Is honey better than sugar?

Last updated: 2026-11-03

Both are free sugars

The World Health Organization puts honey and table sugar in the same category. Its definition of "free sugars" covers the sugars a manufacturer or a cook adds to food, plus the sugars naturally present in honey, syrups and fruit juices. The same guideline recommends keeping free sugars below 10% of total energy intake, with a further benefit below 5%^[1]. Honey is not an exemption from that limit; it is one of the things the limit is counting.

That is the answer to the question most people are actually asking. If you replace the sugar in your tea with honey, you have changed the flavour and added a trace of other compounds. You have not stepped outside the recommendation, and your daily sugar total has not reset.

What a spoonful actually costs

Honey is roughly 82 g of sugar per 100 g; most of the remainder is water. Granulated sugar is very close to 100 g of sugar per 100 g^[2]. So weight for weight, honey is the less concentrated of the two. But nobody measures either in 100 g portions, and the spoon is where the comparison inverts: honey is dense and viscous, so a spoon of it holds far more mass than the same spoon of dry sugar.

Spoon for spoon, then, honey carries more energy than sugar, not less^[2]. It is also sweeter per gram, because fructose tastes sweeter than sucrose, so some people genuinely use less of it. If that is you, the swap reduces your intake. If you use the same number of spoons out of habit, it raises it.

The other claim worth checking against the composition tables is the one about honey's vitamins and minerals. They are real and they are negligible: a tablespoon supplies well under 1% of an adult's daily requirement for any single vitamin or mineral^[2]. Honey is a sugar with traces of other things in it, not a supplement.

The glycaemic index argument, and where it runs out

The strongest version of the case for honey is its glycaemic index. Most published values put honey a little below sucrose, which would mean a gentler rise in blood glucose for the same amount of carbohydrate. The problem is the spread: the international tables list honeys ranging from well below sucrose to above it, depending on floral source and on the fructose-to-glucose ratio of that particular jar^[3]. A label that says "honey" tells you almost nothing about where in that range you are.

There is a second limit. Glycaemic index is measured by feeding a 50 g carbohydrate dose of the food on an empty stomach^[3]. That is around nine tablespoons of honey — not a teaspoon stirred into tea alongside bread and cheese. In a mixed meal, the rest of the plate blunts the response far more than the choice between two sweeteners does.

What the trials on honey actually found

This has been tested properly. A systematic review pooled 18 controlled trials covering 1,105 participants and found that honey intake lowered fasting glucose, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, and raised HDL cholesterol^[4]. That sounds like a strong result, and it comes with three caveats the headlines usually drop.

First, the effects differed by the type of honey: raw and single-flower honeys drove most of the benefit, and processed honey showed little. Second, the authors graded the overall certainty of the evidence as low to very low, which is a statement about how much the pooled numbers should move your behaviour. Third, the trials fed honey inside an otherwise healthy diet; they are not evidence that adding honey to what you already eat improves anything^[4].

Read plainly, the literature supports a modest claim: if a sweetener is going into the cup either way, honey is a defensible choice and may be marginally better than sugar. It does not support treating honey as medicine, and it does not make honey free.

Honey in a real kitchen

Three practical rules follow. If you are tracking your intake, log honey by the spoon and log it as sugar, because that is what your body and your target will treat it as; a single tablespoon in each of three glasses of tea is a meaningful share of a day's sugar allowance^[1]. If you live with diabetes or insulin resistance, honey counts as carbohydrate in exactly the way sugar does, and the glycaemic index difference is too small and too variable to plan around. And honey must never be given to an infant under twelve months old: the spores it can carry cause infant botulism, which is the one hard contraindication in this entire topic^[5].

None of this makes honey a problem food. A spoon of honey in yoghurt or on the Ramadan table is a small, countable amount of sugar in an otherwise good meal, and that is a sensible place for sweetness to sit. The mistake is the upgrade in your head — the belief that because honey is natural, it is outside the accounting.

If you want to see where sugar fits in a day's total rather than arguing about a spoon, the guide on how to split your calories into carbs and fat shows how carbohydrate is budgeted, and how your daily calories are calculated explains where the budget itself comes from. Logging the spoon is the part people skip; sending it as a message to a calorie counter that works inside WhatsApp takes about as long as stirring it in.

Sources

1. World Health Organization. Guideline: Sugars Intake for Adults and Children. Geneva: WHO, 2015. ↩
2. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. FoodData Central — Honey; Sugars, granulated. ↩
3. Atkinson FS, Foster-Powell K, Brand-Miller JC. International tables of glycemic index and glycemic load values: 2008. Diabetes Care 2008;31(12):2281–2283. ↩
4. Ahmed A, Tul-Noor Z, Lee D, et al. Effect of honey on cardiometabolic risk factors: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Nutrition Reviews 2023;81(7). ↩
5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Infant Botulism — honey should not be fed to children younger than 12 months. ↩

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