"A study published over the summer suggests that bees do better on honey than on HFCS."

This study found a number of immune system genes and genes aimed at detoxing non-nutritive food elements were active when bees were fed honey but not active when fed HFCS.  The authors leaped to the dubious conclusion that this indicated honey as being the more healthy feed.

A great many, probably most, genes are under active control.  It would be a total waste of metabolic energy to have them on when they are not needed.  Rather they are expressed when some stimulant triggers expression.  Some of these control mechanisms are well understood.  For instance digestion of lactose by e coli.  Most control elements are not understood at all which is why for practical purposes no diseases have been solved at all by knowing the human genome, unlike what was promised to justify the project which involved spending a few billion $ of public money.

Honey contains a variety of polyterpenes, alkaloids and nitrogen containing aromatics depending on the nectar source.  Plants produced most of these compounds because they were toxic to insects and acted as natural insecticides or insect feeding repellents.  These are not digestible foods nor are they vitamins.  Rather, bees need to either degrade them into things the bees can use such as acetate or degrade them to compounds which can be easily excreted.  Such substances should be expected to trigger activity in a variety of genes to promote their destruction.  As HFCS does not contain such impurities the genes would not be triggered into an on state.

I see nothing at all in this work that shows honey is a more healthy food than HFCS as the authors attempt to claim.  I will be the first to admit that turning on such genes full blast can be of benefit in the presence of toxins.  For instance in human health there are some poisons for which the antidote turns on detox genes full blast which results in destruction of the toxin.  One antidote of this type which has been used in humans is DDT.

Dick


" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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