Sugars as Possible Indicator of Honey Authenticity

Abstract

Honey is a valuable natural product which offers important nutritional and medicinal benefits. Consequently, it is frequently subjected to adulteration either by addition of various sugar syrups or cheaper and lower quality honey, or by mislabelling of declaration. In that sense, product authentication, as one of the most important food quality assurances, is essential in order to protect the consumers’ health and to avoid competition that can create a destabilized market. The authenticity of the honey has two aspects: the authenticity associated with the production of honey (sugar supplements, removal or addition of water, heating) and the authenticity of the honey related to its description, botanical and geographical origin. Chemically, honey is a concentrated aqueous solution of various sugars, mainly fructose and glucose, but it also contains other mono-, oligo-, and polysaccharides. Some of the most important characteristics of honey include the sugars’ content, particularly the glucose and the fructose content and their total quantity, as well as a sucrose amount. Some authors demonstrated also that the ratio between glucose and fructose, as well as between some other characteristic sugars, is another parameter of interest in both defining botanical origin of honey and detection of its adulteration. Hence, a detailed analysis of sugars profile in honey samples is a useful tool for verifying product declaration, its botanical origin, as well as to uncover honey adulteration, and has been a long-time scientific preoccupation. At present, a variety of analytical techniques have been developed to determine the content of sugars in honey, such as spectroscopic, chromatographic, and electrochemical. The current compilation aims to provide the cross-section of the results on sugars composition, obtained by contemporary analytical methods, used in honey authentication.