Honey: Nature's Wonder Sugar

7:07Josh Clark:Where's that? Was that like his definition?

7:09Chuck Bryant:Yeah. I mean, he talks about basically what honey is and how it's made. Oh, so you're just saying start from take it from the top? Basically. But I thought the way he did it was like, here's it's totally unambiguous.

7:21Josh Clark:Yeah. Completely understandable. Agreed.

7:24Chuck Bryant:And it's just a good descriptor of honey and how it's made.

7:27Josh Clark:Yeah, this is good stuff by the grabster. So, yeah, a bit of a refresher, though, but we all know that bees like to fly around to different flowers and stick their face in them and dance all over them and do kind of fun things. And there is a sugary liquid called nectar in flowering plants, and bees are wild about the stuff for a lot of reasons. one reason is like you know sometimes they just drink it like they want to save that stuff in what's called their crop or their honey stomach to bring back to the hive that's their main job but when they're out there working all day they're also like let me take a little bit of this sweet stuff down for me

8:06Chuck Bryant:I wonder if there's any bees out there seriously that have like a bit of a problem with nectar

8:13Josh Clark:yeah it goes from one for me three for you to three for me one for you

8:16Chuck Bryant:kind of I wonder if there's some that like just kind of drink it more than others There's got to be.

8:22Josh Clark:Maybe. Sure.

8:23Chuck Bryant:Yeah. So, yes, but for the most part, when they're out there harvesting and foraging for nectar, they're using their crop, a honey stomach, which they can store, I think, a thousand flowers worth of nectar in. That is a lot. A lot of nectar. Which is weird because I saw that it can grow to about a hundred times its size. So 100 times its initial size, holding 1 ,000 flowers worth of nectar, that's just a very efficient organ. And it just sits there. It's not doing anything. It's not digesting. It's just basically for carrying back to the hive.

9:02Josh Clark:By the way, I had the most amazing dad joke that I failed to tell.

9:06Chuck Bryant:What was it?

9:07Josh Clark:Should I tell it now?

9:08Chuck Bryant:Of course.

9:10Josh Clark:When you said it, it just popped into my head. That's why I know that I'm just on the way down. comedically.

9:17Chuck Bryant:Well, that means the podcast is on the way down, too.

9:19Josh Clark:Oh, yeah, for sure.

9:20Chuck Bryant:Okay.

9:21Josh Clark:You were talking about the bees having the problem with drinking too much honey. I said, well, you know, they could always just go to a BB meeting. Oh, boy. That was good. That wasn't bad.

9:32Chuck Bryant:That was a really good one.

9:33Josh Clark:I don't know. All right. I would love to hear from people. Terrible or borderline genius.

9:39Chuck Bryant:Okay. Well, I'm registering the first vote, and I'm going to say somewhere in the middle of those.

9:44Josh Clark:I was about to say there's no in between, but of course there is. Okay. All right. So where did you leave off with eating pollen?

9:50Chuck Bryant:That they take the nectar back to their nest, their hive.

9:54Josh Clark:Okay. Well, then I'll chime in here with the pollen part. Okay. Bees are obviously accidentally transferring this pollen. But, you know, some of this pollen is getting eaten and mixed in with that honey too because they love it because it's got protein and fat. And so what you end up with when you go back to the hive is a gut or crop or a honey stomach full of this nectar, a little bit of pollen. There's probably like just dust and things from the air. And they start puking it up into each other's mouths, chewing on it some, puking it around, transferring it to one another until it's ready for storage.

10:33Right.

10:34Josh Clark:Which sounds gross.

10:35Chuck Bryant:It is, but Ed makes a really good point here that they're not actually, it's not actually bee vomit. Honey's not bee vomit. I've said that before. So I think I'm kind of being inadvertently taken to task by Ed because, again. Oh, did you really? Oh, yeah, definitely. I've said that every chance I've ever had. But, again, the bee crop, the honey crop, is not digesting. So what they're regurgitating is virtually the same thing that's going in. So it's not really puke. It's just something else. But yes, they are transferring it from mouth to mouth. And as each bee takes another mouthful of nectar and then passes it around, they're chewing it for a little bit.

11:17Chuck Bryant:And one of the things they're doing is absorbing some of the moisture inside. They're also mixing in their own enzymes. And what they're doing in that sense, they're transforming nectar into honey. So honey is a mixture of bee enzymes, flower nectar, pollen, and that's dehydrated and combines to form brand new compounds. And that's what honey is.

11:45Josh Clark:Yeah. And as we'll see, there can be other things in there because it's nature. And these are sort of messy, although beautiful, processes. So as you'll see when we talk about like completely raw unfiltered honey, there may be some bee legs in there. Sure. And some other little bee, but there may be a piece of a wing because, you know, this is just how things go out there in the wild.

12:06Chuck Bryant:And sometimes some bees have really bad days. Yes.

12:11Josh Clark:That's when they go to the bee bee meetings.

12:14Chuck Bryant:So there's another way that what we've been talking about is blossom honey, what most people think of when they think of honey. There's actually one other way to make honey. And do you remember in our ant episode where ants are ranchers of aphids and the aphids suck the juice out of plants and produce honeydew? Well, bees go find that honeydew in some cases and can actually make honey from the sap of the stems, leaves and like bark of trees and other plants. And they basically harvest that like they harvest nectar from flowers. And so there's an entirely different way to produce honey that comes straight from the plant, not even from the flowers, and that's called honeydew honey.

12:55Chuck Bryant:Honeydew honey. Have you ever had that? I don't think I have. I was looking it up to see what some types of honeydew honey are, and I couldn't find many, and nothing that I found sounded like anything I've had before. Okay.

