Honey: Nature's Wonder Sugar

Summary

Stuff You Should Know — "Honey: Nature's Wonder Sugar"

Podcast: Stuff You Should Know
Hosts: Josh & Chuck (with mention of Jerry)
Date: March 20, 2026
Episode Theme: An in-depth, lively exploration of honey—its natural origins, production, varieties, health benefits, historical significance, and more.

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Josh and Chuck take a deep dive into "Nature’s Wonder Sugar"—honey. They explore how bees make it, the different types, its unique chemical and health properties, and the remarkable history of honey and beekeeping. With classic SYSK humor and banter, they also debunk myths and highlight honey's “miraculous” nature, both nutritionally and culturally.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Is Honey and How Is it Made?

• Basic Process:
  • Bees collect nectar from flowers, store it in their ‘honey stomach,’ and on returning to the hive, regurgitate it to other bees, who process it further with enzymes.
  • This process dehydrates the nectar, mixes in enzymes, and turns it into honey (07:14–11:38).
• "Is Honey Bee Vomit?"
  • Josh clarifies that honey is not bee vomit because the honey stomach doesn’t digest the nectar.
  • Josh: "Honey's not bee vomit...what they're regurgitating is virtually the same thing that's going in." (10:28)
• Raw Honey Can Contain... Parts
  • Unfiltered honey can have bee legs, wings, pollen, and dust—nature is messy! (11:38)
• Honeydew Honey & Other Sources:
  • Beyond flower nectar, bees can convert plant sap/excretions (like aphid honeydew) into “honeydew honey”—a rarer specialty (12:06–13:00).

2. Bees & Beekeeping: Humanity’s Sweet History

• Not All Bees Make Honey:
  • Emphasis on Apis mellifera (Western honeybee), the main honey-producer (13:00).
• Mutually Beneficial Extraction:
  • Beekeeping, unlike many human-extraction practices, doesn’t harm bees if done responsibly (13:57).
• Ancient Practice:
  • Evidence of honey harvesting goes back to the Mesolithic era (~8,000+ years ago).
  • Early "hives" were clay jars or captured wild hives; beekeeping arose independently in various cultures (15:07–16:13).

3. What’s In Honey? (Ingredients & Structure)

• Mostly (Simple & Complex) Sugars:
  • Fructose, glucose, plus lesser-known sugars like isomaltotriose and galactose (21:50).
• Micronutrients & Compounds:
  • Contains all nine essential amino acids, a range of enzymes, antioxidants, polyphenols, and flavonoids (23:28).
• Preservative Power:
  • Antibacterial and acidic—honey can last indefinitely (24:17).
  • Old hard honey? Just warm it gently to revive it (24:17–24:35).
• Kitchen Chemistry: Heating Myths:
  • The idea that heating honey is “toxic” is more ancient wisdom than scientific fact—evidence is murky (24:35).

4. Health Benefits & Medicinal Uses

• Allergy Relief:
  • Studies show local honey can reduce allergy symptoms (rhinitis) if consumed at around one gram per kg of body weight (29:58).
  • Needs to be local to expose your body to local pollens (30:20).
• Anti-Inflammatory & Antioxidant:
  • Honey’s flavonoids block genes responsible for producing inflammatory proteins (32:04).
  • Helps with cardiovascular health, arthritis, and possibly cancer (33:10, 38:27).
• Star Honeys – Manuka & Tualang Hones:
  • Manuka Honey (New Zealand): High in methylglyoxal—powerful antimicrobial (33:10–34:45).
  • Tualang Honey (Malaysia, “jungle honey”): Getting buzz for similar properties (34:56).
• Topical Use:
  • Heals wounds, especially diabetic foot ulcers—may reduce risk of amputation and control wound odor; most honeys work, not just Manuka (35:53–37:23).
• Other Health Aspects:
  • Blood pressure—some studies show effect mainly in women (37:23).
  • Cancer—promotes apoptosis (“blebbing”) in cancer cells (38:27–39:43).
  • Neurological—may help with depression, dementia, and more; remarkable reduction in dementia risk in a specific study (40:31).
  • Sugar Swap Advice: Eat a tablespoon a day, but replace other sugars, don’t just add honey on top (41:18).
• Memorable Soapbox:
  • Josh criticizes cruel animal testing, reflecting on restraint-stress tests in mice for honey studies (25:22–27:25).
  • Josh: "The stuff we do to animals is unconscionable...there's really basically no justification for it in the greater scheme of things." (27:22)

