Is honey better than sugar?
Honey is slightly better than sugar by the gram and worse by the spoon. Its glycemic index averages about 61 against sugar's 65, and it carries a little less sugar per gram because it's 17% water. But a tablespoon of honey holds about 17 g of sugar against 12.5 g in a tablespoon of white sugar.
If you're managing diabetes or prediabetes, that's most of the story in two numbers. Below is the detail, the one big review that disagrees, and what to use if you want the sweetness without the sugar.
1. What is honey actually made of?
Honey is about 82% sugar by weight, mostly fructose and glucose, with about 17% water. India's own food standard builds that in: FSSAI's honey specification sets a minimum of 65% reducing sugars and caps sucrose at 5% for most honeys. The enzymes, pollen and plant compounds people buy it for are a small fraction.
USDA's food composition data puts 100 g of honey at 82.1 g of sugars (40.9 g fructose, 35.8 g glucose, small amounts of others), 17.1 g of water and 304 kcal (USDA FoodData Central). The FSSAI figures are from Chapter 2.8 of the Food Products Standards, version 1 of September 2023.
Table sugar is sucrose: one glucose and one fructose, bonded together. Your gut splits that bond within minutes, so both end up as the same two sugars in your blood. The bees just did the splitting first.
2. Does honey spike blood sugar less than sugar?
A little. The International Tables of Glycemic Index (Atkinson and colleagues, Diabetes Care, 2008), the standard reference, average honey at 61 and sucrose at 65, on a scale where glucose is 100. That gap is real and small, and a spoon of honey still raises your glucose much the way a spoon of sugar does.
Honey's edge comes from its fructose, which your liver handles before much of it reaches your blood as glucose. More fructose, lower GI. That's also why honeys differ so much: one systematic review of honey trials puts the range across floral sources at 32 to 85.
So the jar in your kitchen could sit well below sugar or above it, and the label won't tell you which. Jaggery, for comparison, is put at about 84, which is why jaggery runs higher than both.
GI also says nothing about how much carbohydrate is on your spoon. Which brings us to the spoon.
3. Is a spoon of honey lighter than a spoon of sugar?
No. Honey is dense, so a tablespoon weighs about 21 g and carries about 17 g of sugar and 64 kcal, while a level tablespoon of white sugar weighs about 12.5 g and carries 12.5 g of sugar and about 50 kcal. Spoon for spoon, honey delivers over a third more sugar than the white stuff it replaced.
By weight it flips. 100 g of honey has 304 kcal against roughly 390 to 400 kcal for 100 g of table sugar, because a sixth of honey is water. But you sweeten chai by the spoon, and the spoon is where honey loses.
ICMR-NIN's Dietary Guidelines for Indians, 2024 say to keep sugar to 20 to 25 g a day for adults. One tablespoon of honey uses most of that before breakfast is over.
4. What happened when people with type 2 diabetes ate honey every day?
In two 8-week honey trials in type 2 diabetes, HbA1c moved the wrong way. A 2009 Iranian trial gave 25 of 48 patients honey for 8 weeks and their HbA1c rose. A 2019 crossover trial gave 50 g a day for 8 weeks: HbA1c rose 0.17% on honey and fell 0.22% without it.
Fair context on both. The 2009 trial (Bahrami and colleagues, International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition) stepped the dose up to 2.5 g of honey per kg of body weight a day by the final fortnight.
For a 60 kg adult that's about 150 g, far more than a spoon in tea. The same trial saw cholesterol and body weight improve.
The 2019 trial (Sadeghi and colleagues, Shiraz) used a more realistic 50 g of raw honey a day, about two and a half tablespoons, and 42 people finished it. The rise on honey wasn't statistically significant by itself; the fall without honey was. The authors concluded that 8 weeks of honey raised HbA1c, though waist size fell slightly.
One 4-month Turkish trial of smaller doses, 5 to 25 g a day, reported HbA1c falling instead. Still, in the people most often told honey is the healthy swap, it behaved like added sugar on the number they track every quarter. If you want the wider picture, here's how the common sweeteners compare if you have diabetes.
5. Doesn't a big review say honey is good for you?
Yes, and it deserves a proper read. A 2023 University of Toronto meta-analysis in Nutrition Reviews pooled 18 trials and 1,105 people and found honey lowered fasting glucose and some cholesterol markers. The effects were small, mostly rated low certainty, and came largely from raw honey and two specific floral types.
The numbers from Ahmed and colleagues: fasting glucose fell by 0.20 mmol/L, about 3.6 mg/dL, at a median of 40 g of honey a day over 8 weeks. Raw honey, clover honey and robinia (sold as acacia) drove the benefit. Processed honey didn't show it.
Three details the headlines skipped. When the authors adjusted for small studies that may never have been published, the fasting glucose effect lost significance, and their pooled HbA1c result didn't reach significance either. And in 23 of the 33 comparisons, honey was added to people's usual diet; only 5 compared it with sucrose directly.