13:09Josh Clark:We should point out that not all bees produce honey, obviously. There are a lot of different species of bees, and we went over those in great detail in the bee episode. But the honeybee is from the genus Apis. And there are some other bees that do make honey, but, like, the chief honeybee is the western honeybee. This is the stud when it comes to making great honey. This is the one we domesticated. This is the one that makes so much honey, they have enough for them. They have enough for us. And everybody is happy, basically, which is one of the things I love about beekeeping. It seems like one of the, geez, few things where we extract something from nature for ourselves where there's enough to go around.

13:59Josh Clark:And if you do it in the right way, it doesn't harm the thing that gave it to you.

14:04Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that is kind of a beautiful thing about it. And as we'll see, the fact that honey exists is kind of miraculous. And that's just kind of like the cherry on the top, Chuck, that we can harvest honey without harming the bees or taking some of their head stash for us. Like, just make a little extra for us and we can take that. I think it's wonderful, too.

14:28Josh Clark:So, yeah, you know, you mentioned we have a whole episode on beekeeping. But as a short refresher, this has been happening for a long time. They were people were collecting honey, you know, in the Mesolithic period. So there are like cave drawings that depict this stuff. So we've always liked the honey as humans. And then, you know, there's a belief that it may have just like beekeeping may have happened by accident when a hive maybe set up in a jar or basket or something that was outside at somebody's place. And they went, hey, wait a minute. like this awesome honey is now in this jar on my back porch.

15:07Josh Clark:Like, I wonder if we could do this like intentionally and do it on purpose. And they kind of just started doing it. That's what the thought is, at least.

15:15Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And they think that originally maybe some of the earliest, earliest artificial hives were some sort of clay pod or something that they repurposed for that. Sometimes maybe they came across a hive and they're like, this is pretty firmly attached to this stick. I'm just going to take the whole stick home with me.

15:33Josh Clark:I hope.

15:33Chuck Bryant:Farm it like that, you know? Yeah, there's, regardless, at some point, somebody probably just stumbled upon this. And then in very short order, it started to spread. They think that beekeeping at least goes back about 5 ,000 years ago. There's evidence of it in Egypt, the Indus Valley, and Mesopotamia. And then China, about 800 years after that, evidence of beekeeping starts up. And you would guess the people of China and the people of Mesopotamia may not have been in contact at the same time or at that time. So it's really possible that beekeeping just kind of independently grew up or evolved in different societies and cultures around the world independently.

16:20Yeah.

16:21Josh Clark:And it was something because you're using like clay jars and things like you were saying. You didn't need to forge metal. It wasn't super expensive. It was something that there was a low barrier to entry, I guess, is what you would say these days. Yeah, totally. So, and it was really delicious and, as we'll soon find out, super beneficial. So it became a big deal.

16:42Chuck Bryant:Yeah. One of the earliest artificial hives is still pretty much the symbol for a beehive. If you look at any A.A. Milne Winnie the Pooh illustrations. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's called, it's basically a cone, a basket-y cone turned upside down. So you take an ice cream cone, turn it upside down on the ice cream part, make it kind of bubbly, and there you go. That's a skep.

17:08Josh Clark:Yeah, that's great. Totally. And that's where you get your beehive hairdo. It's named after these things. Mm-hmm. And, you know, things just advance from there. And we'll talk a little bit about that later. But I say we take a break now. Okay. And then talk about what's in honey and what makes it so good for us. Sounds good.

17:51Chuck Bryant:Hey, everybody, get this. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers. And that's where it stands apart from other ad buys.

18:03Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company, role, seniority, skills, even company revenue, so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.

18:12Chuck Bryant:Yep, that's why LinkedIn ads generates the highest B2B ROAS of all online ad networks. Seriously, all of them.

18:19Josh Clark:And get this, if you spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads, you get a free$250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash S-Y-S-K. That's linkedin.com slash S-Y-S-K. Terms and conditions apply.

18:40Josh Clark:In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

18:47Chuck Bryant:And T-Mobile knows all about that. They're now the best network, according to the experts at Ookla Speedtest. And they use that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

19:02Josh Clark:That's right. With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged. With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand. With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, and your clients. And with seamless coverage from the world's tallest satellite to mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

19:26Chuck Bryant:That's your business supercharged. Learn more at supermobile.com.

19:31Josh Clark:Seamless coverage with compatible device in most outdoor areas in the U.S. where you can see the sky. Best network based on analysis by Ukla of Speedtest Intelligence, data 2H 2025.

19:45Chuck Bryant:We're always talking about how things work, and one thing that keeps your car running smoothly is regular oil changes. But life's busy, and the oil light always comes on at the worst time. Well, that's why there's Take 5 Oil Change. It doesn't just save time. It gives you control of your day back. You pull in, stay in your car, check something off your to-do list. No waiting room, no pressure. You're in and you're out in about 10 minutes. Oil changes include tire pressure checks and fluid top-offs, and the friendly staff explain everything and welcome you with a free water.

20:14Josh Clark:Take 5 fitting into your busy schedule is something you should know. Find your nearest shop at Take5.com.

20:31Josh Clark:Okay, so the question of what is in honey is very easy to answer because it's almost all sugar. There is some water in there, although, you know, like we mentioned, And part of the process of getting to the honey state is to remove as much moisture as possible. But you still need some moisture. So it's, you know, something that you can squirt out of a plastic bear.

20:56Chuck Bryant:Sure. Which you can later make a bong out of.

21:01Josh Clark:I think most everyone that was in college when True Romance came out probably tried that. Totally.

21:05Chuck Bryant:And by the way, so long sixth grade classes that were just listening to this episode.