5. Honeycomb & Honey Extraction Methods

• Honeycomb Basics:
  • Bees build wax cells ("combs"). Bee keepers now provide pre-made wax frames, increasing honey yield and minimizing bee effort (45:09–47:13).
  • Eating honeycomb itself? Edible, though Josh finds it gritty (46:26).
• Centrifuge Extraction:
  • Spins honey out while keeping comb structure intact, increasing sustainability (46:25).

6. Honey Classifications & Processing

• Levels of Processing:
  • Raw honey (minimal filtration), filtered honey (heavily strained), ultra-filtered honey (removes almost everything—barely honey) (48:12–52:09).
  • Pasteurization—rarely necessary except for smoother texture, sometimes to remove yeast (49:20).
  • Diatomaceous earth used for ultra-fine filtration (52:10).
• Spun/Creamed/Whipped Honey: Just regular honey processed for texture—same nutritional value (53:09).
• Color & Grading:
  • Uses the Pfund color scale (0=water white, up to 114+=dark amber) (53:48).
• Organic Standards:
  • Any processing level can be "organic" as long as the source plants and methods qualify (53:56).

7. Honey Varieties: Mono- vs Multiflora

• Monofloral Honey:
  • From mainly one flower species (e.g., Manuka, orange blossom). Farms plant large monocultures for this (54:53).
  • “Notes” of flavor—it won’t taste like the fruit, but traces are there (55:35).
  • Warning: If it actually smells like oranges, it may be fake (55:35).
• Multiflora ("Wildflower") Honey:
  • Blend from whatever is blooming nearby.
• Specialty/Flavored Honeys:
  • Bourbon-infused, chili honey, etc.—the base honey remains nutritious (56:30).

8. Modern Trends, Market, & Celebrity Honey

• Local, small-farm honey often supports sustainable beekeeping, though tends to be pricier (56:30).
• Celebrity Honey? Will Ferrell and LeBron James have honey “brands” produced on their properties for (charity-benefitting) luxury markets (56:59–57:41).
• Unusual varieties: Avocado honey exists, too! (57:41).

9. The Most Miraculous Food?

• Nutritional Superlatives:
  • According to Josh (with a breathless run-down of research):
    "Antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antineoplastic, antimicrobial, anticarcinogenic, antiarrhythmic, anti-leishmanial, antithrombotic, antimutagenic, antinociceptive, antimycobacterial, antiproliferative, and immune-boosting properties... Hypocholesteremic, cardioprotective, antihypertensive, hepatoprotective, hypoglycemic and neuroprotective, nephroprotective, gastroprotective... and it can improve sperm count and motility and protects against vaginal and uterine atrophy!" (58:05–59:02)
• Chuck: "Did you say Antichrist in there?" (59:05)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Josh: "Honey is something really special...when you put all of it together, you just can't help but step back and say, honey is miraculous." (23:28)
• Chuck: "It is acidic. It has antibacterial properties. So that means honey will last you a long, long time." (24:17)
• Josh: "If you're keeping bees and you're not giving them preformed beeswax cells, you're a chump." (47:13)
• On animal testing:
  Josh: "The stuff we do to animals is unconscionable...I really think we should be allocating a significant amount of our research efforts to figuring out how to not use animals." (27:22)
• On allergies:
  Josh: "It totally makes sense because you're exposing yourself to the local pollen. ...Your body's like, oh, this stuff's not that bad." (30:20)
• On cancer:
  Josh: "Honey goes after cancer cells and makes them 'bleb.' ...Oh my god, I’m blebbing. That’s not a good sign." (38:27–39:39)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [03:11–06:46] — Host anecdotes; intro to honey and spun/creamed honey
• [07:14–11:38] — How bees make honey; details of the transformation process
• [12:06–13:00] — Honeydew honey overview
• [13:57–16:13] — Beekeeping history and mutual benefit
• [21:50–24:35] — The complex composition of honey and storing/reviving old honey
• [29:58–30:53] — Honey and allergies
• [32:04–33:10] — Anti-inflammatory properties and antioxidants
• [33:10–34:45] — Manuka honey details
• [35:53–37:23] — Topical honey for wounds, diabetic ulcers
• [38:27–39:39] — Cancer and what “blebbing” means
• [40:31–41:18] — Honey and neurological health
• [46:25–47:13] — Honeycomb, wax production, and beekeeping trickery
• [53:48] — The Pfund color scale and honey color grading
• [54:53–55:35] — Monofloral vs multifloral (wildflower) honey and flavor notes
• [58:05–59:02] — Epic rundown of health benefits

