I just read some interesting new research that immediately made me think about dear old Winnie-the-Pooh, who struggles with a honey obsession and a weight problem. Might giving in to the former help him conquer the latter? Maybe so!

A recent (albeit small) study conducted at the University of Wyoming in Laramie found that honey, used as a sweetener, brought about hormonal changes that may suppress appetite.

A Sweet Study

Researchers fed 14 healthy, young (average age 22), non-obese women a breakfast consisting of a peanut butter-oatmeal cookie and a cup of tea on two separate mornings. At one breakfast meal (in a randomly assigned order), the cookie and tea were sweetened with honey, while white table sugar was used for the other meal. Both meals contained exactly the same amount of calories, and none of the participants was told which sweetener was used for which breakfast. Blood samples and hunger ratings based on a scale of 1 to 100 were taken before eating and at 30-minute intervals for four hours afterward. Subjects were then invited to eat as much as they wanted from a lunch buffet. While they did so, researchers discretely tracked exactly how much food each consumed.

What the researchers found: Analyzing the blood samples showed that when the women had the breakfast sweetened with honey, they had delayed response of the hunger hormone ghrelin — the higher your level of ghrelin the hungrier you feel. At the same time, their blood contained greater amounts of the hormone peptide YY (PYY) after the honey-containing meal, which is associated with the feeling of satiety after a meal. So, compared with sugar, the breakfast made with honey brought about hormonal changes that would be expected to make people feel less hungry and more satisfied… a combination that you would naturally expect to lead to less eating.

Except… it didn’t! It seems that psychological cues can still override biological ones. While the blood tests showed hormone levels that would lead any scientist to predict fewer trips to the buffet table, in reality there was no difference following the two breakfast meals in how hungry the subjects reported feeling or in how much they ate at lunch.

I asked the study’s lead author, Enette Larson-Meyer, PhD, RD, associate professor of human nutrition at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, to tell me why. She said that scientists are still trying to understand exactly how these hormones affect appetite. She noted that habit can trigger a need or desire to eat that may override real hunger. “We might be satisfied, but if the right food or a free meal appears, we’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, I can eat,'” she said, noting that further research will explore what might happen when the next meal is not so readily available.

Honey, Do…

So, the lab work said that the participants who ate honey should have been less inclined to eat, but the offer of a free meal seems to have overridden that. Where does that leave us? This research suggests that honey will help you feel more satisfied than sugar. It also showed that honey did not raise blood sugar as much as sugar did, in healthy women. Meanwhile honey does have some trace nutrients, such as vitamin B-6, calcium, amino acids, although not enough to eat it for its vitamin or mineral content. The calories are also about equal to sugar — 60 per tablespoon.

It’s fairly easy to substitute honey for sugar if you like sweetened coffee or tea… and you can use honey for cooking and baking, too. Dr. Larson-Meyer said that we now know that honey produces chemical changes that suppress appetite. Now we simply need the mind to follow.