21:11Josh Clark:Poor teacher. who just ran to the front of the glass and stopped. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I'm sorry. What's a bong? Was that Ralph Wiggum? It was. It was a pretty good one. So it's mostly sugar, and believe it or not, it's mostly simple sugar. Fructose and glucose, there are some complex sugars, but that's not to say just because honey is mainly just sugar and simple sugar that it's not complex because it really is.

21:41Chuck Bryant:It is super complex. Again, the word miraculous just keeps springing to mind. And I'm definitely not one of those intelligent design people. I just think honey is something really special, though. And so, like, yes, it does have the simple sugars. It has very complex sugars. Let me throw out a couple of these names just to kind of blow your mind.

21:59Josh Clark:Did you practice? All right.

22:00Chuck Bryant:There's maltopentose.

22:03Josh Clark:Okay.

22:04Chuck Bryant:I didn't add the extra T in there. I wanted to so bad. Galactose. That's an amazing name. There's also isomaltotriose. These are not your average everyday sugars like fructose and glucose, both of which are found in honey. But that's just the sugars. And again, the simple sugars combined with other enzymes in the bees' mouths to create these much more sophisticated sugars, some of which have like actual protective health properties we've found. But that's just the sugars. There's also amino acids, enzymes, polyphenols, flavonoids. And when you start looking at all of the different things that pop up in honey, that's in honey, and you look at each one individually and you look them up, you will find that they do all sorts of amazing things.

22:51Chuck Bryant:And when you put all of it together, you just can't help but step back and say, honey is miraculous.

22:57Josh Clark:Yeah. And let's have a spoonful.

22:58Chuck Bryant:Yeah, exactly. That's the second thought that follows.

23:02Josh Clark:It is. It has. In fact, you mentioned amino acids. It has all nine, all nine essential amino acids. which are the ones that we need that we don't make in our own body. So we have to eat them. It is, and we'll get to the healthy stuff in like 12 seconds, but we do need to mention that one of the other great things about honey is that it's, I don't know about last forever, maybe. I know they pulled honey out of like Egyptian tombs and reconstituted it to where it was fine. So maybe it does last forever, but it is acidic. It has antibacterial properties. So that means honey will last you a long, long time.

23:39Josh Clark:And if you find an old, hard, you know, lump of honey in a jar in your house that you forgot about, you can probably make that honey awesome again with very little effort.

23:50Chuck Bryant:Yeah, supposedly what you do is you just throw it in that jar. And you take that jar and you put it in like a bath of very hot tap water. Do not heat it up on the stove. Just put it in hot tap water and very slowly that chunk of honey will turn back into liquid gold, a.k.a. honey.

24:08Josh Clark:Yeah, there's a lot of mixed messaging around honey being toxic if it's heated beyond a certain point. Sure. Because, you know, there's ancient wisdom that says it becomes toxic. Other people these days say, no, it doesn't. So I was like, you know, I mean, surely there's a study about this. And I didn't really find one. I found one about lab rats and honey heated with ghee. Okay. But that wasn't only honey. That sounds kind of good. And it does, doesn't it? But I don't know if I just didn't have time to find the study because it seems like a simple enough thing to research. Like you heat the honey.

24:48Josh Clark:Yeah. And feed it to a monkey and see if it dies. So. I'm kidding, by the way.

24:56Chuck Bryant:But the thing is, Chuck, is you raised something that came up for me later on that I'll just put here. Like, the stuff we do to animals is unconscionable. A hundred years from now, our cohort is going to be looked at as just so barbaric. And one of the things that kind of raised my hackles was, as we'll see later on, one of the things they think honey can help with is neurological disorders or mental imbalances. and they test that stuff on rats. And one of the things they found was that in rats, it recovers hopeless behavior, sorry, in mice that have undergone restraint stress for 21 days. And I was like, restraint stress doesn't sound very good.

25:39Chuck Bryant:What is that? They put the mouse in a tube where it can't move any of its limbs or body or anything. And they kept it there for 21 days. And you think being put in a tube as a human being for 21 days where you couldn't move, like I can barely breathe just saying that out loud, right? That's 21 human days. Imagine what 21 days is in the length of a mouse's life. And then, by the way, after they studied the mouse after taking it out of the tube, they probably killed it shortly after that. So that mouse's entire life was spent under restraint stress in a tube. And this is just one of the myriad things that we do to animals.

26:20Chuck Bryant:And the more I just kind of come across this stuff casually mentioned in this really dry clinical tone in peer-reviewed papers, the more I'm just like, this is, I don't know that we can justify this. And yes, we've come up with so many amazing things to help humanity along, but I really think we should be allocating a significant amount of our research efforts to figuring out how to not use animals to come up with those same amazing breakthroughs. Because it's just wrong. It's cruel and wrong, and there's really basically no justification for it in the greater scheme of things. And that's my soapbox.

26:58Josh Clark:I think that's your first soapbox moment of 2023.

27:01Chuck Bryant:Oh, it definitely is now that you mention it. Sure.

27:04Josh Clark:All right. That means we're going to toast some Amaro.

27:08Chuck Bryant:Clink.

27:09Josh Clark:That is good for your body as well.

27:11Chuck Bryant:Uh-huh. What's your Amaro that you like? Congratulations.

27:14Josh Clark:You know, I got a few of them. That's going to be a very near future topic, by the way. Oh, okay, cool. Because I've gotten very into Amaro.

27:20Chuck Bryant:Mine is Montenegro.

27:23Josh Clark:Montenegro is fantastic.

27:24Chuck Bryant:Amaro Montenegro is so good. And it's really good to mix cocktails with, too.

27:28Josh Clark:It sure is. A little bourbon and some Amaro or some rye and Amaro. A little bit of that.

27:33Chuck Bryant:It's delicious. It'll fix a mouse that's been in restraint stress for 21 days right up.

27:39Josh Clark:Some orange bitters, a little shake of that.

