Mike McInnes is a retired Scottish pharmacist and the author of The Honey Diet, published today. This book interests me because it advocates eating honey at bedtime.
Could you summarize the book?
It’s based on two ideas — that modern obesity is driven by two main factors. First, overconsumption of carbohydrates and sugars. Second, poor quality sleep. The medical profession has been saying that the cause of obesity is fat. We’ve known since the 19th century that it is carbohydrates, not fat. Poor quality sleep drives up stress hormones and appetite hormones.
In the West we have an early evening meal. We go to bed with a depleted liver. There is not enough fuel in the liver to supply the brain overnight. The way to resolve that is to forward-provision the brain, via the liver. The best food for that is honey. Honey is liver-specific. It is metabolized differently from other sugars. Honey restocks the liver prior to sleep. No other food can do this in the same way that honey can do this. Fruits are unlike honey because honey contains an army of nutrients, bioflavonoids, organic acids and others that ensure honey is not metabolized in the same way as refined sugars, which have none of these nutrients. Indeed it is fair to describe honey as the most potent anti-diabetic food known to man.
What’s the background, the history, of these ideas?
I’m a pharmacist. Sold my pharmacy. Went into sport nutrition in the late 1990s. I rapidly discovered that athletes have no concept of brain metabolism or liver store during exercise and recovery. The most critical organ of sport is the liver. I looked for a food that would provide sufficient liver supply during exercise and during recovery. When an athlete collapses, it’s not enough fuel left in the liver. Same at night, you go to sleep without sufficient fuel in the liver, after an early evening meal – and then you cannot recover physiologically – the brain is forced to activate stress and this in turn upgrades the orexigenic (appetite) hormones.
I knew from my physiological background that fructose was a key sugar to replenish the liver, fructose is liver specific – it only goes to the liver, where it is converted to glucose and stored as liver glycogen. It also brings glucose into the liver – it liberates the glucose enzyme – glucokinase and optimizes the liver (cerebral) energy reserve. Fructose is critical to replenishing the liver. At the time the usual line was the fructose goes only to muscle, and therefore had no role to play is exercise and fueling in sport.
Birmingham University did studies on fructose with success. Now every sports drink in the world contains fructose. They missed the nocturnal physiology. You have to replenish your liver before sleep. If you have a six or seven o’clock meal, you don’t have enough in the liver to see the brain through the nocturnal fast. Having discovered that honey was the key fuel to refuel the liver before sleep, I then developed the theory of replenishing the liver before sleep. Honey is the gold standard food for doing that – no other food that I know of can do this as can honey, and without digestive burden.
Have you tested other foods?
You will find thousands of studies on the Mediterranean Diet. I only know of one scientist who has written about the key question of timing. With this diet you have healthy meal that contains fruits and vegetables at 11 pm. The key principle is the timing. That would allow significant liver replenishment of the liver via the fruits and vegetables. That meant the brain had a good liver supply for sleep. The brain could activate the recovery system via the pituitary gland. That meant you were reducing the risk of all the degenerative diseases – diabetes, dementia, obesity and heart disease.
They’ve now stopped that. They now do as we do in Europe and America, they have an early evening meal. The fastest growing rate of these diseases is in the southern Mediterranean.
I just looked at the nutrient content of other foods.
I wrote a book in 1995 based on utilizing honey at night. We got feedback from all around the world. What the effect of the honey was on nocturnal physiology. It’s not difficult to work out what’s going on, it’s quite simple. The response from readers was that honey at bedtime, in addition to better sleep, produced changes like “fitter/stronger/healthier/improved mental acuity/less nausea and morning sickness” — all of which can be attributed to reduced adrenaline/cortisol and glucagon, to nocturnal energy homeostasis, and improved anabolic profile.
