Honey for Your Honey

If you can celebrate Valentine's Day with one honey, why not with two? And we are not suggesting bigamy here.

FEBRUARY, let’s accept it, is the month of Love. Thanks to the ever-enduring popular and commercial success of Saint Valentine’s Day on the 14th. But there is something sweeter in honey than just the kiss.

Honey is considered as the sweetest natural substance to-date. It developed from the combination of nectar and sweet deposits from plants, which get modified and stored in a honeycomb.

Expectedly, its major components are basic sugars such as fructose (fruit sugar) and glucose (table sugar). But not very long ago, a group of substances had been identified comprising 20-25 percent of honey. These are the caffeic acid ester derivates. A study in 2009 described a wide range of activities from these substances including the stopping or protection against tumor. They caused colon cancer cells to burst into destruction, frustrating the mechanism that enabled cancer to grow.

Another, albeit minor, component of honey active against cancer cells is... [READ MORE]

This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 8 February 2012.

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