27:41Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it's good stuff. All right. Also, Chuck, by the way, just a little bit of Amaro Montenegro, like I think an ounce of that, and some good seltzer is really good on its own too.

27:53Josh Clark:That's a digestif and a half.

27:55Chuck Bryant:It definitely is.

27:56Josh Clark:Yeah, that's great. You know, recently I went to L.A. just for the day to see our friend Ben Harrison. Yeah. And our friend and booking agent Josh Lindgren and my friend Adam Pranica. You'd love Adam. You just haven't hung out with him much. But we went to Musso and Frank, and I'll just say this, and I haven't been drinking much lately, but we had a day. And we're way too drunk to be in Musso and Frank.

28:21Chuck Bryant:I could tell from your Instagram posts from it.

28:24Josh Clark:Yeah. I was like, Chuck looks really happy in these photos. This great big meal and drinks and all this stuff at one of the oldest restaurants in Hollywood. And at the very end, Ben Harrison just shouts out, is that it? We're like, yes, nothing else. And Ben went, for Amaro's. Oh, yeah? So that's how we ended our meal. Wow. Very nice. We're just supposed to help with a hangover. So let's not blow all of our knowledge on Amaro right here.

28:50Chuck Bryant:Well put, Chuck. Jerk.

28:53Josh Clark:All right. So health qualities of honey is where we left off 10 minutes ago. There are lots of health benefits, and there are lots of studies that back this up, which is great. There are medicinal uses that have been academically studied and verified. So this isn't like, you know, witchy hokum or woo-woo stuff like that. Honey is really, really good for you. And we've known this for a long time. And one of the things that honey is great for is if you have allergies. If you, they did studies where they looked over the course of a couple of months during allergy season. And it had significant reductions in what's called rhinitis.

29:32Josh Clark:Rhinitis. Yeah, rhinitis, which is, you know, stuffy nose, sneezing, allergic sort of qualities. Fear of rhinoceri. And this was like quite a bit of honey. I think it was one gram of honey per kilogram of body weight. That's a lot of honey. It's a lot of honey, but it works. And, you know, it's better than some dumb allergy medication.

29:53Chuck Bryant:So you remember our immunotherapy episode from very early on. We talked a lot about eating honey to get over allergies. And it totally makes sense because you're exposing yourself to the local pollen. That's why people who say this actually works to get yourself over allergies say it won't work unless you are eating local honey, meaning like within 20 or I think 30 miles of where you live. Because you're exposing yourself little by little to that pollen and your body's like, oh, this stuff's not that bad. We won't give you any more allergies.

30:27Josh Clark:Yeah. And there's a lot of reasons to eat local honey and eat locally, period. period, not the least of which is that's just how it was for a gazillion years. You ate what was near you because you couldn't get anywhere else. And that's just sort of the better way to eat.

30:42Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I've really gotten into green grapes lately. They're just so good. And they're so good for you to just always have like a bowl of them out. And we just left grape season. And the stuff that's out now is just, it's so bad. It's just like you put in your mouth and there's no like pop to it. It just mushes. And I'm like, this is not any good. Yeah, it is like an eyeball. It's like a rotten eyeball, basically. Oh, God. I'm off of grapes. I'm trying to find a grape replacement until they come back in season.

31:13Josh Clark:Grape replacement is not a bad band name. Actually, it is a bad band name, but I could see someone naming their band that.

31:18Chuck Bryant:That seems like a side project band name.

31:20Josh Clark:Right.

31:20Chuck Bryant:Okay.

31:22Josh Clark:What about inflammation? That's, you know, inflammation we've talked a lot about. That's not the root cause of every problem humans have, But inflammation is one of the leading causes of a lot of problems that humans have.

31:35Chuck Bryant:I think we need to do an episode on that.

31:37Josh Clark:Yeah, totally.

31:38Chuck Bryant:But yeah, I mean, it's behind cardiovascular issues. Your blood pressure might be high. You might have gut problems, arthritis, some types of cancer. And it's your body basically mounting this immune response that is overblown. And so you're suffering as a result. And it has all these terrible effects. Well, the flavonoids that I mentioned are, there's a ton of flavonoids, I think like 30 different flavonoids found in basically all types of honey, just to varying degrees, depending on what flowers it came from. And they are antioxidants. We've talked about antioxidants and whether or not they actually work or not.

32:17Chuck Bryant:The jury's still kind of out, but there are some things that flavonoids do that are like, this is just demonstrably effective. one of the things they do is go to the genes that produce inflammatory proteins and say, nope, not today. You just rest easy. Stop making those things. So they block expression of inflammatory proteins. That's just one of the things that you can find in honey. Yeah.

32:42Josh Clark:A pretty big one, if you ask me. Sure. If you want kind of one of the king daddies of healthful honeys, you've probably heard of Manuka honey, it seems to have, I don't know about exploded, but it seems to have really garnered a lot more popularity. Garnered popularity? Whatever. You know what I'm saying. Sure. In more recent years, partially because of marketing and PR, but partially because Manuka honey is really good for you. This is a monofloral honey, which means, as we'll talk about a bit more later, that it comes from a single flower, as much as possible, from New Zealand. And it's got a pretty short period in which this flower flowers.

33:25Josh Clark:And that makes it a more rare honey. That makes it more expensive, of course. But Manuka honey kind of does all the things that honey does times, you know, with a plus afterward.

33:38Chuck Bryant:Yeah, supposedly the active ingredient for manuka honey's antimicrobial properties is methylglyoxal. It's a word as ugly as it sounds spelled out, but it has about 100 times the amount that other types of honey have. And that's one of the reasons why everybody's so bully on manuka honey. I think the other reason is because it is very rare. The manuka shrub grows in fairly remote, isolated regions of New Zealand. So it's hard to get. And that means it's very expensive. So you can sell it for a lot of money. So anything you can say is Manuka honey, you can kind of hype. But there does seem to be some some actual like reality behind the hype.