For decades, people have said sleep is a low energy system. That’s wrong. Sleep is a high-energy system. Is the brain optimally fueled from the liver in advance of sleep? That’s the critical question. The brain has about 30 seconds worth of glucose. About 5 grams in the blood. The blood glucose would last 5 minutes. The only store that matters to the brain is how much reserve fuel is in the liver. Your liver has about 65-75 g of glucose in capacity. It releases 10 g every hour into the circulation – around 6-6 and a half grams to the brain. Do the math, you see the brain is in trouble at any tome is the 24 hour cycle if the liver reserve is low – especially in advance of the night fast. The brain cannot use fats for that purpose. The body cannot convert fat to glucose. Never. What it can do is during starvation it can convert fat to ketones and use the ketones for energy. But you have to be starving for that to happen. The brain must be fully provisioned prior to sleep. The gold standard food for that is honey.
What about eating a banana or apple in place of honey?
A tablespoon of honey is equivalent to a small or medium apple. However the apple doesn’t have the huge number of nutrients that affect honey’s ability to metabolize optimally in the liver and to stabilize blood glucose concentration. Honey has 200 non-nutrients that make a difference. If you took fruit at night, you would get significant liver replenishment but not as much as honey.
Of course a perfectly good case may be made for fruits and indeed vegetables before sleep since they both have an appr. 1:1 ratio of fructose to glucose, as does honey. However there are many additional nutrients in honey that improve insulin signalling, and partition and disposal of the sugars that are not in these foods – hence honey is a potent anti-diabetic food – it improves the action of two of our most widely used anti-diabetic medications – metformin and glibenclamide – I am not aware of any other sugar or sugar containing food that can do that. In the fullness of time we may find other foods/fuels that are as good as, or better than, honey, but the present knowledge is that honey is the Gold Standard. Nothing wrong with some added fiber – but not required at night, and adds digestive burden.
When is the best time to take the honey?
The honey should be taken as close to bedtime as possible.
Why that timing?
You have to do the mathematics of liver capacity and liver release. We’ve done several local studies on it. One German scientist is interested in this – Christian Benedict at Lubeck University. I wrote an earlier book on this subject that got a huge amount of responses from around the world. People saying how it transformed their sleep patterns. We found there was a significant improvement. It’s not a complicated issue.
Why call it a diet?
The only time you burn body fat exclusively is when you are sleeping. During exercise you burn both glucose and fat. You also burn muscle fat. Let’s take a 90-minute moderate intensity work out. A BBC study was done. The subject burned 19 g of fat. Overnight when the physiologist measured it he had burned 49 g of fat. What he did not understand during the exercise that although the total fat was 19 g, half of that was body fat, half was muscle fat. His attempt to explain why he burned more fat overnight was nonsense. The reason is very simple. Recovery physiology is highly expensive and exclusively ues body fat as the fuel from the circulation. If you burn 19 g during the workout then the half which is the body fat portion is 9.5 g. Now you can understand the relationship between exercise physiology and nocturnal physiology with respect to body fat used – it was 5 times as much during the night as during the workout. The key to recovery physiology is how much fuel is in liver. The study that reached that conclusion was done in 1950 and was and is ignored by the scientific establishment. It was a study on mitosis in mice. It traced the mitosis (cell division), an index to recovery. The main point was the recovery depends on the level of glycogen in the liver. This study also noted that recovery utilizes fat – again missed by the scientific establishment to this day.
Most of the stuff that I do is already there in the literature, you just need to know where to look. There’s only one scientist that I know of who has developed the same idea about sleep. Christian Benedict at Lubeck in northern Germany. The brain’s stress system is activated during the night because of the brain’s requirement for fuel. He looked at nocturnal physiology. He looked at the stress system overnight. He didn’t measure the effect of honey. It’s likely that once the book is published, there’s an important group at Lubeck called the Selfish Brain Group who are interested in the relation between cerebral energy deprivation and obesity. They are focusing on the concept that obesity is driven by chronic cerebral glucose deprivation. Basically the same as my theory. Some differences.
