Many people have honey at home. Honey has many functions. Most people usually like to drink honey directly with water. Honey has the effect of moisturizing the intestines. If you have constipation, you can drink some. Of course, honey can also It is rich in nutrients, but some honey on the market is fake. So what are the ways to distinguish real honey from fake honey? How to distinguish real and fake honey? .

1. How to distinguish true and false honey

1. Look at the luster and color.

Real honey is thick, sticky, shiny and moist; fake honey is turbid. Especially after stirring with chopsticks, real honey has good light transmittance and uniform color; fake honey is not only turbid but also contains impurities. Different honeys have different colors, so you need to know the relevant knowledge before buying honey. Sophora nectar is light amber; wattle nectar is also amber, but darker than sophora nectar; hundred-flower nectar is mostly yellow-red, with variable colors; date nectar is also darker in color. It is worth mentioning that compared to other honeys, date honey is not prone to crystallization.

2. Look at the crystals and rub them.

If you have a refrigerator at home, you can also store the honey in the refrigerator for a period of time before taking it out. Honey will become solid after being placed in an environment of 4 to 14 degrees Celsius for a while. The crystals of real honey are soft and have poor transparency, and they can stick in the eye; fake honey cannot stick, and some fake honey crystals will make a crisp sound when you bite them.

Put the crystals in your hands and rub them. The crystals of real honey are fine and have no gritty feel. Fake honey does not easily form crystals, and some fake honeys will have precipitates. The precipitates are harder than the crystals and are very sticky. Difficult to grind.

3. Smell the smell, whether it smells good or not.

Real honey exudes a light sweet fragrance, which can be smelled when you open the bottle, and the fragrance can last for a long time. This is not the case with fake honey, which either has an unnatural fragrance or has no fragrance at all.

4. Taste it, is it good or not?

Real honey is sweet and moist, and the sweetness of flowers echoes in the mouth for a long time; fake honey cannot taste the fragrance of flowers, but fake honey made with sugar can taste the taste of sugar. If there are crystals in real honey, the crystals will melt quickly after entering the mouth; on the contrary, fake honey will not dissolve the crystals easily. Some fake honey has a peculiar smell in your mouth and can irritate your throat.

5. With a chopstick and a piece of paper, inferior honey appears in its original form.

Although some honey is real, it is mixed with things, such as sugar and starch. And good honey cannot add anything other than honey. How to distinguish pure honey from adulterated inferior honey? The method is very simple, just a chopstick and a piece of white paper.

First, let’s talk about the white paper detection method. Drop honey onto white paper. Pure honey will not seep out, but honey mixed with water will seep out slowly. Pure honey has a thick texture and will form a bead shape when dropped onto paper; inferior honey will not form and will fall apart easily.

Let’s talk about the chopstick detection method. Insert a clean chopstick into the honey and lift it straight up. Pure honey will slowly flow down the chopsticks and pull out sticky strands. If these strands are broken, they will shrink into a ball. If you feel a lot of resistance when stirring the honey with chopsticks, be careful. This means that the honey you bought may have been mixed with glucose or maltose (also known as maltose).

2. How to consume honey

First, drink it with cold boiled water. In this way, the vitamin C oxidase in honey will not be destroyed. Drinking it in summer also has the effect of relieving heat, detoxification and laxatives. .

The second is to drink it with warm water (below 40 degrees). This can replenish vital energy without destroying various nutrients. However, in daily life, many people are accustomed to drinking honey with higher temperature or boiling water, which is unscientific. Because doing so will destroy the hydrocarbons and some vitamins in honey, thereby producing excess hydroxymethylfurfur, which will greatly damage the nutritional content of honey.

In addition, drinking honey with hot boiling water will also deactivate the enzymes in the honey, darken the color, evaporate the aroma, change the taste, and give the honey an unpleasant sour taste. This is also the main reason why pure natural honey is better than processed honey.

Because the first step in processing honey is to high-temperature distillate the low-concentration pure honey purchased from the bee factory to make its concentration reach 42 degrees to 43 degrees. But high temperature causes huge damage to the nutrients in honey.

3. Why is there fake honey?

Honey production has dropped sharply due to global climate change

In recent years, due to global weather factors and the abuse of pesticides and weeding, Agents have caused a sharp decrease in honey production, resulting in a shortage of honey on the market, and some businesses are mixing real and fake honey. Currently, the "carbon isotope detection method" is used to determine whether there is adulterated honey.

Isotopes can be used to test fingerprints to tell whether honey is real

If it is real honey, it contains a small amount of protein, so there is a certain range of carbon isotope ratios. If it is mixed with sucrose or corn syrup, The carbon isotope ratio will deviate from the original value. The "sugar doping rate" can be calculated from the carbon isotope ratio of honey and the protein in honey. The carbon isotope ratio is like a fingerprint, which can be used to identify the identity.