In Honey’s Unknown Benefits By Lindsey Duncan, ND, CN he states
I’ve heard this many times: “It’s supposed to be this way.” I am less sure. How do the people who say this know what paleolithic sleep was like? Maybe rural people always get up at night because they don’t get enough sunlight in the morning, or enough exercise or enough X – there are dozens of possible X’s.
To be sure that sleep is supposed to be this way we’d need to know all the variables that have a big effect on sleep and then set all of them to their paleolithic values, and see what happens. The people who make the “supposed to be this way” claim don’t seem to understand this.
I’m confused by why there’s confusion around the evolutionary desire for extremely sweet things. Why is it more complicated than that?
Seth: Sugar is a low density form of energy. Fat is almost twice as dense. It is unclear that there is an evolutionary desire for “extremely sweet things” separate from a preference for sweetness. The Paleolithic world did not have a lot of extremely sweet things, so perhaps we like extremely sweet things because we like sweet things. High blood sugar is damaging (diabetes), why would we develop a preference for foods that damaged us? If extremely sweet things are so good for us, why do we get sick of them so quickly? (Sweets are generally small.)
..”Improved sleep and relaxation: Honey can promote relaxation and help ease you to sleep at night. The natural sugar found in honey raises our insulin slightly and allows tryptophan, the compound famous for making us sleepy after eating turkey at Thanksgiving, to enter our brains more easily. Taking a spoonful of honey before bed can help you get restful sleep.”
Lots of sugar = lots of glucose = higher spike in blood glucose and ability to do whatever we need to do with renewed energy
“The natural sugar found in honey raises our insulin slightly and allows tryptophan, the compound famous for making us sleepy after eating turkey at Thanksgiving, to enter our brains more easily.”
Tryptophan has been found to reduce sleep latency – the time it takes to fall asleep after you turn off the lights and try to fall asleep. I don’t care much about sleep latency since I usually fall asleep quickly. That being said, it’s possible that the honey has caused me interracialcupid com login to fall asleep more quickly. Last night it seems like I fell asleep in a few seconds.
Option A: honey is a dark colour & runny (i seem remember reading that the higher fructose honeys can be runnier than the lower fructose honeys).
Option B: honey is light colour & a lot thicker than option A (possibly with some minor crystallisation). label also reads that this honey “retains small quantities of propolis and pollen”.
Both honeys were at the same temperature, same shop/shelf. Although both honeys are raw & organic, i wonder if option B may have the least processing, due to the mention of propolis and pollen.
so which do you think i should buy first for this sleep experiment & why… is runnier better, is higher fructose better (although i do not know the actual fructose contents), is inclusion of some propolis and pollen good or bad, etc,
you said, “When I first tried the honey I used an organic, but lightly heated variety which worked very well. After switching to raw local honey it didn’t work as well. I’m trying different varieties…”
