Raw Honey: Is It Good for You? 7 Amazing Facts
October 25, 2025For thousands of years, honey has been valued as more than food — it’s been medicine, currency, even sacred offering. Yet in a world of refined sugars and synthetic sweeteners, people still ask a simple question: is honey really good for you?
The truth is fascinating. Real, raw honey is a living product of nature — complex, traceable, and full of stories that connect bees, plants, and people. Here are seven remarkable facts about raw honey, each supported by scientific research or authoritative sources. It is important to note that commercially processed honey does not bring the same benefits as raw unpasteurised honey.
1. Raw Honey Is Good For You Because It Never Spoils
Archaeologists have discovered sealed jars of honey in ancient Egyptian tombs, more than 3,000 years old - still perfectly edible.
Why? Honey creates an environment where bacteria and mould cannot grow. Its low water content (around 17%), acidity (pH about 3.9), and the slow production of hydrogen peroxide make it self-preserving.
When bees add the enzyme glucose oxidase to nectar, it converts glucose into gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide — a mild natural antiseptic. According to Brudzynski & Sjaarda (FEMS Microbiology Letters, 2014), this trace hydrogen peroxide is “a key factor responsible for the antibacterial stability of most honeys.”
Together, these properties give honey one of the longest natural shelf lives of any food on Earth.
2. Raw Honey Is Good For You Because Scientists Have Identified More Than 180 Compounds In Raw Honey
Raw honey is one of nature’s most chemically rich foods. The European Commission’s review (Anklam, 1998, Journal of Food Chemistry, 63:549-562) confirmed that over 180 different substances have been identified in raw honey.
These include sugars (mainly fructose and glucose), organic acids, amino acids such as proline, enzymes like invertase and glucose oxidase, minerals, phenolic compounds, and trace vitamins.
In the words of Dr. Eva Anklam, “Honey is not just a mixture of sugars — it is a complex natural product derived from plant nectar, transformed and enriched by bees.”
This complexity explains why no two honeys taste or behave exactly alike.
3. Raw Honey Is Good For You Because The Colour and Flavour Reflect the Flowers Bees Visit
Honey’s flavour, aroma, texture and nutritional properties depend entirely on its floral source. Lighter honeys, such as acacia or citrus, tend to be mild; darker varieties, like heather or rainforest honeys, carry deeper, maltier tones and higher mineral content.
Latin American forest honeys often come from diverse wild flora, giving them extraordinary depth and character rarely found in monocrop landscapes. The shade in your jar is more than colour — it’s a fingerprint of the land itself.
4. Raw Honey Is Good For You Because Bees Visit Around Two Million Flowers to Make One Jar
To fill a single 227 gram jar of raw honey, bees must gather nectar from roughly two million blossoms — the lifetime work of about a dozen bees.
Each worker makes dozens of trips per day, visiting up to 100 flowers each time. According to the US Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), bees may fly over 55,000 miles collectively for 500g of honey.
Every spoonful you consume is the result of an astonishing collaboration between sunlight, plants and one of nature’s hardest-working creatures.
5. Raw Honey Is Good For You Because Raw Honey’s Gentle Acidity Gives It Its Tang and Stability
Raw honey’s mild acidity doesn’t just prevent spoilage — it’s also responsible for its subtle tang. Research published in the Journal of Food Science (2018) identified gluconic acid as one of the main organic acids in honey, formed naturally by the enzyme glucose oxidase.
This acid, along with others such as acetic and citric acid, helps maintain honey’s freshness and balance its sweetness — giving raw honey its distinctive, rounded flavour profile.
6. Raw Honey Is Good For You Because Raw Honey Retains Living Enzymes Lost in Heating
Most supermarket honeys are pasteurised (heated to around 70 °C) to make them smoother and clearer, but heat destroys most of honey’s delicate enzymes.
A review by Bogdanov et al. (Apidologie, 1999) found that pasteurisation markedly reduced two key enzymes — diastase and invertase — that bees use to break down nectar.
Raw, unpasteurised honey retains these enzymes and the subtle aromas they create, giving it more complexity and a sense of life that processed syrups simply can’t match.
7. Raw Honey Is Good For You Because Every Honey Reflects the Landscape It Comes From
Each honey carries what experts call terroir — the taste of its environment. Pollen analysis, known as melissopalynology, allows scientists to identify exactly which plants bees visited.
The International Honey Commission uses this method to verify authenticity and botanical origin. That’s how you can trace an Andean wildflower honey to its mountain slopes, or a Brazilian rainforest honey to the trees that fed its bees.
When you buy single-origin raw honey, you’re not just tasting sweetness — you’re tasting a landscape.
Conclusion: Nature’s Original Sweetness
So, is raw honey good for you? Without doubt, raw honey is the ultimate superfood and it beats every other type of food.
It is pure, unrefined and made by one of the most vital creatures on Earth. It holds centuries of craft, chemistry and connection in each spoonful.
Every jar tells a story: of forests in bloom, of bees in flight, of something ancient that still feels new every morning.
When you choose raw organic Latin American honey, you’re not just buying sweetness — you’re honouring a relationship between people, plants and the planet.
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