One disclosure, stated for precision. The review was funded by Canadian public and charitable funders, and two senior authors declare past research support from the US National Honey Board. Industry ties run through most sweetener research, including the allulose trials we cite, which we lay out trial by trial, funding included.
And the researchers framed their result as a swap. In the university's own write-up, senior researcher Tauseef Khan said they weren't suggesting that people who already avoid sugar should start eating honey; the point was replacement.
6. Is the honey in your jar all honey?
Maybe not. FSSAI's standard says honey sold as such can't have anything added to it, and it tests for cane-sugar and rice-syrup markers. But in December 2020 the Centre for Science and Environment sent 13 Indian brands to a German lab, and 10 failed an NMR purity test that routine Indian checks didn't include.
CSE said the syrups involved were designed to slip past the standard tests (The Tribune's report). Several brands disputed the findings and pointed to their own test reports, and we're not naming any of them here. The current standard's C4 sugar test, the check for cane and corn sugars, fails a sample above 7%.
For a sugar-conscious reader the takeaway is blunt. If a jar is partly syrup, you're eating sugar with honey's reputation. Look for a brand that publishes NMR results, or count every spoon as sugar, which it mostly is anyway.
Pack claims trip people up for the same reason, so here's the legal difference between no added sugar and sugar-free.
7. What can replace both sugar and honey?
Monk fruit and allulose. Allulose carries the body and browning of sugar, and taken with a meal it lowered the post-meal glucose rise in human trials, including in type 2 diabetes. Monk fruit carries the sweetness, and in a 2017 Singapore trial a monk fruit drink caused no first-hour glucose spike against sugar.
Allulose is the rare sugar your body absorbs but doesn't burn. Published estimates put it at 0.2 to 0.4 calories per gram against sugar's 4. The FDA lets US labels use 0.4, the top of the range, and leave allulose out of Total and Added Sugars, though it still counts toward Total Carbohydrate.
Two meta-analyses carry the glucose claim. Tani and colleagues (PLOS ONE, 2023) found doses of 10 g or less, including 5 g or less, taken with a meal trimmed the post-meal curve in healthy adults; people with diabetes weren't included. Ayesh and colleagues (Metabolism Open, 2024) pooled 6 trials and 126 people with type 2 diabetes and found a lower post-meal rise and less time above range, with no significant change in fasting glucose.
Monk fruit's job is sweetness. In Tey and colleagues' trial in 30 healthy men (International Journal of Obesity, 2017), the sugar drink spiked glucose in the first hour and the monk fruit drink didn't.
But the monk fruit group ate more at the lunch that followed, and 3-hour glucose totals ended up similar. Monk fruit adds no sugar itself; what you eat afterwards still counts.
Two honest trade-offs. A blend won't give you honey's floral flavour, so for a drizzle over curd where you want the taste of honey, nothing else does that job. And it costs more than white sugar.
The zero calories on a pack like ours is a rounded number too; every zero-calorie sweetener reaches it the same way.
Beyond The Sugar's monk fruit and allulose sweetener has no erythritol and no preservatives. Start with a teaspoon where you'd have used a teaspoon of honey and adjust to taste. For the morning cup, here's our guide to sweetening chai without sugar or honey.
Frequently asked questions
Is honey good for diabetics?
Count honey as sugar if you have diabetes. Its glycemic index is only slightly lower than sugar's, a tablespoon carries more sugar than a tablespoon of white sugar, and in two 8-week trials in type 2 diabetes, HbA1c rose on honey. If you do use it, check your meter afterwards.
Can I add honey to hot water or chai?
You can, though the heat won't make it healthier. In the Toronto review the benefits came from raw honey, and processed honey, typically pasteurised at around 65°C, didn't show them. Either way, a teaspoon of honey in hot chai still adds about 6 g of sugar to the cup.
Does honey count as sugar in India's dietary guidelines?
ICMR-NIN's 2024 guidelines set the 20 to 25 g daily limit for sugar and don't single out honey. The WHO definition of free sugars explicitly includes sugars naturally present in honey. So the practical answer is yes: count honey toward the same daily limit.
Is raw honey better than regular honey?
On the current evidence, a little. The 2023 Toronto meta-analysis found raw honey drove most of the improvements in fasting glucose and cholesterol, while processed honey didn't show them. The sugar content is about the same in both, so raw honey is still sugar by the spoon.
How much honey is okay in a day?
If you count it toward ICMR-NIN's limit of 20 to 25 g of sugar a day, that's about 24 to 30 g of honey, a little over one tablespoon to about one and a half. That budget has to cover every other source of added sugar too, from biscuits to ketchup.
Is jaggery better than honey?
Neither is a free pass. Jaggery's glycemic index is put at about 84, well above both honey at about 61 and white sugar at 65, and FSSAI's standard requires cane jaggery to be at least 90% total sugars on a dry-weight basis. Honey has the lower GI of the two, and both count as sugar.