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Tone & Style

• Warm, playful, fact-filled, with classic SYSK tangents and humor.
• The balance of scientific rigor and relaxed chat keeps the episode accessible and engaging.
• Occasional earnestness for animal welfare and environmental impact.

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For First-Time Listeners/Non-Listeners

If you missed this episode, you'll walk away knowing just how “miraculous” honey truly is—from bee biology and the chemistry of sweetness, to ancient history and modern health claims. Expect a few laughs, a handful of memorable analogies, and practical tips on buying, storing, and using one of nature’s most celebrated foods—plus a deeper appreciation of the bee-human relationship through the ages.

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If you enjoy learning trivia soaked in good vibes and bee puns, this episode is for you.

Transcript

[Chuck]

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[Chuck]

number 10, all about honey.

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Honey.

[Chuck]

Colon, Nature's Wonder Sugar.

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And if you think you knew a thing or two about honey, think again, because this is some honey centric goodness. And you're gonna learn a lot of

[Chuck]

stuff that you never knew about honey.

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For instance, you can put it on toast with butter and it's delicious. So I hope everyone enjoys honey. Nature's Wonder Sugar.

[Chuck]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartrad.

[Josh]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jerry's here, barely. And this is Stuff you should know.

[Chuck]

Well, we should explain what that means. It's very ambiguous and strange.

[Josh]

Then should we, though?

[Chuck]

Jerry had a poor Internet connection and was a few minutes late. That's it. She's barely here.

[Josh]

Yeah, mystery solved. Joke killed.

[Chuck]

It feels tenuous, too, that she's just

[Josh]

barely hanging on by her fingernails.

[Chuck]

Well, no, I think. I don't know. That Internet connection just sounded dodgy.

[Josh]

That's what I'm saying. She came in, like, Houston, where I have a problem.

[Chuck]

You know that Internet connection sound, Right.

[Josh]

Sounds like Apollo 13.

[Chuck]

I'm pretty excited about this one.

[Josh]

Me too. I even ate some honey for lunch today.

[Chuck]

I had a little dab at Breck. At Brekkie.

[Josh]

Okay.

[Chuck]

Which I don't usually eat, but I ate another toast with a spun honey spread.

[Josh]

Good for you, man. So, spun honey. Are you talking about the creamed honey? Is that what I'm hearing now?

[Chuck]

Yeah, creamed, spun. Or I think there's one more word for it, but we always called it spun honey growing up, and boy, is it good. And guess what? It is just as healthful. Has just as many helpful properties as regular honey. It doesn't. Spinning it. Or that the process of getting it to that state doesn't change it at all.

[Josh]

Yeah, it's like honey in a different format. Like, if you had a really great song, like, play that funky music, White Boy, and you had it on eight track, but you also had it on record. It's the same song. It's just in two different formats, right? Yeah, same thing.

[Chuck]

Yeah, I like that.

[Josh]

I really dislike that song, though.

[Chuck]

I really do, too, actually.

[Josh]

Um. Although I have a great memory of it, I guess sometime around Piedmont park, it must have been St. Patrick's Day, this, like, car full of dudes came up. They were wearing, like, green wigs and everything. They were ready to throw down for St. Patrick's Day. And they were blaring that song. And, like, everybody in the car was singing it, having, like, the best time. And then.

[Chuck]

Right on the money.

