The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long
Honey commonly contains small amounts of the anaerobic bacteria Clostridium botulinum, which causes botulism.
This is why you should not feed honey to infants, because their immune systems cannot safely handle any amount of it yet. Even though the levels apparently are small enough for the rest of humans to consume worry-free.
Infantile botulism is extremely rare. There are an estimated 100 cases per year in the U.S., among approximately 4 million children in the age range under 1. That’s a risk of 1 in 40,000. This is somewhat less likely than the chance of visiting the ER for a blanket-related injury in a given year (yes, I looked that up, and I do think it’s a good comparison).... In an estimated 20% of cases — that’s about 20 cases a year — honey is one of the exposures. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the botulism actually came from honey; it’s just that because we know the spores can live in honey … it seems possible.
At best, this suggests that by avoiding honey, you could lower the risk of infantile botulism from 1 in 40,000 to 1 in 50,000.
Though tbh do people really eat that much honey? I only have some in my kitchen to have with tea when I have a cold. Other then that I almost never use it.
And no, I don’t have diabetes yet. I’m not insane about it, but I do have it frequently.
For me the shift happened when I stopped thinking of it as a sweetener for liquids and started thinking about it as a condiment to deploy conservatively but frequently.
In an extreme example… only 20 parents fed their kids honey and 20 kids contracted botulism.
That would be a 100% risk. Obviously in real life it’s not 100% of kids, but still could be a meaningful percentage and likely higher than 1 in 50,000 for babies that eat honey.
The second most common prelacteal feed is honey, a delicious natural sweetener. Numerous studies [29,30] have shown that the ingestion of honey under one year of age is linked with infant botulism, a disease that results in a blockade of voluntary motor and autonomic functions. Apart from this, other prelacteal feeds get contaminated due to unhygienic environment, especially in rural India and in urban slums, resulting in infantile diarrhea. Thus, a wide range of prelacteal feeds and the introduction of early supplements result in recurrent diarrhea with multiple illness finally ending lives because of inaccessibility and unaffordibility of treatment and delayed or inappropriate care seeking behavior.
Rohini Ghosh - Child mortality in India: a complex situation (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12519-012-0331-y)
The paper lists a bunch of other traditional practices that have deleterious effects on the infants' health, such as putting unsanitary herbal concoctions on the babies navel while it's still healing, etc.
result in recurrent diarrhea
This mind-blowing statistic stays in my head:
"Diarrhoea is a leading killer of children, accounting for approximately 9 per cent of all deaths among children under age 5 worldwide in 2021. This translates to over 1,200 young children dying each day" - https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/diarrhoeal-diseas...
Almost one per minute.
Kid went full Winnie-the-Pooh on the jar.
OK, sister bees, now remember: this season we'll be feeding the hu-man's child, so wipe your feet before entering the hive, and if you feel the sniffles coming on, Don't Make Honey!
If that is so, then completely removing honey exposure for infants would mean that 80 rather than 100 infants get botulism poisoning.
So the new probability of contracting botulism is (80 / 100) * (old probability), and (80 / 100) * (1 / 40000) = 1 / 50000.
A=Infantile botulism
B=Kid eats honey
P(A|!B) = P(A) * (1 - P(B|A))
Not sure it is correct!
The ACX signature says:
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B)
So
P(A|!B) = [P(A)*P(!B|A)]/P(!B)
= (1/40000) * .8 / ???
??? Is very small though if people take the medical advice.
Their number assumes nobody follows the advice!
Similarly one should not put honey to too hot tea if one wants the benefits instead of just sugar.
I'll bet only the imported Chinese honey is pasteurized on the supermarket shelf. Most of that goes to industrial use anyway.
But the intestinal microbiot of infants (not their immune system) is not necessarily developed enough, and as such Clostridium botulinum can colonize their intestine (it strives in anaerobic environment) and then they can develop a special kind of botulism where the toxin is actually produced in their own body (as opposed to ingested, like in regular botulism).
It's not the only way a child can stumble upon the bacteria's spore though.
Here’s the definition of water activity from FDA:https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...
Probably just as well (invoke some kind of anthropic principle here if you like) or we'd have, say, fungus there can quickly eat dry things and storing food or building anything with longevity would be much harder.
Life on Earth has had billions of years and expanded to fill so many niches, but they're nearly all damp niches. Nothing has ever really managed to really thrive in deserts.
By definition, the desert "niche" IS filled. It has as much life as it can support. That doesn't mean wall-to-wall forest; you wouldn't expect to find that covering a field of barely weathered granite, either.
All life on Earth uses water to transport chemicals and ions across its cells. Period. It's one immutable requirement of life on Earth.
