As I understand it honey is mostly fructose rather than glucose. Table sugar is half fructose and half glucose.

Fructose is processed in the body differently. It is directly processed by the liver. It does not raise the blood sugar level as badly as glucose but it is much worse at causeing fatty liver because most of the fructose gets stored as fat in the liver.

The big problem with conventional diabetes treatment is they treat it as a blood sugar disease. Keep the blood sugar low we are told and we will be ok. But that is not true. The root cause of the disease is really a problem of insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia. Excessive insulin needed to keep the blood sugar low. By focusing only on the blood sugar level it ignores the other problems created by chronic high insulin levels. Like obesity and fatty liver disease. High fructose consumption exacerbates diabetes because it causes insulin resistance in the liver.

So while the honey may not spike his blood sugar levels as much as sugar or even bread, it is doing damage to his liver and internal organs because of the fat it creates in and around these organs. Fructose in excessive amounts can be more damaging to the health than excessive glucose even though it does not raise blood sugar levels excessively.

If a person is relatively thin and trim but has a bit of a pot belly and expanded belt line, they probably have a fatty liver. Excessive fructose essentially is processed by the liver in a similar manner as alcohol and will cause the same problem as excessive alcohol consumption. One is called Fatty Liver Disease. Excessive fructose leads to NAFLD, Non Alcohol Fatty Liver Disease.

A tiny bit once a day in his coffee is probably not a killer. But consuming lots of fruit and honey by a diabetic is not doing them any good. If he is already getting eye degradation, imagine what is happening with his internal organs that he can't see. Bananas, apples, all the high sugar/fructose fruit is not a healthy option for diabetics. And likely not for healthy people if over consumed. Evolutionarily we did not have high sugar fruits or honey year round. We may have gorged on it during the fall (and became temporarily insulin resistant to gain fat for winter) but we did not have 365 day access to fruits and honey like we do today in modern grocery stores. And fruits of today are bred to be excessively sweet, very high in fructose.

At least that is my understanding. But don't listen to me, listen to doctors that know.

Dr Jason Fung, the problem with fructose.

Around the middle of his talk Fetke gets to a short version of the metabolism of fructose and says we have only known of this mechanism since 2010. So any textbooks written before then are wrong.

Gary Fetke on fruit and fructose

Dr Gary Fetke is an especially outspoken critic of fructose.

John