How much honey can I eat every day?

          How much honey can I eat every day?

A frequently asked question about honey dosage from our visitors - How much honey can we eat every day? What is considered excessive?

My response is: "Eat as much as you can?" No, of course not!

As a very general rule of thumb, in the case of a normal, balanced diet, not more than 10 teaspoons of honey (which is about 50ml) per day is recommended. This amount is formulated based on advice from some trusted honey stores, and not based on any medical point of view backed by scientific data.

Nevertheless, how much honey can one eat is actually a tricky one. The amount of honey considered to be optimum depends a whole lot on a person's diet and lifestyle. For instance, one could be taking foods with very low sugar content every day, leading a very active lifestyle, and following a disciplined exercise regimen, while on the other extreme end; another with a sweet tooth could be taking plenty of high-sugar stuff and living a sedentary lifestyle. Hence, apparently, the daily amount of honey to be prescribed for different people would not be the same.

As per the widely-known principle, excessiveness of any food, including honey is not wise. But note, not all sweeteners are equal. One excellent way to healthier eating is to use honey in our everyday food, for example, replace empty-calorie table sugar with nutritious honey in your routine beverages, spread honey instead of jam on bread, etc, For instance, if all this while you have been taking tea, coffee, or juices with table sugar in all your regular meals, you could straight away replace the sugar with honey. Some Benefits of Honey visitors have another concern about honey, that is, if eating honey, a very sweet liquid, would cause them to gain weight. Actually, the principle of weight gain is very simple: When you eat more than what your body needs, regardless of whether it is sugar, fat, or honey, the excess calories are stored as fat which in turns leads to weight gain. Read "Using a Calorie Counter to Lose Weight". The idea here is to not to introduce more sugars into your body with honey but to replace as much as possible the processed, refined and artificial sugars in one's current diet with a more superior, healthier sweetener, honey.

"How much honey is enough? Generally, three to five tablespoons of honey a day is sufficient. A good regimen to follow is to consume a tablespoon or two of honey in the morning with fruit or yogurt or cereal. Another tablespoon should be consumed at bedtime. In between, another one or two tablespoons can be ingested with fruit snacks, in baked goods, or as used in cooking. Honey contains about 60 calories per tablespoon. Generally, the percentage of ones' total caloric requiremnets provided from simple sugars should not exceed 10%. Thus, the 180 to 300 calories a day provided from honey is sufficient, unless excessive energy demands allow for additional consumption."
~ Dr Ron Fessenden, MD, MPM, The Honey Revolution.

 

If you are doing a full fasting, taking in only liquids and no other foods (which is not a normal diet), I learned from a honey fast book that an average-size adult could take up to about 150ml to 200ml honey mixed with water or tea everyday for a few days. Read "My First Honey Water Fast – The Wins and Woes" if you are keen to discover how a honey fast works. Please note that this recommendation is for a full-fasting with just honey water for detoxification purposes, lasting only a few days. The only source of carbohydrate/energy during the fast is the honey consumed. Hence, the daily honey dosage for such a fast could look something like this – two glasses of water/tea each time with a tablespoon of honey (about 15ml) each, for breakfast, lunch, at 3pm, dinner, and before bedtime. All these would add up to about 150ml of honey in total for a day.