34:19Josh Clark:Yeah. Like there there are people who do this and who just like take a spoonful of Manuka honey every day as if they're taking their vitamins in the morning or something like that.

34:29Chuck Bryant:For sure. And there's another one that's kind of come up recently that has been rivaling Manuka's tuolang honey. It grows in Malaysia. The thing is, Manuka honey is a monofloral honey, as we'll see. It's just made from the flowers of the Manuka shrub. Tuolang is called jungle honey. Like it's just made from whatever's flowering in Malaysia. But supposedly the flowers that are growing in the jungles of Malaysia have a lot of amazing properties too. Because people are saying this Tuolang, it's the hot new product. And so long Manuka, you're so over and done with.

35:05Josh Clark:Yeah, Jungle Honey is a good song title. Yeah, for sure. Or maybe I'm just thinking Jungle Boogie.

35:10Chuck Bryant:No, Jungle Honey sounds good. You put honey with any other word, and it's going to make it more appealing, I think, for sure.

35:18Josh Clark:I love the word jungle. It's one of my favorites.

35:20Chuck Bryant:Yeah, you said earlier you were starting your honey file. I was like, you should call all files your honey file.

35:27Josh Clark:Maybe I will. Honey is also good topically. You can put honey, especially something like Manuka honey, on a skinned knee or something like that. cuts, any kind of stubborn wounds, it's going to help out with. They've done meta-studies on putting honey on topically, and a lot of these were, it seems like, from studies on diabetic foot wounds. This is what Ed found. But, you know, it healed faster. There was less inflammation. Apparently it can reduce nasty odors. And even in diabetic foot wounds, helped reduce the need for amputation.

36:06Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Yeah. Apparently, that's with just about any honey you could use for wound healing, not just Manuka.

36:13Josh Clark:Yeah.

36:13Chuck Bryant:I saw a paper that said, actually, you might not want to use Manuka because that methylglyoxal is something that might actually prevent a diabetic foot ulcer from healing. Oh, really? It's so potent. It might actually, like, kill off, like, the new cells that are trying to form. Oh, wow. Other honey has been shown, and this honey in general, that it actually does help heal diabetic foot ulcers and really any kind of wound. But the reason they say diabetic ulcers is because they have so much trouble healing because there's so little circulation being led to that wound site that it just basically just persists.

36:50Chuck Bryant:And if you slather some honey on there, you can say goodbye, stubborn wound. Goodbye.

36:57Josh Clark:We already talked about blood pressure some, but we should note that some of the studies have found that it reduces hypertension in women and not men. And that's not to say that it can't in men, but it's in, you know, Ed points this out very astutely that honey is just there's a lot of studies and meta studies and things. But, you know, it's something that bees make in nature and that humans collect. So they aren't always the most consistent results when it comes to studies. And there's so many varieties and so many kinds of bees and where they live and then the flowers that they're pollinating and getting that nectar from.

37:34Josh Clark:That it's just because a study says something, it doesn't mean like that's the end, full stop.

37:41Chuck Bryant:Yeah, one way or the other. Like didn't find this property actually helpful or did. There just needs to be more study. Yes, they need to refine the study of honey, which I think we're in the midst of.

37:55Josh Clark:Like right now on this podcast?

37:56Chuck Bryant:We're helping move it along, I think. What about cancer? Cancer is another one. They think that basically there's properties in honey that create apoptosis, which is programmed cell death, and that they help target cancer tumors to go ahead and die. Just die, die, die tumor. And that's basically how chemotherapy works in a lot of ways. So, yes, it does seem to have some sort of effect on cancer. I saw that not only has it been shown to work in the lab, like in cell lines of cancer cells, but that it's had some clinical results as well. But apparently when they go after cancer cells, there's something that's called blebbing.

38:44Chuck Bryant:and blebbing is where a cell gets pulled away, like its membrane gets pulled away from the cytoskeleton and there's like a bulge. And at that point, you have what's called blebbing and that cell is in very big trouble. So honey goes after cancer cells and makes them bleb.

39:05Josh Clark:Well, you know how I knew it would be something that makes you in trouble. What? Is that it's called blebbing. Yeah, exactly. That can't be good.

39:13Chuck Bryant:No. Oh, my God, I'm blebbing. That's not a good sign.

39:16Josh Clark:No one would ever say, oh, that's fantastic. Good for you.

39:19Chuck Bryant:Yeah, high bleb. Right.

39:22Josh Clark:You mentioned neurological problems earlier a little bit. Obviously, this can be a whole host of things, but they have found, and this is another area that there needs to be a lot more testing, but the clinical trials have shown some pretty good results in things like depression, dementia, any kind of age-related, like, mental neurological deterioration, basically. But even things like convulsions. There was one study in some senior adults where they had a placebo control group, which had about 400 % greater incidence of dementia than the group that took a daily tablespoon of honey. That is astounding.

40:04Josh Clark:That's huge, yeah.

40:05Chuck Bryant:Yeah. That's the kind of study where it's like, no, that's the end. Nobody else needs to do any more research. Does everybody eat a tablespoon of honey? And that's actually, that raises a good question that a lot of people have. It's like, wait a minute, honey is a sweetener. Yes, it's natural, but it's got tons of sugar in it. So is it really okay to eat a tablespoon of honey a day? And the answer is, in the West especially, you should, yes, go ahead and eat a tablespoon of honey a day. But make sure that what you're doing is exchanging the added sugars that you're eating in your diet normally for that tablespoon.

40:41Chuck Bryant:Don't just add it to your normal diet. Figure out where you can cut down some sugar and use honey instead. And yes, you will probably be much better off in the long run because sugar is really not good for us at all.

