Honey: the liver glycogen nobody talks about

Honey is sold to athletes as a natural alternative to sports products, and most of that marketing is noise.

Underneath it there is one real mechanism, it is more specific than the packaging suggests, and it matters in exactly one window of a fighter's year.

Two glycogen stores, not one

Almost everything written about refuelling talks about glycogen as a single thing. It is not.

Muscle glycogen is the fuel in the working muscle. It is what people mean when they talk about being depleted, and what a carbohydrate load is aimed at.

Liver glycogen does a different job. It maintains blood glucose between meals and during exercise, and when it runs low the brain registers a fuel problem.

That contributes to central fatigue, the kind that feels like losing interest rather than losing strength.

A fighter after a weigh-in has depleted both. He has been eating less for weeks, training through it, and then removed food and fluid entirely for the last day or two.

Both need refilling. They do not refill the same way.

The finding

Glucose and fructose are absorbed by different intestinal transporters. Glucose uses one pathway, fructose another, and combining them uses both, which increases total absorption capacity beyond what either achieves alone.

That produces two separate effects, and the distinction is the whole point of this page.

Two stores, two answers. The fructose is doing something specific, and it is not what most people assume.

A third effect is worth having. Glucose-fructose mixtures reduce gastrointestinal distress when intake approaches or exceeds the capacity of the glucose absorption pathway, roughly 1.2 grams per minute. In the hours after a weigh-in, when you are moving a lot of carbohydrate into a gut that has been empty, that is not a minor consideration.

And the honest limit

The mechanism is measured. Whether it produces better performance is less settled.

A randomised double-blind study looked at exactly that: 4 hours of recovery from glycogen-depleting exercise, carbohydrate at 1.2 grams per kilogram per hour, either fructose plus maltodextrin or glucose plus maltodextrin, followed by a time trial.

No difference in performance between the two.

That is one study with eight participants in a cycling protocol, and it does not overturn the liver glycogen finding. It does mean the chain from faster liver repletion to better performance has not been demonstrated as cleanly as the first half.

The honest position: the absorption and repletion advantages are real, the gastrointestinal advantage is real and practically useful, and the performance claim should be held loosely.

Where honey comes in

Honey is roughly 80 to 85 percent sugar by weight, split between glucose and fructose in proportions that vary by source but sit near enough to even.

Which means honey delivers the glucose-fructose combination described above without anybody having to formulate anything. Its glycaemic index sits around 50 to 58, moderate rather than low, and lower than glucose because of the fructose share.

So the mechanism transfers. Honey is a reasonable vehicle for the thing that actually works.

And here is what the marketing leaves out

Honey carries small quantities of antioxidants, enzymes and minerals that sugar does not, and in the amounts a fighter actually eats those contribute very little.

A tablespoon is not a meaningful source of anything except carbohydrate.

The case for honey over sugar is preference, palatability, and the fact that it goes down easily when appetite has gone. Those are real reasons. "Natural" is not one of them, and any product selling honey as metabolically superior to sucrose is selling something the literature does not support.

The window where it matters

The hours after a weigh-in, and specifically the early part of them.

The order there is fluid first, then carbohydrate, and the reasoning is in the rehydration protocol. Honey fits the carbohydrate part well, for three reasons.

• No preparation and no chewing, which matters when appetite has not returned.
• It dissolves into a drink, arriving alongside the fluid rather than competing with it.
• The glucose-fructose split targets liver glycogen at the point where liver glycogen is genuinely low.

Practical version: honey stirred into a rehydration drink, or taken with white rice or bread in the second and third feeds. Not as the first thing in, which should be fluid.

How much, if you are using it properly

The refuelling target is around 1.2 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram per hour, and honey is one component rather than the whole of it.

For a fighter weighing 70 kg at the scale, that is roughly 84 grams of carbohydrate an hour.

A tablespoon of honey carries about 17 grams. So five tablespoons would cover a single hour, which nobody is going to eat, and that is the point.

