What Happens When You Add Honey To Hot Tea? Does Honey Lose Nutrients?

Tea with honey conjures up images of home and hearth. Coffee sweetened with honey is less common, although the mild sweetness offsets the coffee’s slight bitterness well. Using raw honey to sweeten beverages is a healthy option for a number of reasons, although adding honey to hot tea and coffee can destroy some of those nutrients.

Nutrients in Honey

Fresh raw honey is rich in antioxidants, although it contains only trace amounts of other nutrients. The main benefit of using honey instead of refined sugar is that the natural sugars in honey take longer to digest than refined sugars. This means your pancreas doesn’t have to secrete as much insulin to capture and store extra sugar. When insulin flushes sugar out of your blood, your brain signals that it needs more sugar and you’re hungry. Honey can help you avoid these ups and downs, whether taken alone or added to tea or coffee.

Does Honey Lose Nutrients When Added to Tea

First, you should understand the difference between raw honey and pasteurized honey. Pasteurization is a process you may be more familiar with dairy products, but most commercially available honey goes through the same process. Pasteurization is the process of gently heating food, in the case of honey, it’s just to make the texture more suitable for the consumer. Although pasteurization is commonly believed to remove harmful bacteria from honey, it helps keep honey smooth and spreadable.

Processing honey in this way destroys many nutrients in the first place, so adding pasteurized honey to tea won’t detract from its benefits because they’ve already been destroyed. That said, if you add honey to your tea immediately after boiling, you may lose all the benefits of honey, except for the taste. Honey is also a very popular ingredient in cooking, but the high, constant heat involved here will almost certainly negate any benefits.

Read the article: How Bees Make Honey?

Raw Honey vs. Pasteurized Honey

There are two different types in the honey world; these are raw and pasteurized. Adding raw honey to boiling hot tea can rob it of its flavor and nutrients. However, if you add pasteurized honey to hot tea, it stays the same.

As you can see, depending on how you heat the honey, whether it destroys its benefits will vary. If you want to learn more about hot tea and honey, I suggest you read the following:

Is Adding Honey To Hot Tea Toxic?

The simple answer is no. Adding honey to hot tea is nontoxic, despite a common belief. Many claim that heating honey in any way – in tea, for cooking – actually makes it so toxic that it will poison you. Again, an important distinction is between raw and processed honey. The two react differently when heated. Generally, the ban is for processed honey because it has already been heated once.

The idea stems from Ayurvedic medicine, an alternative medicine system that originated in India. While there is a lot of wisdom in these teachings, what Ayurvedic medicine teaches about honey contradicts what we know about more traditional methods.

While we definitely recommend using raw honey in tea, there is only one study showing negative effects from heating processed honey, and the results were seen in mice, not humans. This is not meant to belittle or ignore the work done, but it does not lead to the irrefutable conclusion that heating processed honey is toxic. The study concluded that heat-processed honey produces HMF, an organic compound formed from reducing sugars that is thought to be carcinogenic to humans. However, no link between HMF and cancer has been established in humans.

Read the article: Does Honey Expire And Does Honey Go Bad?

What Are The Benefits Of Hot Tea And Honey?

Around the world, honey is used in tea as a popular remedy for sore throats. This is one of the most popular uses. Whatever the cause of your sore throat—whether it’s a cold or bronchitis—hot tea and honey can help soothe your throat, reduce mucus and provide a soothing coating to soothe throat irritation.

After all, honey is pretty much just raw energy — sugar in a different form. Therefore, it is no surprise that it has a natural revitalizing effect. Coming back to the question between raw honey and pasteurized honey, there is some debate about the presence of pollen in honey. Some believe that raw honey has a better nutritional profile due to the presence of bee pollen, which is lost during pasteurization. However, its presence is simply not enough to affect the contours.

An Australian study found little change in the nutrient content before and after processing, but raw honey is still ideal for medicinal purposes.

Is Honey And Hot Tea Good For Your Health?

Due to its soothing effects on the respiratory tract and throat, honey has been used for centuries as a natural remedy for various breathing problems. It has antioxidant properties that fight inflammation associated with conditions like asthma.

Coughing at night can be a serious problem for people with asthma. It affects your sleep patterns and ultimately your daily energy, so ignoring it is not a problem. Nocturnal asthma is known to disrupt your sleep with coughing, wheezing and chest tightness.

UCLA research shows that the sweetness of honey causes the salivary glands to lubricate the airways with saliva, which relieves coughs and reduces bronchial inflammation. Adding two teaspoons of honey to a glass of warm water before bed may be all you need to prevent a cough that keeps you awake at night.

Read the article: Do Bees Poop, Pee Or Vomit And Is Honey Bee Poop?

Conclusion

You should now know the pros and cons of using honey in tea. While abuse can rob honey of its flavor, it certainly won’t harm the human body.