[Josh]

It totally was. And then as they got out of the car, all of them are, like, just, like, boogieing down the streets still, like, going to the bar. And one of them, like, stopped kind of and, like, turned around and made eye contact with me. It was. I think he'll be embarrassed for the rest of his life about that. I didn't even stare him down. He just. He initiated that embarrassing situation.

[Chuck]

So you could tell he felt some shame because you were just looking at

[Josh]

him a little bit and again, not staring them down. You Know me, I'll stare somebody down, but not these guys. This was. This was. He initiated it.

[Chuck]

But, hey, good for them. I bet they had a blast.

[Josh]

So honey, I think, is what we were originally talking about, right?

[Chuck]

Yeah. And the Grabster helped us with this one. And this was my commission because Emily is very much into, you know, she's gotten very much into her herbs and growing herbs and natural remedies and things, and honey is a big part of that. And although we are not beekeeping yet, that could be on the docket for us.

[Josh]

I hope so, man. I think beekeeping is one of the neatest things you can do. I'll bet it's so relax. Yeah.

[Chuck]

She's interested in it, and so that might happen.

[Josh]

Tell me how it goes if she does that. I will. Okay, yeah.

[Chuck]

I'll follow up.

[Josh]

We've actually done an entire episode on beekeeping. It was one of our best, if you ask me, certainly our most homespun episode by far. So we're not going to talk too much about beekeeping, but you pretty much can't discuss honey without also talking at least a little bit about beekeeping. It's so beekeeping adjacent that it would be weird to not mention it. But I just want to say, if you have not heard our beekeeping episode or you haven't heard it in a while, go listen to it, because it's a really, really good app.

[Chuck]

Did we do bees and beekeeping?

[Josh]

Yes. Yeah, we've done bees, beekeeping, now honey.

[Chuck]

Yeah. And one of our TV show episodes was about bees. It was one of the sillier episodes, I think it was.

[Josh]

I wrote that episode.

[Chuck]

Yeah. That's probably what was silly. I think you had a good eye for the absurd for that show.

[Josh]

Thanks a lot.

[Chuck]

And I mean that in a complimentary way.

[Josh]

Oh, I took it that way.

[Chuck]

Okay. I love absurdist comedy, and you nailed it.

[Josh]

So let's talk a little bit about honey. Ed helped us with this one, I think you just said, and I think he did about the best, most clinical description of honey that you could possibly come up with.

[Chuck]

Where's that? Was that, like, his definition?

[Josh]

Yeah, I mean, he talks about basically what honey is and how it's made.

[Chuck]

Oh, so you're just saying start from. Take it from the top, basically.

[Josh]

But I thought the way he did it was like, here's. It's totally unambiguous.

[Chuck]

Yeah, yeah.

[Josh]

Completely understandable.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Agreed.

[Josh]

And it's just a good descriptor of honey and how it's made.

[Chuck]

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 sometimes they just drink it. They want to save that stuff and 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.

[Josh]

I wonder if there's any bees out there, seriously, that have, like, a bit of a problem with nectar.

[Chuck]

Yeah, it goes from one for me, three for you, to three for me,

[Josh]

one for you, kind of. I wonder if there's some that, like, just kind of drink it more than others. There's gotta be.

[Chuck]

Maybe. Sure.

[Josh]

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 100 times its size. So 100 times its initial size, holding a thousand flowers worth of nectar. That's just a. That's 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.

[Chuck]

By the way, I had the most amazing dad joke that I failed to tell.

[Josh]

What was it?

[Chuck]

Should I tell it now? Of course, when you said, it just popped into my head. That's why. That's why I know that I'm just on the way down comedically.

[Josh]

Well, that means the podcast is on the way down, too.

[Chuck]

Oh, yeah, for sure.

[Josh]

Okay.

[Chuck]

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.

[Josh]

Oh, boy, that was good. That wasn't bad. That was a really good one.

[Chuck]

I don't know. All right, well, I would love to hear from people. Terrible or borderline genius.

[Josh]

Okay, well, I'm registering the first vote, and I'm going to say somewhere in the middle of those two.

[Chuck]

I was about to say there's no in between, but of course there is.

