Enzyme

Definition

Honey carries enzymes added by the bee, principally invertase, which splits nectar's sucrose into fructose and glucose; diastase, which breaks down starch and has no role in honey at all; and glucose oxidase, which generates hydrogen peroxide when honey is diluted. Enzyme activity is measured in honey because it degrades predictably with heat and storage time, which makes it a record of how a honey has been handled.

Where the word gets used loosely

Enzyme content is routinely presented as a nutritional benefit of raw honey. It is not one: the quantities are minute, these are not human digestive enzymes, and proteins eaten are digested as proteins. Diastase is a genuinely useful number — about the honey, not about the person eating it.

Guide records that discuss this

• How honey is madeNectar is mostly water. Honey is mostly sugar. Everything interesting about honey happens in the gap between those two sentences.
• What is honey?Honey is nectar that bees have concentrated and chemically altered, then sealed in wax. Every property people notice about it — the sweetness, the keeping quality, the setting — follows from that process.
• How plants decide honey flavourNearly everything that distinguishes one honey from another arrives in the nectar. The bee contributes enzymes and evaporation; the plant contributes everything you taste.
• How bees collect and process nectarA forager carries nectar in a stomach she does not digest from, hands it to a receiver who begins altering it chemically, and the colony then removes most of its water. The honey is made by the hive, not by the forager.
• Why different bees make different honeyNectar is only the raw material. What reaches the jar has been through a specific animal's crop, enzymes, evaporation behaviour and storage vessel — and change the animal and you change the product.
• Bee pollen: the colony's proteinPollen packed into pellets with nectar and enzymes, and the entire protein supply of a colony. Nutritionally real, nutritionally unremarkable at the doses people take, and not a treatment for hay fever.
• The enzymes in honeyHoney is the only common food that arrives carrying the enzymes of the animal that made it. Two of them made the honey, one defends it, and all of them are read in a laboratory as a record of how it has been treated.
• Why honey chemistry variesFive things decide what a laboratory finds in a jar of honey — the plant, the season, the bee, the place and what happened after extraction. Knowing which one moves which number is the difference between reading an analysis and guessing at it.

Question records that discuss this

• Is raw honey better than ordinary honey?Better for flavour, yes — raw honey keeps aroma compounds, enzymes and pollen that heating and fine filtration remove. Better for health, no: there is no good evidence that any of that produces a benefit. And 'raw' has no legal definition in most markets, so the word on a supermarket jar guarantees nothing.
• Does putting honey in hot tea ruin it?It damages the flavour, which is the real loss. Boiling water drives off aroma compounds and degrades enzymes, so an expensive honey in a boiling drink is largely wasted. It does not make honey toxic — that claim comes from Ayurvedic tradition and is not supported by evidence. Let a drink cool for a minute before stirring honey in.
• Does heating honey destroy it?Heating does not make honey harmful, and it does degrade it. Volatile aroma compounds are driven off, enzyme activity falls and hydroxymethylfurfural rises — so a heated honey is duller rather than dangerous. The claim that heated honey becomes toxic comes from Ayurvedic tradition and is not supported by evidence.