40:52Josh Clark:That's great. I think we take our second break here. We come back and we talk about honeycombs, grades of honey. We still got a lot to go over. So let's get to it.

41:15Josh Clark:learning stuff with joshua and charles stuff you should know so

41:27Chuck Bryant:hey everybody get this linkedin has grown to a network of over one billion professionals and 130 million decision makers. And that's where it stands apart from other ad buys.

41:39Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company, role, seniority, skills, even company revenue, so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.

41:48Chuck Bryant:Yep, that's why LinkedIn Ads generates the highest B2B ROAS of all online ad networks. Seriously, all of them.

41:55Josh Clark:And get this, if you spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads, you get a free$250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash S-Y-S-K. That's LinkedIn.com slash S-Y-S-K. Terms and conditions apply.

42:16Josh Clark:In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

42:23Chuck Bryant:And T-Mobile knows all about that. They're now the best network, according to the experts at Ookla Speedtest. And they use that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

42:38Josh Clark:That's right. With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged. With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand. With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, and your clients. And with seamless coverage from the world's tallest satellite to mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

43:02Chuck Bryant:That's your business supercharged. Learn more at supermobile.com.

43:07Josh Clark:Seamless coverage with compatible device in most outdoor areas in the U.S. where you can see the sky. Best network based on analysis by UKLA of Speedtest Intelligence Data 2H 2025.

43:21Chuck Bryant:We're always talking about how things work, and one thing that keeps your car running smoothly is regular oil changes. But life's busy, and the oil light always comes on at the worst time. Well, that's why there's Take 5 Oil Change. It doesn't just save time. It gives you control of your day back. You pull in, stay in your car, check something off your to-do list. No waiting room, no pressure. You're in and you're out in about 10 minutes. Oil changes include tire pressure checks and fluid top-offs, And the friendly staff explain everything and welcome you with a free water.

43:50Josh Clark:Take 5 fitting into your busy schedule is something you should know. Find your nearest shop at Take5.com.

44:07Chuck Bryant:Okay, Chuck, this suddenly turned into a short stuff. Go.

44:12Josh Clark:Well, I mean, we can talk about the honeycomb briefly. Again, that's in our beekeeping episode, in our bee episode, with a lot of detail. But basically, the honeycomb is like that hexagonal cell structure that you see inside the hive made of the wax that the bees produce. And they make cells for storing honey or for housing that queen in the brood. But the important thing as far as the honeycomb goes is that humans came along as far as beekeeping is concerned and said, you know, let me let me build a frame of your house for you and you can come in and add the detail. So we started making these, you know, what would you call it, like a form?

44:57Josh Clark:A substrate. Ooh, look at you. Which gives the bees a little bit of a head start. And then, you know, the honey is in there. they extract that honey in a centrifuge, leaves that honeycomb intact, although you can get that natural honey if you've seen it in the store or maybe at a local farmer's market with a honeycomb floating in that honey. You can eat that stuff. It's waxed. It's not going to hurt you. Yeah, it's true.

45:29Chuck Bryant:And it probably makes you feel like Martha Stewart or something. It makes my teeth feel gritty, so I don't like it, but I do know that it is edible for sure.

45:37Josh Clark:Yeah.

45:37Chuck Bryant:One of the things I saw, Chuck, though, I was like, well, wait a minute. If beekeepers are like making basically fully formed honeycombs for the bees to use, this is going to produce some soft, lazy bees. But it turns out there's actually a really good reason to do this. And that is that when bees produce their own wax, they have to eat honey to produce the wax. And they consume six pounds of honey to make one pound of wax. So by giving them the wax to begin with, you're saving all of that extra honey. They're just going to keep making that honey, and you're going to get more for it.

46:12Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, maybe that's one of the reasons we have that surplus.

46:15Chuck Bryant:Probably. I would think so. Yeah, if you're keeping bees and you're not giving them preformed beeswax cells, you're a chump.

46:25Josh Clark:There are lots of different ways to rate or grade honey. We're going to go over a lot of those now. One of which is how much it's processed. We talked about right out of the hive, it's going to have some bead legs and pieces of wing and some yeast in there, some bacteria, some pollen, maybe some dust, some honey crystals. You know, you generally want to, I'm sure there are purists that just love that stuff. But if you're selling it in a store, you probably want to remove some of that or a lot of that to make it a food product. The other reason why is because if there's something floating in your honey, that just gives the honey a solid thing in there to crystallize around.

47:07Josh Clark:And generally, the honey buying public sees crystallization as like, I don't want to buy that honey.

47:15Chuck Bryant:I saw that that was mostly Americans that have an aversion to crystallized honey. That doesn't surprise me. And it's because we think that it's gone bad somehow. And again, yeah. All it is is like, yeah, there's been some crystallization of the sugars. And all you have to do is put in a nice tap water bath and it'll go back. But yes, you can just totally eat crystallized honey. There's no problem with it whatsoever. But because they know they're consumers, honey producers are like, we got to get the solids out of there. So basically any honey you buy in the United States is going to have at least undergone macro filtering, what the USDA calls straining.

47:52Chuck Bryant:And what that produces is raw honey. It's just they're getting out the biggest of the big solids. But then that's it. There's no more filtration whatsoever, and it's raw honey, which is a bit of a misnomer because every honey type that isn't pasteurized, and pasteurized honey is just one small subset, every other type of honey is technically raw honey. It's not been heated. There's nothing that's been killed off in it. It's all still raw. But I think what they're basically using the word raw for is like rustic honey.