[Josh]

Okay.

[Chuck]

All right, so where'd you leave off with eating pollen that they take the

[Josh]

nectar back to Their nest, Their hive.

[Chuck]

Okay, well, then I'll chime in here with the pollen part. Bees are obviously accidentally transferring this pollen, but 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.

[Josh]

Right.

[Chuck]

Which sounds gross.

[Josh]

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. And I've said that before, so I think I'm kind of being inadvertently taken to task by Ed, because. Again.

[Chuck]

Did you really?

[Josh]

Oh, yeah, definitely. I've said that every chance I've ever had. But the. The. Again, the. 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. 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. They're transforming nectar into honey. So honey is a mixture of B enzymes, flower nectar, pollen, and that's dehydrated and combines to form brand new compounds. And that's what honey is.

[Chuck]

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.

[Josh]

Sure.

[Chuck]

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.

[Josh]

And sometimes some bees have really bad days.

[Chuck]

Yes. It's when they go to the BB meetings.

[Josh]

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 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.

[Chuck]

Honeydew honey. Have you ever had that?

[Josh]

I don't think I have. I was looking it up to see, like, 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.

[Chuck]

Okay. 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, and if you do it in the right way, it doesn't harm the thing that gave it to you.

[Josh]

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 or the bees or taking some of their head stash for us. They just make a little extra for us, and we can take that. I think it's wonderful, too.

[Chuck]

So, yeah, you mentioned we have a whole episode on beekeeping. But as a short refresher, this has been happening for a long time. People were collecting honey 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 may be 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. 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.

[Josh]

Yeah. And they think that originally, maybe some of the earliest, earliest artificial hives were some sort of clay pot 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. I hope 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.

[Chuck]

Yeah. 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.

[Josh]

Yeah, totally.

[Chuck]

So. And it was really delicious. And as we'll soon find out, super beneficial. So it became a big deal.

[Josh]

Yeah. One of the earliest artificial hives is still pretty much the symbol for a beehive. If you look at any AA Milne, Winnie the Pooh illustrations. 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.

[Chuck]

Yeah, it's great. And that's where you get your beehive hairdo is named after these things. 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.

[Josh]

Okay.

[Chuck]

And then talk about what's in honey and what makes it so good for us.

[Josh]

Sounds good. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know.

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[Josh]

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[Josh]

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[Chuck]

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, 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.

[Josh]

Sure. Which you can later make a bong out of.

[Chuck]

I think most everyone that was in college when True Romance came out probably tried that.

[Josh]

Totally. And by the way, so long sixth grade classes that were just listening to this episode.

[Chuck]

Poor teacher who just ran to the front of the class.

[Josh]

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

[Chuck]

I'm sorry, what's a bong? Was that Ralph Wiggum?

[Josh]

It was, it was a pretty good one too.

[Chuck]

So it's mostly sugar and it's, 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.

[Josh]

It is super complex. It's again, the word miraculous just keeps springing to mind.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Josh]

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.

[Chuck]

Did you practice?

[Josh]

All right, there's malto penta.

[Chuck]

Okay.

[Josh]

I didn't add the extra tea in there. Oh, I wanted to so bad. Galactose. That's an amazing name. There's also isomaltotriose.

[Chuck]

Nice.

[Josh]

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 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. And when you put all of it together, you Just can't help but step back and say, honey is miraculous.

[Chuck]

Yeah. And let's have a spoonful.

[Josh]

Yeah, exactly. That's the second thought that follows.

[Chuck]

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. Lasts 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. 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.

[Josh]

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, AKA honey.

[Chuck]

Yeah. There's a lot of mixed messaging around honey being toxic if it's heated beyond a certain point, because 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 the honey heated with ghee. But that wasn't only honey.

[Josh]

That sounds kind of good.

[Chuck]

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 and feed it to a monkey and see if it dies. So I'm kidding, by the way.

[Josh]

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. 100 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. 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. 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. 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.

[Chuck]

I think that's your first soapbox moment of 2023.

[Josh]

Oh, it definitely is. Now that you mention it. Sure.

[Chuck]

All right. That means we're going to toast some Amaro.

