolysis of starch is done by a process called "amylases". With the aid of
an amylase (such as pancreatic amylase), water molecules break the chain of
sugars that make up a starch, and produce a mixture of glucose and maltose.
("Maltose" is nothing but pairs of glucose molecules, resulting from starch "digestion".)

It is funny that this thread should appear on Bee-L just now, as I recently drafted an
article intended for Bee Culture about sugars, artificial sweeteners, the "health marketing"
associated with sweeteners, and where honey stands in all the noise, confusion, and
outright fraud.  When one is married to a serious baker, the holidays force one to do
extensive "quality control testing" of a variety of sweet things as they exit the ovens, so
I had ample opportunity to think about the various "sweeteners" lined up on the pantry shelves.

Most of the increases in diabetes and obesity come from MASSIVE OVER-INDULGENCE
in sugars and carbohydrates.  There are, of course, a small number of people who were dealt
very bad hands of genetic cards, and are diabetic or obese for reasons beyond their personal control.

        jim  (who had an unbelievably attractive biochem instructor, and paid rapt attention)