The sensible construction is one to two tablespoons stirred into a rehydration drink, alongside rice, bread or fruit for the bulk of the carbohydrate. The honey adds fructose to a mix that would otherwise be mostly glucose and starch, which is the reason it is there.

Taking the entire target from honey would also mean a large fructose load in one sitting, and large isolated fructose doses are the version most likely to produce gastrointestinal trouble. The combination is what works.

Fructose alone is not better than glucose, it is complementary to it.

And the window where it does not

Everywhere else, honey is sugar with a better reputation.

In ordinary camp it is a flavouring rather than a strategy. A spoonful in porridge is fine, contributes around 60 calories, and does nothing the porridge was not already doing.

In the final days it stays on the list without difficulty, because it carries no fibre and no residue. That does not make it useful, it makes it permitted. A fighter that week is not short of carbohydrate options, he is short of appetite and calories, and honey helps with neither.

On fight day it works in the last full meal and in the final 90 minutes as part of a drink, for the same reason as any other simple carbohydrate.

Portions

A tablespoon is around 21 grams, carrying roughly 17 grams of carbohydrate and 64 calories.

Worth stating because honey is used by the spoon and counted by nobody. Three spoonfuls through a day is around 190 calories, and it goes into tea, onto porridge and into yoghurt without appearing in anybody's mental total.

After a weigh-in that is irrelevant, because calories are the point. In week six of a deficit it is 190 calories he did not account for.

Types, and whether they differ

Honey varies by floral source in colour, flavour and mineral content, and the differences that matter to a fighter are close to none.

Darker honeys generally carry more antioxidant compounds than lighter ones. In the quantities eaten, that difference is not doing anything measurable.

The glucose to fructose ratio also varies by source, which affects how quickly a honey crystallises: higher glucose crystallises faster. A kitchen property rather than a nutritional one.

Raw honey is unheated and unfiltered, retaining more pollen and enzymes. Processed honey has been heated for clarity and shelf life. Neither difference changes the carbohydrate, which is the part this page is about.

The expensive jar and the supermarket squeezy bottle deliver the same thing for the purpose described here. Buy on taste and price.

The adulteration problem

Honey is among the more commonly adulterated foods in the world, usually diluted with cheaper syrups such as rice or corn syrup.

Nutritionally this is close to irrelevant for a fighter, since the adulterant is also a sugar and the mechanism on this page barely changes.

It earns a mention for a different reason. A product sold as honey that is largely syrup is a product whose label does not describe its contents, and this site's general position applies: if you are eating something because of a claim on the front, and the front is not reliable, the reason was not reliable either.

For anybody under anti-doping rules, note that this is food fraud rather than contamination in the supplement sense. Honey is not a category associated with prohibited substances. The concern is honesty rather than safety.

And what about before training

Honey before a session comes up as often as honey after one, and the answer is less interesting.

As a pre-training carbohydrate it works and it is unremarkable. Moderate glycaemic index, easy to eat, no fibre, no fat. A spoonful 30 to 60 minutes out behaves like any other simple carbohydrate.

There is no version of the liver glycogen argument that applies before exercise the way it applies after. Going in, what matters is having carbohydrate available. The fructose distinction becomes relevant when you are refilling two different stores quickly, which is a recovery problem.

So: fine before training, not special before training, and the same is true of a banana, a slice of white bread with jam, or a sports drink.

The things people claim and should not

The mechanism at the top of this page is the one that holds. It is enough on its own and it does not need help.

One thing that is not a claim

Honey should not be given to infants under one year old, because of the risk of botulism spores.

That has nothing to do with fighting and it appears here because this is a page about honey, and it is the one genuinely serious warning attached to the food.

One window, and sugar does the same job

• Use it in the hours after a weigh-in, in a drink, in the second and third feeds. That is the window where the mechanism does something.
• Understand what the mechanism is. Fructose helps the liver store, not the muscle store, and the two are different.
• Sugar does the same thing. If honey is easier to get down, use honey. If not, it is not superior.
• Count the spoonfuls in camp. Sixty calories each, and nobody counts them.
• And ignore the rest of what is written on the jar.