The foods we eat overload the circulation with energy. It means that if the glucose in that system went into the brain the brain would fry to death. The cerebral glucose pump, which is called the iPump, is suppressed. This is my theory. Consequently the glucose that you are consuming when you eat a high carb meal does not transfer into the brain. That means the brain is now deprived of energy so you are forced to go back and eat more and you repeat the cycle.
The time we burn body fat is when we are sleeping. For that to happen you have to activate the recovery system. For that to happen the brain has to have reserve fuel in the liver. If the brain does not have enough fuel in the liver it cannot activate recovery, it has to activate stress. The highest consumption of energy during the night is REM sleep and that’s when you learn. There’s another fundamental question that we need to address. The scientific and health professions will tell you if you are diabetic, you increase your risk of dementia dramatically. They’ve got that completely the wrong way around because suppressing the cerebral glucose pump is incipient dementia. It means that your brain is already deprived of energy – it’s already starving. The first thing that happens is we overload the systemic system with glucose. The second is that we overproduce insulin. Both hyperglycemia and hyperinsulin suppress the cerebellar glucose pump (iPump). That is incipient dementia. Then the excess glucose in the circulation is converted to fat via insulin. Now you’re becoming obese. Eventually your ability to keep your glucose stable by storing it as fat breaks down – you become insulin resistant – and then you become diabetic. The first system of energy impairment is in the brain. Then in the body – the sequence is first incipient dementia and chronic cerebral glucose deprivation (hunger) – then the excess circulating energy is converted to fat – then this protective mechanism breaks down – you become insulin resistant – that is diabetic.
I’m a retired pharmacist. I don’t have access to university science and study facilities. I just use the existing literature – however this is changing and a number of academics are now interested. There’s nothing that I’ve said that is not based on the literature.
If people take honey at bedtime they will lose weight?
This has been confirmed over and over again. Anecdotally, of course. Talking to athletes. Hundreds of people. After the first book, we got feedback from all around the world. Small to massive weight loss. Many people lost several stone. The new book has more science and is based on new science as well that is emerging almost daily. They’re realizing that Alzheimer’s and diabetes are basically the same disease. They still think that diabetes causes Alzheimer’s, whereas it’s the other way around. Chronic cerebellar glucose deprivation – that is incipient dementia causes obesity and diabetes. Any high energy system which is overloaded will short circuit. That’s what sugars are doing to the brain. The mechanism is very simple, sugars and insulin short-circuit the brain by suppressing the cerebral glucose pump – the iPump. If your blood sugar is too high it reduces the blood sugar/energy in the brain. That means if you have a high carb meal, less glucose enters the brain. Within 15 minutes, you’re hungry again. This is why carbohydrates make you hungry sooner. The explanation is stunningly simple.
You see people on TV who are gigantic. That’s the reason. These people are suffering from chronic cerebral hunger. The more they eat, the worse it gets.
I lost weight when I drank sugar water. Can you explain that?
I saw that. The fructose would replenish the liver. If the liver is replenished, the brain thinks that’s fine. There’s research by a guy named Maricio Russeck in Mexico. He discovered glucose receptors in the liver. He advocated the notion, which was correct, that the liver is critical in appetite control. That’s now being confirmed by recent science.
How is The Honey Diet different from the earlier book?
That book was based on restocking the liver before sleep. There’s much more science in this book. The scientific world has moved on in two ways. It’s now looking at honey in a serious way. Also, the question of low carbohydrate versus low fat diets is now becoming a major issue.
How would you sum this up?
The critical measure for the brain in all feeding and appetite regulation is based not on what’s in the blood but what’s in the liver. Russeck was spot on, 5 decades ahead of his time. These are absolutely critical questions. Let’s focus on dementia. There’s 35 million demented people in the world. That doubles every 20 years. One hundred years from now, one billion people are demented. The human brain is now shrinking, it’s not growing. That’s because one percent of those demented people is genetically driven. What is causing the other 99% of dementia, which has happened in the last 40-50 years? The answer is sugar. Refined carbohydrates. Processed foods. Honey is metabolized differently than refined sugars.