48:23Josh Clark:Right. Yeah, I agree. You mentioned pasteurization. We might as well talk about that. I looked it up. I was like, why would you pasteurize honey? Because you typically think of pasteurization for more of like a dairy product. It's basically just there is no reason to do it that I found other than making it look and like pour out of the bottle or jar or whatever more freely. It's smoother, apparently. It's going to alter the flavor, obviously, because you're heating this honey up. Yeah. But that's the only thing I found why you would pasteurize honey.

49:01Chuck Bryant:I saw that, you know, honey has all these antimicrobial, antiviral properties. That doesn't mean there's no such thing as bacteria in honey or there's no such thing as mold spores in honey. And mold in particular can cause honey to ferment slightly. Again, nothing wrong with that. It's totally fine. You basically just have a free little mini shot of mead right there in your honey. But people don't like that kind of thing. So I think pasteurizing it kills off any of those potential microbes or yeast or mold or anything. I met a hippie once in, I think, West Virginia that made his own mead.

49:37Josh Clark:I think I might have told the story before, but he gave me some mead.

49:39Chuck Bryant:Yeah, somebody mailed us mead years and years and years ago. It's the only mead I've ever had in my life. I'm not a fan. It was fine. Yeah, it's not something I could drink regularly or anything like that. But yeah, if I were in West Virginia wearing nothing but a pair of overalls, I could probably drink a little mead.

49:57Josh Clark:This is a nice guy, despite the fact that he was a fish fan. I'm getting killed for knocking fish, by the way.

50:04Chuck Bryant:Just keep it up, though. It doesn't matter.

50:08Josh Clark:Well, you know what's funny is all the people that have written in are trying to talk me into liking fish.

50:12Chuck Bryant:Right. They're like, surely you clearly haven't listened to fish and you don't know what you're talking about.

50:16Josh Clark:They do it. It's all almost verbatim. It's funny. It's almost like they had talking points they shared. But I know fish fans wouldn't share talking points. That's not the fish way. No way. Back to the filtering. We're jumping back to the other USDA designation, which is filtered honey. And that is basically just more filtering. The filters are finer, and it's going to remove almost all those solids that you're going to see. And it probably does require some heating because to get through those filters, you've got to have it a little more viscous or less viscous.

50:50Chuck Bryant:Yeah. A little bit. But if you're ultra-filtering, not only do you have to warm it up, you combine it with a lot of water.

50:57Josh Clark:Yeah.

50:58Chuck Bryant:Because you're pushing it through not quite reverse osmosis membranes, but something not too far off where it is getting everything out of the honey. So much so the USDA says this isn't honey. You can't call it honey, honey. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. So there's another way to basically achieve the same end without blasting it through an ultra-filtered membrane. And that's using diatomaceous earth. And diatoms are fossilized microalgae with silica shells. And this is the shells left over. And they are super tiny, but they pick up even tinier particles. They are attracted to them. They get stuck in the shells.

51:37Chuck Bryant:And then you filter out the diatoms. And then you've also filtered out the stuff even further. So you don't have to use quite as fine a filter because the diatoms have sucked up all the stuff that would have passed through that filter that's catching the diatoms. Does that make sense?

51:54Josh Clark:Yeah, and it's pretty amazing. You might remember diatomaceous earth from our cockroach episode because that's the stuff that you can spread around that they eat that kills them from the inside out.

52:04Chuck Bryant:It also dries fleas out too. If you have a flea problem, you can spread diatomaceous earth on your carpet and it will help.

52:11Josh Clark:Yeah, I've been through that. We talked about spun honey already. And just want to reiterate that spun honey or creamed honey or whipped honey. It's all the same thing, and it still doesn't lose any of those helpful properties. You can also rate honey by color, of course. You know, honey has a great range of color, and technically it's called optical density, but they use the Pfund color scale. I think it's just fund.

52:41Chuck Bryant:No, really, like Pfister, the fabulous faucet with a funny name?

52:45Josh Clark:Yeah, but I always say Pfister just because I think it's funny.

52:47Chuck Bryant:Okay, well then, yes, this would definitely be fun.

52:50Josh Clark:And this is a scale from zero, which is water white, all the way to 114 and above, which is dark amber. Very nice. And then what's the deal with organic honey?

53:01Chuck Bryant:So organic honey is a different type of classification. Any of the stuff we've talked about, ultra-filtered, pasteurized, raw, micro-filtered, creamed, all of that stuff could also be organic honey. basically as long as the organic techniques that the USDA requires were used to create the honey. And also on the plants that the bees are harvesting nectar from.

53:26Josh Clark:That's right.

53:26Chuck Bryant:So that's it. So from what I can tell, based on all this information, grade A raw organic honey is probably top of the pops for anybody.

53:36Josh Clark:Top of the pops. And then when it comes to flavors, this is where we get into sort of the last piece. We mentioned monofloral. The other end of the spectrum would be multifloral. And that is just simply what these bees are flowering on or what kind of flowers they're dancing with. Sure. If they're dancing with one flower, and, you know, Ed points out bees are bees. So it may be hard to make sure that's the only thing. They're very promiscuous. They are. If it's labeled monofluoral honey, that probably means that a farm has planted a very, very large area of one thing. So it's really likely that the bee is eating almost all of that.

54:18Josh Clark:Or you can, like the wildflower honey, it's just multifluorals. Like, hey, whatever's in the area, have at it. There can be different flavors, but it's not exactly, like there are notes of things. It's not like if you eat orange blossom honey, it tastes like you squirted an orange in it. But there will be like notes of citrus and things like that.

54:38Chuck Bryant:I actually saw on a site of different types of honey that they warn you that if your orange blossom honey smells like orange fragrance, then you've got some sort of fake honey that it's being counterfeit in some way. It's not like that. Like you said, it's notes. But orange blossom honey has citrusy notes. Pumpkin blossom honey has pumpkin-y notes. I think sourwood is herbal and woodsy. Or no, that's, what is that, Chuck? Linden. Linden honey. Herbal and woodsy. Eucalyptus honey has like a slight menthol note to it. Buckwheat honey, I don't think I've ever had it, but it's almost like black in color.