I wonder if there's some general mathematical description one could form of the biomass per acre versus water content of the "surface soil". The oceans provide the extreme, but even then there are "biodeserts" far from land where there are insufficient nutrients (organic chemicals, probably) to keep even algae going.
a populated biome has an active +- exchange of resources between participants that facilitates the need for competition due to resource bounds. (the rain forest, most of the biological world)
a sterile biome has no known properties of life, and no known participants. The participants that are there struggle to exist or are in some form of stasis to survive the condition. (a brand-new sealed blood vacuum vial.)
as for 'as much as it can support', i'm unaware of how to determine an optimal maxima for biological growth independent of species or environment. Maybe some exotic sphere-packing type idea might work with a reward function for 'resources' ? I don't know.
All life on Earth uses water to transport chemicals and ions across its cells. Period. It's one immutable requirement of life on Earth.
They were pondering this. With billions of years of evolution, life has found no way around this, and that's interesting.
That's all they were saying.
But yeah, you're completely right about the chisel. Hammer and chisel is how we've processed rocks for most of history (all the way back to flint knapping).
Wet processing for tile/stone is really only about 100 years old, since we didn't have a usable cutting abrasive until diamond blades came around in the late 1800s.
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All that aside, the problem with a hammer & chisel is that it's hard to be precise. It's not impossible, but it's definitely a skill requiring mastery.
If we expand the scope a little and include ceramics - then yes, we did need quite a bit of water.
Brick, Clay, Cement, etc - they were all good alternatives to chiseling stone to get a very hard, stone-like material in a very specific shape, and they all require good amounts of water.
And other than the cost of the tools, there is one thing harder to drill than a rock, and that's a rock with the previous drill bit's carbide insert stuck at the bottom of the hole!
The models estimated that Oldowan stone tools originated 2.617-2.644 million years ago, 36,000 to 63,000 years earlier than current evidence. The Acheulean’s origin was pushed back further by at least 55,000 years to 1.815-1.823 million years ago.
https://www.kent.ac.uk/news/science/28246/the-worlds-earlies...
Statistical inference of earlier origins for the first flaked stone technologies
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27213168-i-contain-multi...
Different desert plants use similar ideas, the Aussie outback for example blooms for about a month after a given flood, reproduces, then dies out near completely except around the occasional waterhole.
You see the exact same idea in HVAC - if you can keep the relative humidity below 50%, mold growth becomes nearly impossible.
In laundry care, the dryer does all of the sanitizing action.
Etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Preservation in particular mentions gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide produced by the bees' glucose oxidase, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Medical_use_and_research also mentions its content of methylglyoxal, which damages DNA and cross-links proteins somewhat like formaldehyde, thus killing microorganisms; mãnuka honey is required to contain at least 85mg/kg of methylglyoxal, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81nuka_honey. I suspect that there is a great deal more research on the topic.
It's disappointing to see such a low-quality article on the BBC website; I generally regard the BBC as a reliable source.
Personally, I would bet that certain wines have a longer shelf life than honey. The evidence for honey's stability on extreme time scales is scanty, lots of very poor quality sources and hearsay. Meanwhile, we have countless wines that are hundreds of years old and in excellent shape. It only takes a fairly small amount of degradation of one small component of honey to taste "off", and many of the components of honey are in their non-oxidized, non-heat damaged states. Contrast that with a wine such as Madeira, where the entire wine is intentionally heat-damaged and oxidized to produce the final product. I would put my money on the Madeira any day.
It does seem plausible that some wines might last longer than honey.
I'm still putting my money on the wine as far as long term storage goes, but I think honey might have a solid second place above any other common foods. I've been trying to find others that might last a while but obviously most results these days are contentless slop or straight up fabrications. I did find one report of Irish chef Kevin Thornton trying 4,000 year old butter, unfortunately he described it as "rancid": https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p03yf4kj
And OP evidently knows a lot about honey :)
I agree that its focus is somewhat wrong. I don't think that the backgrounder on the importance of food preservation is completely without value. It's just that it's already fairly well known that food rots and why.
My larger objection, though, is that there are important, well-established reasons for honey to be far less perishable than other substances of similar water activity and pH, and the article does not mention them even briefly. I think it's fine to have lots of the wrong kind of details, but it's not fine to omit the right ones.
which amounts to centuries in many cases.
Pretty sure I read about honey found in a Pharaoh's tomb - that's millennia, not centuries.
Quick search:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-science-be...
(However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances or only chemical traces.[29])
...but the citation is from 01975.
The Smithsonian page is a great link! It mentions that the pH of honey is 3–4.5 (another crucial fact omitted from the BBC article) and mentions the peroxide, but not the methylglyoxal.
The Smithsonian article contains this link:
Modern archeologists, excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, have often found something unexpected amongst the tombs’ artifacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved
which goes to a Google Books page I can't see (perhaps because I'm in Argentina) of a book from 02006 that is apparently about beekeeping, not archaeology, called "Letters from the Hive", published by Random House Children's Books.
