Honey is often used as a sweetener instead of sugar or herbal medicine. There are also honey products marketed with specific uses for weight gain. However, is it true that there are benefits of honey as a body fattener?
Can honey fatten the body?
Honey can actually help you gain weight. The reason is, the sugar in honey increases calorie intake.
Calorie intake that is greater than calories out for physical activity can add to your weight. This condition is called a calorie surplus.
Body-fattening honey also contains several additional ingredients, such as Aromatic Ginger, turmeric, Temulawak, and Temu Ireng.
These ingredients also help increase your weight.
The benefits of body-fattening honey
What are the benefits of body-fattening honey?
1. Provide energy intake quickly
The main content of honey is sugar. 100 grams of honey contains 82.1 grams of sugar.
It is known, sugar is a type of carbohydrate with the simplest composition. This makes sugar easy to digest, absorb and convert into energy quickly.
Excess sugar can be stored in the form of fat. If the intake of sugar is very excessive, the body can get fat quickly.
In addition, this energy makes you feel energized for a few moments after consuming honey.
So, it is suitable for those of you who have to do high-intensity physical activities, for example, exercise to gain weight.
2. Increase appetite
Honey can also make the desire to eat increase. These benefits are obtained when the body-fattening honey product is mixed with natural ingredients, such as cancer, turmeric, and temulawak.
These three spices contain a compound called curcumin which can affect the performance of the pancreas and accelerate gastric emptying.
Some of the ways of working above can make your appetite increase.
Temulawak is also rich in zinc which increases hunger-triggering hormones. A study published in the Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences (2014) also found that meeting zinc intake can reduce the risk of low body weight.
Sugar in honey is fast to raise blood sugar levels, but also quickly lower blood sugar. This can cause you to get hungry faster, so you eat more.
When you eat more, your daily calorie count increases so you can gain weight.
3. Increase the water content in the body
The type of sugar found in honey is fructose.
Consuming a high intake of fructose can make water levels retained in the body. The large amount of water contained in the body can actually increase body weight.
Even so, you need to remember that the benefits of body-fattening honey do not make your body weight increase drastically.
Body fattening honey side effects
Honey can indeed be a weight gain food, but there are effects that you need to be aware of. Anything?
1. Digestive problems
This side effect of body-fattening honey is triggered by high fructose.
Too much fructose intake can overload the digestive tract. As a result, the absorption of fructose was not perfect.
Fructose absorption problems are characterized by abdominal pain, bloating, diarrhea and vomiting. This condition is also prone to occur in patients with fructose intolerance.
2. Increase cholesterol
Foods high in sugar make the liver produce bad cholesterol (LDL) in the body.
In addition, excess calorie intake also makes the body fat, including in the blood or triglycerides.
High sugar intake also lowers good cholesterol (HDL). In fact, this type of cholesterol is important for absorbing bad cholesterol and returning it to the liver so that it is immediately disposed of.
Bad cholesterol and excess triglycerides can clog blood vessels and increase the risk of heart disease.
3. Vulnerable to Diabetes
The side effect of consuming body-fattening honey is increasing the risk of diabetes. Why is that?
When sugar intake increases, the pancreas produces the hormone insulin to lower blood sugar.
Excessive sugar intake in the long term makes insulin continue to be produced, but the body’s cells are no longer able to respond properly.
As a result, sugar remains in the blood so that blood sugar levels are out of control and cause diabetes.
How to safely consume body-fattening honey
In order to reduce the risk of side effects, there are a number of things you should pay attention to.
Just like added sugar in general, make sure you limit your daily honey intake, which is no more than 4 tablespoons or 50 grams per day.
In addition, choose pasteurized body-fattening honey, not raw honey.
Pasteurized honey has gone through a heating process in a short time so that even harmful bacteria and fungi die.
You can get the benefits of body-fattening honey if you only consume it as an additional food intake or supplement, not the main food source.
To gain weight, you should increase your intake of 500 kcal per day by increasing your meal portions to 5 times a day.
Main food sources should consist of staple foods, protein-rich side dishes, vegetables, and fruit.