55:17Chuck Bryant:It's definitely the dark amber side of the Pafun scale. But it also has like kind of like a slight bitter note to it too. I want to try it. It sounds almost like torturous, but I would still try it. I'll try basically any honey at least once.

55:33Josh Clark:Yeah, and there are all kinds of great honey, sort of like flavored honeys, and the honey is still in it, so it's still great for you and delicious. But like bourbon honeys and like sort of spicy chili pepper honey and stuff like that, all sorts of delicious things out there. One of our favorite things to do is go to our local farm co-op and get that local honey. And, you know, it costs a little bit more, but like they're doing the right thing. And not like Will Ferrell and LeBron James. Did you see that?

56:01Chuck Bryant:Did they get into honey? They are.

56:04Josh Clark:Actually, it's a pretty cool thing. They partnered, along with some other celebrities, with a company called Flamingo Estate, which is listed here as an urban farm and lifestyle brand. Okay. Sells, you know, all kinds of stuff. Sells urban straw hats. But they serve curated farm boxes. But what they've done is I think they've gone to some of these celebrities who have large properties and said, hey, how'd you like your own honey? We can make we can keep bees on your property and it will be called Will Ferrell honey and it'll cost two hundred and fifty dollars a jar. No. But it goes to charity.

56:44Chuck Bryant:OK. I pulled it out at the end there. You know where they should go is the Magnum's estate. He has big avocado farms. And apparently. Yeah. And apparently avocado honey is a thing too. Okay. Interesting. Before we end this, Chuck, if you'll indulge me, I just wanted to rattle off the properties that have been found among some of the compounds that you find in honey. Let's hear it. If you'll indulge me. You ready? Mm-hmm. that these compounds found in honey are shown to possess these properties. Antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-neoplastic, antimicrobial, anti-carcinogen, anti-arrhythmic, anti-leishmanial, anti-thrombotic, anti-mutagenic, anti-nociceptive, anti-mycobacterial, anti-proliferative, and immune-boosting properties, not to mention that it's hypocholesteremic, cardioprotective, antihypertensive, hepatoprotective, hypoglycemic, and neuroprotective, nephroprotective, gastroprotective, so on, so forth.

57:55Chuck Bryant:And it can improve sperm count and their motility and protects against vaginal and uterine atrophy. Plus, it improves the normal estrus cycle. Wow. Isn't that amazing? Did you say antichrist in there? I think so. It's miraculous, but in like the reverse manner. Uh-huh. You got anything else? I have nothing else. I don't either, and that means, of course, everybody, it's time for listener mail.

58:26Josh Clark:I'm going to make this one very short because I just wanted to shout out that we got a, I got an email from, well, we got one from our old buddy, Aaron Mizell, who helps head up the Stuff You Should Know 5K.

58:43Chuck Bryant:I'm glad you thought of this.

58:46Josh Clark:But Aaron, I think, was trying to locate this English professor that taught my Shakespeare class. Yeah. I don't think she landed on it, but someone else did. Okay. And said, was it Dr. Vance? And I was like, oh, it totally was. As soon as I heard the name, I remembered. and uh i believe aaron though or now i feel bad because i can't remember if it was aaron or the other person who wrote in um was still in touch with dr vance got in touch with him and said hey chuck took your classes you may have even taken some classes from vance who knows do you remember me no i didn't okay um well i guess i was an english major so i was always over there.

59:27Josh Clark:But Dr. Vance sent in an email, which I haven't responded to, but I'm going to do that today. It said, Chuck, can't tell you how honored I was by your remarks on the podcast. I thank you so very much. All is well here. Loving retirement, traveling, grandchildren. And here's my website in case you want to see what I've been publishing. And I think everyone should go check it out. It's mystery, thrillers, literary horror, humorous romance, historical fiction. Wow. All kinds of fun stuff. And you can find all this at authorjohnvance.com

1:00:01Chuck Bryant:Very nice. That was short and, Chuck, appropriately sweet for this episode.

1:00:06Josh Clark:Good stuff.

1:00:07Chuck Bryant:That was nice, man. Got a pat on your head from your old English teacher.

1:00:11Josh Clark:He was the best, man. One of the few college professors who really impacted me.

1:00:15Chuck Bryant:Yeah, like Robin Williams. Yeah.

1:00:19Josh Clark:Don't get that joke. You don't?

1:00:22Chuck Bryant:No. From, um...

1:00:24Josh Clark:Oh, Dead Poets Society.

1:00:25Chuck Bryant:Yes.

1:00:26Josh Clark:Okay.

1:00:27Chuck Bryant:Thank you for saying that, because I was about to say, from O Captain, My Captain.

1:00:31Josh Clark:That's a working title.

1:00:33Chuck Bryant:So, if you want to be like Dr. Vance and let us know how retirement's going for you, you can wrap it up in an email, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

1:00:46Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

1:01:19Chuck Bryant:Something off your to-do list. No waiting room. No pressure. You're in and you're out in about 10 minutes. Oil changes include tire pressure checks and fluid top-offs. And the friendly staff explain everything and welcome you with a free water.

1:01:31Josh Clark:Take 5 fitting into your busy schedule is something you should know. Find your nearest shop at Take5.com. Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs, and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong, even when life gets busy. Some of the most life-giving conversations start with just a phone call. That's why AT &T guarantees a network you can rely on so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most.

1:02:01Josh Clark:That's the AT &T Guarantee. AT &T connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Just visit att.com slash guarantee for details. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One, N-A, member FDIC.

1:02:37Josh Clark:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.