Honey food product
The value of honey as a food and medicinal product.
Honey is known as a food product for a very long time. Excellent taste qualities of honey are perfectly combined with its high nutritional content and easy digestibility by the human body. But most importantly, honey is an excellent preventive and curative product.
It has long been known the value of honey as a food product, contributing to the rapid accumulation of human forces. Therefore, honey is often included in the diet of people preparing to work, connected with great physical stress, such as when preparing for competitions, in mountaineering, in preparing teams that will have to work at sea in great depth, etc.
Honey is especially useful for children. Children, whose diet is introduced honey, grow faster and more resistant to disease. Studies have shown that in children receiving honey, the percentage of hemoglobin in the blood increases and other indicators of their health improve.
Honey, introduced into the diet of people recovering after severe illnesses, has an exceptionally beneficial effect. This effect of honey is explained not only by the availability in it of easily assimilated nutrients, but also by the fact that there are other substances in honey that are extremely necessary for the organism, namely enzymes, vitamins and mineral salts. Although these three groups of complex chemical compounds are found in honey and in small quantities, they are presented as a whole complex.
In folk medicine, honey as an external and internal remedy has been used since ancient times. For the same purposes, honey is also used in modern medicine, and its use grows every year. Particularly widely used was honey as a medicinal product in Soviet medicine during the Great Patriotic War.
The use of honey as an external agent in the treatment of purulent wounds is based primarily on the fact that honey has bactericidal
From other medical drugs, honey is favorably distinguished primarily by the fact that many drugs, contributing to the improvement of the state of some organs, while at the same time adversely affect others; honey improves the condition of the whole organism.
In connection with this, honey is widely and successfully used in medicine for healing: diseases of the gastrointestinal tract, in particular gastric and duodenal ulcers, as well as chronic catarrhs, etc.; respiratory diseases; diseases of the cardiovascular system; kidney disease; diseases of the nervous system; childhood diseases.
Along with this, honey, being a general toning up and strengthening body, helps to restore the strength after such debilitating diseases as malaria, disinfection, typhoid fever, etc.
Classification of honey.
Honey can be divided into groups according to a number of their signs.
First of all, honey is distinguished according to origin, depending on the sources of their production. In our country, the main source of honey is a saccharine liquid, the so-called nectar, which is picked up by bees from flowering plants. This honey is called flower honey. The source of most of the honeydew honey is nectar collected by bees from asthenia of many species. However, it usually happens that honey is most clearly visible properties associated with its predominant origin from plants of certain species, for example: buckwheat, acacia, linden. In such cases, honey is called buckwheat, lime, etc. If it is not possible to clearly determine by the aroma and taste, with what plants the origin of the honey is related, such honey is simply called floral. Sometimes in the same sense the names are used: “meadow honey”, “steppe honey”, etc.
The composition and properties of flower honey are to the greatest extent dependent on the type of plants from which the bees take nectar. Thus, the nectar of sainfoin is significantly different from the nectar of buckwheat, etc. In addition, the composition of nectar depends on a number of other conditions (season, time of the day, weather conditions, the nature of the soil, the breed of bees, etc.). Therefore, flower honey is very different in quality, taste, aroma, color, water content and propensity to crystallize.
Sometimes the source of honey is a drop, which in the main mass is of animal origin and is a sugary discharge (in the form of feces) of some insects: aphids, chervets, etc. In some cases, the fall is of vegetable origin. In this case, it is called honeydew. Honey, which comes from the padi, is called padevym.
The source of honey can also serve as other sweet juices, for example, juice sucked out by the bees from the fruit of the garden trees (“carrion”), the juice of ripe watermelons, etc. However, such honey is of little importance. Depending on how the honey is taken from the bee family, it is divided into a honeycomb (selected in the form of honeycombs, in which honey cells are folded and sealed) and centrifugal (extracted from the honeycomb with honey extractors). A variety of honey honey is the so-called sectional honey, which is obtained in small frames, called sections and usually inserted into the nests of families instead of store frames or in the lumen of the upper part of the building frame.
Currently, centrifugal honey accounts for the bulk of the produced commercial honey.
Distinguish honey and other signs, such as maturity (mature and unripe honey), the presence or absence of crystallization, color (light, amber, dark), taste, etc.
In turn, mature honey is subdivided in consistency: very liquid (for example, with acacia), liquid (clover, lime, etc.), thick (esparcous, etc.), sticky or very sticky (most padey honey) and gelatinous (for example, with heather).
Crystallized honey is distinguished by the nature of crystallization, etc.
Chemical composition of honey.
The chemical composition of various honey is quite complex and varied. The components of honey are: water, sugar, dextrins, proteins, acids, mineral salts, enzymes and vitamins. In addition, its composition includes (although in a small amount) and some other substances, for example, coloring, on which depends the color of honey, as well as aromatic substances.