[Josh]

Clink.

[Chuck]

Because that is good for your body as well.

[Josh]

What's your Amaro that you like?

[Chuck]

Congratulations. You know, I got a few of them. That's going to be a future, like, very near future topic, by the way.

[Josh]

Okay, cool.

[Chuck]

Because I've gotten very into Amaro.

[Josh]

Mine is Montenegro.

[Chuck]

Montenegro is Amaro.

[Josh]

Montenegro is so good. And it's really good to mix cocktails with too.

[Chuck]

It sure is. A little bourbon and some Amaro or some rye and Amaro, a little bit of that. Delicious.

[Josh]

It'll fix a mouse that's been in Restraint stress for 21 days.

[Chuck]

Right up some orange bitters, a little shake of that.

[Josh]

Yeah, it's good stuff. Even just also choked, 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.

[Chuck]

That's a digestive and a half.

[Josh]

It definitely is. Yeah.

[Chuck]

That's great. You know, recently I went to LA just for the day to see our friend Ben Harrison. Yeah, 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.

[Josh]

I could tell from your Instagram posts from it. Yeah, I was like, chuck looks really happy in these photos.

[Chuck]

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.

[Josh]

Oh, yeah.

[Chuck]

So that's how we ended our meal.

[Josh]

Wow, very nice.

[Chuck]

Which is supposed to help with a hangover. So let's not blow all of our knowledge on Amaro right here.

[Josh]

Well put, Chuck.

[Chuck]

Jerk. 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 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. They did studies where they looked over the course of a couple of months during allergy season, and it's had significant reductions in what's called rhinitis.

[Josh]

Rhinitis.

[Chuck]

Rhinitis. Which is, you know, stuffy nose, sneezing, allergic sort of qualities, fear of rhinocero. And this was like quite a bit of honey. I think it was one gram of honey per kilogram of body weight.

[Josh]

It's a lot of honey.

[Chuck]

It's a lot of honey. But it works. And you know, it's better than some dumb allergy medication.

[Josh]

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. You're exposing yourself little by little to that pollen, and your body's like, oh, this is. This is. Stuff's not that bad. We won't give you any more allergies.

[Chuck]

Yeah. And there's a lot of reasons to eat local honey and eat locally, period. Not the least of which is that's just how it was for 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.

[Josh]

Yeah, I've really gotten into green grapes lately. They're just so good, and they're so good for you. You just always have, like, a bowl of them out. And we just left green grapes 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 really. It's like a rotten eyeball, basically. So.

[Chuck]

Oh, God, I'm.

[Josh]

I'm off of grapes. I'm trying to find a grape replacement until they come back in season.

[Chuck]

Grape replacement is not a bad band name, actually. It is a bad band name, but I could see someone naming their band that.

[Josh]

That seems like a side project. Band name. Right.

[Chuck]

Okay. 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.

[Josh]

Definitely. I think we need to do an episode on that.

[Chuck]

Yeah, totally.

[Josh]

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. They actually work or not, 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.

[Chuck]

Yeah, a pretty big one, if you ask me.

[Josh]

Sure.

[Chuck]

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. Garnered popularity, whatever. You know what I'm saying?

[Josh]

Sure.

[Chuck]

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. 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.

[Josh]

Yeah. Supposedly the active ingredient for manuka honey's antimicrobial properties is methylglyoxyl. 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.

[Chuck]

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, for sure.

[Josh]

And there's another one that's kind of come up recently that has been rivaling Manuka's tualang honey. It grows in Malaysia. The thing is, manuka honey is a monofloral honey. As we'll see. It's just made from the manuka. The flowers of the manuka shrub. Tualang 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.

[Chuck]

Yeah. Jungle Honey is a good song title.

[Josh]

Yeah, for sure.

[Chuck]

Or maybe I'm just thinking Jungle boogie.

[Josh]

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.

[Chuck]

I love the word jungle. It's one of my favorites.

[Josh]

Yeah. You said earlier you were starting your honey file. I was like, you should call all files your honey file.

[Chuck]

Maybe I will. Honey is also good topically. You can put honey, especially something like Manuka honey, on a skin 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 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.