The copy of the book that I've been able to get does talk extensively about the uses of honey in ancient Egypt, but, unless I missed it, doesn't mention pots of honey being found in tombs at all.
Even if so, it's unclear whether the book would have evidence posterior to Wikipedia's 01975 citation; it isn't the kind of book that cites its sources.
WP: "(However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances or only chemical traces.[29])"
[29] is https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf - this does not look like a peer reviewed paper. They do look to be reputable and they refute some rubbish documented cases of ancient honey but not all of them.
I'm going to call out the WP article as being factually wanting on that point.
[29] is https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf - this does not look like a peer reviewed paper. They do look to be reputable and they refute some rubbish documented cases of ancient honey but not all of them.
The Gwern link is just a PDF copy of an article from a 1975 issue of "Bee World": https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0005772X.1975.11... I can't speak to the journal's rigor in the 1970s, but they seem like a more reliable source than any other mentioned in this discussion.
(The stories about pyramid honey always imply that it's fresh and liquid. It's not. It's dried out and usually completely crystallized.)
There may be other effects on top of that, but if you made a sucrose solution thick enough it too will last forever.
Different solutes have different DRHs, but there are many of them whose affinity for water is so strong that their DRH is so low that under normal circumstances they never completely dry out. Some of them are commonly used as desiccants, such as lye, calcium chloride, and magnesium chloride. In general, mixing solutes tends to impede crystallization, so more heterogeneous mixtures like honey tend to have lower DRH than more homogeneous mixtures like pure sucrose.
(This is an engineering reason to add something like lemon juice when you make simple syrup: the citrate hydrolyzes some of the sucrose into glucose and fructose, greatly impeding crystallization and greatly improving your chances of having a pourable syrup when you want to use it next month.)
Under many circumstances, honey will eventually absorb enough water from the air by this mechanism to permit the growth of yeasts and bacteria. But it takes a remarkably long time.
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† The DRH does vary with temperature, but in most cases only slightly over the human-survivable range, so you can say "CaCl₂ has a DRH of about 40%" and be correct enough for many purposes.
(Sample size 1) I tried it on myself and a wound that was stubborn about healing was better very quickly.
I live in the tropics where people die because due to infection which makes it even more interesting that they use honey.
And thanks for the other homophone correction!
Honey in wound healing: An updated review
The idea being that you pair multiple decoders with each encoder, and multiple encoders with each decoder (randomly sample if large populations). The selective pressure is a feedback loop between the encoder and decoder populations that requires the members to produce and interpret the latent vector as well as possible. In theory, this creates a form of generalization pressure wherein the encoders and decoders must perform well with a wide range of possible up/down stream states. I think with large enough populations, this could be robust to premature convergence and overfitting.
But your grocery store honey is already pasteurized. That's more controlled than your microwave, so if you were looking to feel guilty about something, save it for when your neighbor gives you some from her hive next door.
ANytime I've had chocolate that has the white stuff I've binned it. Even if it isn't spoiled, doesn't it taste bad ?
Not harmful. It's like the white "powder" on hard cheeses, which is just calcium crystalizing over time. Totally safe.
This doesn't mean that honey can withstand all challenges to freshness. Once a jar of honey is open, its surface is being regularly exposed to the air, and dipping licked spoons in will bring bacteria and moisture that weren't there when the jar was sealed.
I have plenty of observational, empirical data that contradicts this apparently theoretical statement. Not just licked spoons but breakfast knives with bits of toasted bread and peanut/butter, Greek yogurt, French moldy goat's cheese, bits of tart, croisssants or other confectionary, etc. All of those can be detected in significant concentrations in my honey jars. Not to mention that simply screwing a lid on an already-opened jar doesn't quite seal it, certainly not firmly enough to cut off the oxygen from it.
Yet I have never known honey to spoil. I mean it's quite remarkable. I think I have seen honey that has stayed at the bottom of a jar for years and it just doesn't go bad. I wouldn't eat it, because it tends to look a bit bleugh, but it won't go off (and that's how it ends up staying in the jar for so long).
Nothing but clean spoons go in my sugar jar, and I rarely dip out honey with anything but its own dipper - which never touches food.
Reginald, bring me my fainting couch, stat!
Various components contribute to the antibacterial efficacy of honey: the sugar content; polyphenol compounds; hydrogen peroxide; 1,2-dicarbonyl compounds; and bee defensin-1. All of these elements are present at different concentrations depending on the source of nectar, bee type, and storage. These components work synergistically, allowing honey to be potent against a variety of microorganisms including multidrug resistant bacteria and modulate their resistance to antimicrobial agents.
Utterly fascinating and wonderful hobby and contributes towards the environment, while having a delicious outcome. Could not recommend enough!