You’ve soothed our throats, sweetened our food, and healed our wounds. You show off your healing power with your antibacterial and anti-inflammatory effects that nourish our surrounding tissues and make us new again.
Over the years we’ve created a beehive of nutritional knowledge, including your positive effects on our health. You’re filled with antioxidants, like phenols and flavonoids that look after our hearts. Our hearts work overtime, producing loads of free radicals which can cause damage to our own tissues, you decrease oxidative stress by cleaning up these radicals. You also increase blood flow to our hearts, by dilating our arteries this decreases blood pressure and improves our heart function, which has a domino effect on our organs.
You don’t stop there, you help lower bad cholesterol and increase good cholesterol, carrying cholesterol away from our hearts to our livers where they can be broken down. Keeping our arteries clear, and decreasing the risk of fatty deposition.
As a natural sweetener, you trump sugar! You help lower blood triglyceride (fat) levels while sugar increases them. Besides being a source of carbohydrate, sugar has no nutritional value. This is why we should be using you more often.
Because you’re so awesome, we paired you with cashew nuts which are high in protein and healthy fats - who have similar effects on our hearts. We also complemented you with dates, rolled oats, and chia seeds. We think we’ve made a perfect match, creating delicious power balls that are ready to protect our hearts.
So thank you honey, for being so sweet.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf025928k
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12358452/