[Josh]

Yeah, apparently that's with just about any honey you could use for wound healing, not just Manuka.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Josh]

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 because it's so potent. It might actually, like, kill off, like the new cells that are trying to form other honey has been shown and is 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. And if you slather some honey on there, you can say, goodbye, stubborn wound, goodbye.

[Chuck]

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 Ed points this out very astutely that honey is just. There's a lot of studies and meta studies and things, but 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, that. It's just because a study says something it doesn't Mean, like, that's the end, full stop.

[Josh]

Yeah. One way or the other. Like, didn't find this property actually helpful or did there just needs to be more study. And yes, they need to refine the study of honey, which I think we're

[Chuck]

in the midst of, like, right now on this podcast.

[Josh]

We're helping move it along, I think.

[Chuck]

What about cancer?

[Josh]

Cancer's 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. 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?

[Chuck]

Well, you know how I knew it would be something that makes you in trouble? What is that? It's called blebbing.

[Josh]

Yeah, exactly.

[Chuck]

That can't be good.

[Josh]

No. Oh, my God, I'm blebbing. That's not a good sign.

[Chuck]

No one would ever say, oh, that's fantastic. Good for you.

[Josh]

Yeah. High blebbing.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Right?

[Chuck]

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 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.

[Josh]

That is astounding.

[Chuck]

That's huge.

[Josh]

Yeah, 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, 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, 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's really not good for us at all.

[Chuck]

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.

[Josh]

Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles stuff you should know.

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[Josh]

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[Josh]

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[Josh]

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[Josh]

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[Josh]

Okay, Chuck, this suddenly turned into a short stuff. Go.

[Chuck]

Well, I mean, we can talk about the honeycomb briefly. Again, that's in our beekeeping episode and our bee episode and 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 and 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 build the 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, 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. It leaves that honeycomb intact. Although you can get that natural honey if you've seen it in the store with that or maybe at a farmer's market, local farmer's market, with a honeycomb floating in that honey. You can eat that stuff. It's wax, it's not gonna hurt you.

[Josh]

Yeah, it's true.

[Chuck]

And it probably makes you feel like Martha Stewart or something.

[Josh]

It makes my teeth feel gritty, so I don't like it. But I do know that it is edible for sure.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Josh]

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, 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 with bees produce their own wax, they have to eat honey to produce the wax. And they, 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.

[Chuck]

Yeah. I mean, maybe that's one of the reasons we had that surplus, probably.

[Josh]

I would think so. Yeah. If you're, if you're keeping bees and you're not giving them preformed beeswax cells, you're a chump.

[Chuck]

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

[Josh]

I saw that that was mostly Americans that have an aversion to crystallized honey.

[Chuck]

That doesn't surprise me.

[Josh]

And it's because we think that it's gone bad somehow. And again, 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 it. So basically, any honey you buy in the United States is going to have at least undergone macro filtering, what the USDA calls straining. 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.

[Chuck]

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 gonna alter the flavor, obviously, because you're heating this honey up. But that's the only thing I found why you would pasteurize honey.

[Josh]

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.

[Chuck]

I met a hippie once in, I think, West Virginia that made his own mead. I think I might have told the story before, but he gave me some mead.

[Josh]

Yeah, Somebody mailed us mead years and years and years ago. It was the only mead I've ever had in my life.

[Chuck]

I'm not a fan.

[Josh]

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.

[Chuck]

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

[Josh]

Just keep it up, though. It doesn't matter.

[Chuck]

Well, you know what's funny is all the people that have written in are trying to talk me into liking fish, right?

[Josh]

They're like, surely you clearly haven't listened to fish and you don't know what you're talking about.

[Chuck]

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.

[Josh]

No way.

[Chuck]

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 gotta have it a little more viscous. Or less viscous.

[Josh]

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.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Josh]

Because you're pushing it through. Not, 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.

[Chuck]

Yeah. That's crazy.

[Josh]

Yeah. So there, there's another way to achieve the same end without blasting it through a 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 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?

[Chuck]

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.

