Not such a great idea. Honey is full of fructose -- this indeed gives it a lower glycemic index than sucrose, but causes other problems. Watch this (long but very interesting) video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
My takeaway from this talk is that it's best to avoid all sugars, but if you must eat something sweet, eat it with plenty of fiber to slow the absorption of the sugar. Of course, the easy way to do this is just to eat fruit.
I'm definitely not the expert here and the suggestion to use honey as a sweetener was given to me by an Orthomolecular Psychiatrist. The context was that if I want to use a sweetener in my tea or coffee, I should use something like honey over white sugar or cane sugar.
Honey may have other issues, which definitely reinforces my feeling that it's really best to consult an expert when attempting to regulate mental disorders by using a special diet or vitamins. However as a common sense solution it seems that using honey to sweeten tea or coffee is a reasonable alternative to white sugar, and it is a situation where fruit simply won't substitute. For a quick snack, fruit is a great idea and I would definitely prefer it over some kind of honey snack or a candy bar.
googling: "honey bipolar refined sugar" leads to a bunch of links comparing white sugar with honey, but again my experience with internet research for vitamins and mental disorders is that the information is extremely unreliable and all over the place. This is an area (similar to searching for information about cancer online) where I think that the most reliable information comes out of books written by qualified professionals and directly from qualified specialists.
Comments
Switch to using honey as a sweetener
Not such a great idea. Honey is full of fructose -- this indeed gives it a lower glycemic index than sucrose, but causes other problems. Watch this (long but very interesting) video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
My takeaway from this talk is that it's best to avoid all sugars, but if you must eat something sweet, eat it with plenty of fiber to slow the absorption of the sugar. Of course, the easy way to do this is just to eat fruit.
I'm definitely not the expert here and the suggestion to use honey as a sweetener was given to me by an Orthomolecular Psychiatrist. The context was that if I want to use a sweetener in my tea or coffee, I should use something like honey over white sugar or cane sugar.
Honey may have other issues, which definitely reinforces my feeling that it's really best to consult an expert when attempting to regulate mental disorders by using a special diet or vitamins. However as a common sense solution it seems that using honey to sweeten tea or coffee is a reasonable alternative to white sugar, and it is a situation where fruit simply won't substitute. For a quick snack, fruit is a great idea and I would definitely prefer it over some kind of honey snack or a candy bar.
googling: "honey bipolar refined sugar" leads to a bunch of links comparing white sugar with honey, but again my experience with internet research for vitamins and mental disorders is that the information is extremely unreliable and all over the place. This is an area (similar to searching for information about cancer online) where I think that the most reliable information comes out of books written by qualified professionals and directly from qualified specialists.