Fast Food #003: Honey vs. Maple Syrup
Fast Food: Bite-sized short reads about sport performance nutrition.
About two years ago, after 2 years on a 100% carnivore diet, I added some select carbohydrates back into my diet. Many will assert that no carbohydrates are ever necessary in a human diet. However, kicking a lot of butt, or receiving a benefit from X, isn’t necessary either.
For those curious about the transition back to some carbohydrate intake, read the original Carnivore and Carbs post. The short version is that a number of factors influence the “crossover effect” when your body transitions to burning more carbohydrates than fat for fuel — namely body fat, carbohydrate vs. fat consumption, movement (in)efficiency, and heart rate.
Since that 2022 article my main source of carbohydrates has been honey (typically raw and organic), dosed in ~50g (of carbohydrate) servings 3-4 times per week — usually after my hardest training days. I’m also not panicking nor fearing the ridicule of the Instagram gods if I have a piece of fruit or dark chocolate — *gasp and clutch pearls.*
One 2022 study (1) found that carbohydrates may improve sleep latency (decreasing the time it takes you to fall asleep) and (increase) melatonin secretion. However, for me I like carbohydrates after training. This is because the issue for me has never been intra-workout performance, it’s been chronic inter-session longevity.
That means, any one “hard” training session on it’s own is manageable, but days-on-days and weeks-on-weeks and months-on-months is a totally different story (2 — note: I don’t necessarily agree with the suggested protocols in that article, but it’s a good overview).
Something else one should consider is the relationship between the Randle Cycle, diabetes, and obesity (3, 4). If one eats “naked” carbs — by themselves, without protein or fat — there’s a higher blood glucose spike. Typically that’s not great, though it’s not necessarily pathological. In the use case I’m describing, I’m typically very depleted, so the uptake of glucose (or “area under the curve”) is pretty quick.
When it comes to whole fruit versus honey, it’s just easier for me to tote around a bottle of honey, or leave it in my gym locker and gulp a few tablespoons down right after a training session. Not long ago, I was at a wedding and the family brought maple syrup from their family farm; which became the impetus for this whole post — congratulations Tyler and Marian!
Fortunately, the website “foodstruct” generated a bunch of useful graphs which saved me a ton of time not having to create them from scratch on Canva! (5).
We can see in Figure 1 that maple syrup has a lot more water, which not surprisingly then, makes it easier to “drink” rather than “chew.”
In Figure 2 we see that the fructose in maple syrup (half of the sucrose content) is ~29g / 100g while the fructose content of honey is ~41g / 100g. There’s plenty of reason to be weary of fructose, particularly in the form of high-fructose corn syrup (6, 7); though that’s not necessarily the same as fructose from natural sources (sucrose, fructose in combination with glucose)(8).
Figure 3 and Figure 4 compare honey and maple syrup to each other relatively, so I had to cross-reference each of them in Cronometer to check if there was an appreciable amount of vitamins and minerals in either. For honey, the answer is “no” with most vitamins and minerals registering at < 1% DV.
For maple syrup, the manganese and B2 values were notable (> 10% DV) while most others were less than or around 1% DV as well. This isn’t a huge concern neither honey or maple syrup are going to be a primary source of vitamins and minerals; they’re merely a carbohydrate “supplement.”
Lastly, the USDA has a nice chart (Figure 5) summarizing some of the things we’ve talked about here. Maple syrup has some micronutrient (vitamins and minerals) benefit over honey; as well as avoiding the pure fructose whack obviously found in HFCS.
Another good reminder to focus on outcomes over ideology, is the frequent contamination of honey with glyphosate (8). Even if it is certified organic, there is a high degree of cross-contamination due to the wide flight patterns of honey bees (9).
While honey is an “animal-based” product — bee vomit from pollen, maple syrup obviously comes from maple trees. I couldn’t find much information on glyphosate levels in maple syrup, likely because a maple tree takes a lot longer to grow and is harder to mass produce versus the clover and flowers used for honey.
Lastly, dark maple syrups appear to have magnified benefits compared to lighter varieties (10). Enjoy the sweets! Earn your carbs!