[Josh]

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

[Chuck]

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 healthful properties. You can also rate honey by color, of course. Honey has a great range of color and technically it's called optical density. But they use the pfund color scale.

[Josh]

I think it's just fun. No, really like Pfister, the fabulous faucet with a funny name.

[Chuck]

Yeah, but I always say Pfister just cause I think it's funny.

[Josh]

Okay, well then yes, this would definitely be puff fun.

[Chuck]

And this is a scale from 0, which is water white all the way to 114 and above which is dark amber.

[Josh]

Very nice.

[Chuck]

And then what's the deal with organic honey?

[Josh]

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.

[Chuck]

That's right.

[Josh]

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.

[Chuck]

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 multi floral. And that is just simply what these bees are flowering on or what kind of flowers they're dancing with.

[Josh]

Sure.

[Chuck]

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. But they're very promiscuous. They are. If it's labeled monofloral 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. Or you can like the wildflower honey, it's just multi floral. It's 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 he squirt an orange in it, but there will be like notes of citrus and things like that.

[Josh]

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 counterfeited 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 pumpkiny 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. It's definitely the dark amber side of the fun 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. I'll try basically any honey at least once.

[Chuck]

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, 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?

[Josh]

Did they get into honey?

[Chuck]

They are 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.

[Josh]

Okay.

[Chuck]

Sells, you know, all kinds of stuff.

[Josh]

Sells urban straw hats and.

[Chuck]

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 keep bees on your property. And it will be called Will Ferrell Honey. And it'll cost $250 a jar. No, but it goes to charity.

[Josh]

Okay. They 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. If you indulge me. You ready? That these compounds found in honey are shown to possess these properties. Antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, antioxidant, anti, inflammatory anti, antineoplastic, antimicrobial anti, carcinogenic, antiarrhythmic anti, leishmanial, antithrombotic anti, mutagenic, mutagenic, antinociceptive, antimicrobacterial, antiproliferative, and immune boosting properties. Not to mention that it's hypocholesteremic, cardioprotective Antihypertensive, hepatoprotective, hypoglycemic and neuroprotective, nephroprotective, gastroprotective, so on, so forth. And it can improve sperm count and their motility and protects against vaginal and uterine atrophy. Plus it improves the normal estrus cycle.

[Chuck]

Wow.

[Josh]

Isn't that amazing?

[Chuck]

Did you say Antichrist in there?

[Josh]

I think so. It's miraculous, but in like the reverse manner.

[Chuck]

Uh huh.

[Josh]

You got anything else?

[Chuck]

I have nothing else.

[Josh]

I don't either. And that means, of course. Everybody, it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck]

I'm gonna 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 Mazel, who helps head up the Stuff youf should know 5k.

[Josh]

I'm glad you thought of this, but

[Chuck]

Erin, 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 and said, was it Dr. Vance? And I was like, oh, it totally was. As soon as I heard the name, I remembered. And I believe Aaron, though, or. Or now I feel bad because I can't remember if it was Aaron or the other person who wrote in, 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?

[Josh]

No, I didn't.

[Chuck]

Okay. Well, I guess I was an English major, so I was always over there. But Dr. Vance sent in an email, which I haven't responded. YouTube, I'm gonna 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 a mystery, thrillers, literary horror, humorous romance, historical fiction.

[Josh]

Wow.

[Chuck]

All kinds of fun stuff. And you can find and all [e-mail] Very nice.

[Josh]

That was short. And Chuck, appropriately sweet for this episode.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

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[Josh]

That was nice, man. Got a pat on your head from your old English teacher.

[Chuck]

He was the best man.

[Josh]

Had a.

[Chuck]

You know, one of the few college professors who really impacted me.

[Josh]

Yeah, like Robin Williams.

[Chuck]

Yeah, don't get that joke.

[Josh]

You don't?

[Chuck]

No.

[Josh]

From.

[Chuck]

Oh, Deadpot Society.

[Josh]

Yes.

[Chuck]

Okay.

[Josh]

Thank you for saying that because I was about to say from. Oh, Captain my captain

[Chuck]

working title.

[Josh]

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 Stuff podcastheartradio.com

[Chuck]

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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[Josh]

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[Chuck]

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