Honey, maple and coconut sugar are still sugar

Myths & Marketing

By KaTrina Samuels-Garrison, RD

Somewhere along the way sweeteners acquired a moral hierarchy — refined white at the bottom, something amber and unrefined at the top, and a widespread belief that climbing the ladder is a meaningful change. Mostly, it isn't.

Honey, maple syrup, agave, coconut sugar, date syrup and ordinary table sugar are all built from the same simple sugars in slightly different ratios. Your body handles them in much the same way. The differences between them are real, and they are small — far smaller than the gap between the marketing of one and the marketing of the other.

The trace minerals argument comes up constantly. It is technically true and practically beside the point: the amounts in a spoonful are tiny, and you would need to eat an implausible quantity of syrup for them to count for anything. At that quantity, the sugar is doing considerably more than the minerals are.

Where the swap does do something

Two honest points in its favour, and they are worth having:

• The flavour is stronger. Maple and honey carry more taste per spoon than white sugar, so people often reach for less without deciding to.
• It slows you down. Pouring from a jar of honey is a more deliberate act than tipping in sugar from a bag. Deliberate is usually less.

Both of those are behavioural rather than metabolic. The swap is a behaviour change wearing a biochemistry costume. That is not nothing — behaviour is where nearly all real change happens — but it is worth knowing which lever you are pulling, so you don't expect the other one to move.

What is actually worth your attention

The amount, and where most of it is arriving from. Very little added sugar comes in by the spoon. It comes in through drinks, sauces, cereals, flavoured yoghurts, coffee-shop orders and bread — quietly, in places where nobody is thinking about it, which is exactly why it adds up unnoticed.

Sugar that arrives inside whole food behaves differently, and this is the distinction the labels flatten. Fruit brings its sugar packaged with fibre and water, which changes how quickly you get through it and how full you feel afterwards. That is a genuine difference. “Unrefined versus refined” in a jar is not the same kind of difference at all.

None of which means the labels are lying, exactly. Unrefined sweeteners genuinely are less processed, and if that matters to you as a preference, it is a perfectly good reason to buy them. It simply is not a nutrition claim, and it should not be doing the work of one.

The part that usually goes unsaid

A dessert you chose, ate and enjoyed is not a problem waiting to be optimised. Most people's sugar intake is not decided by dessert; it is decided by the ordinary background of the week. Sorting out the background tends to leave more room for the foreground, not less — which is a far better trade than swapping the sugar bowl and hoping.

So use the honey. Use it because you like honey. Just don't let the upgrade quietly convince you that the amount stopped mattering — that, rather than the ingredient, is the part doing the work.

General nutrition information, not individual medical or dietary advice. If you have a medical condition, are pregnant, or take medication that interacts with diet, talk to your own clinician or dietitian before making changes.

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