Honey basically consists of sugars (approximately 75%) and water (about 20%).
The source of sugar found in honey is largely sugar cane, which, together with grape and fruit sugars, is part of the nectar collected by bees; formula of cane sugar C12H22O11. However, in cane sugar honey is very small. The fact is that under the influence of the invertase enzyme secreted by the salivary glands of the bee, cane sugar present in nectar is split into simpler sugars, the so-called monosaccharides: glucose (grape sugar) and fructose (fruit sugar). This splitting begins with the moment when the bee first sucked the nectar from the flower, and almost completely ends up in the process of processing nectar into honey.
The process of splitting cane sugar into glucose and fructose can be represented as a reaction:
C12H220n + H20 = C6H1206 + C6H1206
Cane sugar + water = glucose and fructose.
Monosaccharides (glucose and fructose) differ from cane sugar by a number of properties. Thus, cane sugar caramelizes when heated above 160 њ, that is, it decomposes with the release of water and the formation of special products, the so-called caramelized.
Glucose caramelizes at a lower temperature, even when boiling. At an even lower temperature caramelized fructose.
In connection with the fact that caramelans are very harmful to bees, especially during wintering (bees on caramelized honey hibernate worse than on padevom), a significant warming of honey should be avoided, and it is completely unacceptable to boil it.
Glucose and fructose differ from other sugars very easy digestibility: their solutions during digestion very soon go to the blood.
The tendency to crystallize in glucose and fructose is not the same. A characteristic feature of glucose is that it easily crystallizes. Fructose, however, crystallizes very hard, only under special conditions.
The composition of different honey is an unequal amount of glucose and fructose. On average, fructose in flower honey is slightly larger than glucose.
In peredovyh honey glucose and fructose is less than in floral.
In honeydew honey there are some substances that usually do not happen in floral honey. Such substances include, for example, melisitosis and so-called polyhydric alcohols, which are similar in composition to sugars: mannitol and dulcite. It is believed that both can be absorbed by bees. In addition, in the case of honey, there are a number of other poorly studied substances.
Dextrins – complex substances resulting from the decomposition of starch, are in their composition intermediates between starch and sugars. Their composition is quite diverse. Dissolved in water, dextrins form a sticky liquid.
It is believed that dextrins, which are close in their composition to sugars, may well be used by bees, and dextrins close to starch are used by bees to a much lesser extent.
The number of dextrins in flower and pad honey varies: in the latter, they are usually two to three times more than in the first. In addition, dextrin padehovyh honey is more complex in its composition and less suitable for assimilation by bees. The toughness and stickiness of most pade honey and depends mainly on the presence in them in a significant amount of such dextrins.
The protein and other nitrogenous substances (mainly amino acids) in honey are not sufficiently studied. Studies show that amino acids in honey are more than proteins.
Amino acids can be combined with sugars, forming dark-colored compounds. Therefore, honey over time darkens. The presence of protein substances and mainly explains the turbidity of freshly extracted mature honey.
A significant portion of the protein enters the honey when processed by bees, being an integral part of salivary gland secretions. The total amount of protein substances in honey is increased by pollen, which is a constant, though insignificant, admixture in it.
Acids in honey make up an insignificant part (hundredth, less often – tenths of a percent), but there are a number of them, mainly oxalic, malic, citric, ant, and others. The presence of certain acids affects the taste of honey.
Mineral substances are also found in honey in a small amount: less than 0.20% (average) in flower honey and much more in honeydew honey.
The importance of the mineral substances of honey is very important. In the composition of mineral substances of flower honey, there are phosphorus, iron, calcium, copper, manganese, zinc and other substances. Mineral substances are found in the body in the form of solutions of various salts, and also form part of complex organic compounds.
If there are a lot of mineral substances in honey, as, for example, in pade honey, then such honey is unsuitable for wintering bees.
The amount of mineral substances in honey is judged by its ash content, that is by the percentage of ash remaining after the combustion of the dry substances of honey.
Enzymes are also always present in honey. These are complex substances that accelerate the passage of various reactions, and the action of each enzyme is strictly specific: it facilitates the passage of any one reaction. In honey, enzymes come mainly from the body of the bee, and are partially introduced with pollen, which includes. The presence of enzymes in honey largely determines it. maturation and, accordingly, improvement of its quality.
Vitamins are contained in honey in a small amount, but they are presented in a fairly rich set. So, in it vitamins A, ч1 ч2, ч6 у1 D and others are found.
It is due to the presence in honey of protein substances, mineral salts, acids, enzymes and vitamins, although in a small amount, but in a diverse composition and combination, honey acquires the most valuable qualities, being a full-fledged food product and at the same time a remedy normalizing the state of the human body.
In addition, honey always contains some kind of aromatic and coloring substances, which give honey aroma and color, as well as other substances, for example, alkaloids entering honey with nectar. This group of substances is very little studied.
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