If I drink fructose and glucose in water at bedtime, it would have a different effect?
Yes, because they don’t contain the nutrients that are in honey that enable it to be metabolized differently. In America, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) drives obesity. It overloads the liver with fructose and it’s then converted to fat.
HFCS at bedtime would have quite a different effect than honey?
Yes, for sure.
The healthy amount of sugary foods people should eat is probably lower overall, but the ideal range (where there is no toxicity and where the most benefits are found – ie sleep) is certainly higher than what Lustig or Taubes propose.
I do believe their research is important but this idea that a whole macronutrient needs to be removed is strange – even in the absence of carbs your body begins to convert protein into glucose, doesn’t this tell us something!
https://www.gnolls.org/3374/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-calorie-to-your-body/
What I do know to be true however, at least for me, is that improving my sleep by eating moderate amounts of sugary foods, some starches and honey before bed has made more of a difference to my health and how I feel than any diet plan, theory or strategy yet and this leads me to believe that sleeping well is more important than worrying about specifics regarding macronutrients or calories.
What we have “known since the 19th century” is that, amongst people who are well overweight, a low-carb diet is very often a straightforward way to lose weight. Google ” William Banting” and check the date.
I’m not sure there is a paradox between our being attracted to sweet things like honey and the possibility that eating a chronic excess (seems to) harm us. In a state of nature we never had the opportunity to eat excessive amounts of honey, so one should not expect us to have an evolved defence against the consequences of doing so. Could not sugar be a parallel with alcohol ? a little being good for us, while a lot is harmful, especially as a habit ?
I saw a paper I think somewhere on https://www.high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.comshowing that high levels of omega 6 fats can lead to storage of excess carbs as fat.
So now the Japanese and Kitavans can be thin on high carbs, American’s eating high levels of omega-6 fats can be fat on high carbs and cutting carbs in America leads to weight loss.
I don’t know if that omega 6 paper is true but I think there is something more complicated going on than too many calories.
thanks
lard, tallow, shortening, butter, etc either stable or trending down.
& soy, canola, corn, margarine oil, etc trending up
lard, tallow, shortening, butter, etc either stable or trending down.
& soy, canola, corn oil, margarine, etc trending up
the problem with counting calories is that it does not reflect the actual energy that is passed in to the blood stream, which is an individual thing. way too many variables to try & work out how much real energy you will get from a particular ‘calorie of any food’ at one time…some things that will influence this are, gut flora, thyroid & anabolic hormones/metabolism, food type,…etc, etc
here is an interesting study that attempted to compare the predicted calories of Almonds ‘on the label (so to speak)’ (predicted by the Atwater system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atwater_system)
and the ‘actual/real’ calories (averaged across 18 subjects).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3396444/
This comment section has taken a detour from honey to calories, macronutrients, and bodyweight regulation.
Well since that happened I’ll chime in and try to unite the two.
Honey is fantastic for our gut microbes. Evidence is mounting that the microbiota orchestrates many facets of human health. For example, see this 2012 review of honey and the microbiome: https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/17/1/248
Key quote: “oligosaccharides present in honey might contribute to the antidiabetic and other health-related beneficial effects of honey.”
It’s so silly that people debate macronutrients, totally sidestepping the gut microbiome like we’re sterile creatures.
I’ve been paleo/primal(sic) since September 2010. My main reason for trying paleo/primal was constant joint pain mostly in my knees and morning brain fog. These issues cleared up within weeks of starting the new diet. However from April 2011 I started a semi-constant 3am wakeup, with sweating and heart palpitations. This has got steadily worse and recently it’s got so much worse that I have been waking up with a severe headache and very bad morning brain fog.
Typically I eat my last meal no later than 7pm and then eat again only the following day at around noon. I’ve never been big on eating in the morning or before 10am. Some days I have only one meal but most days two, rarely three. I’ve never been overweight, weight now at 49 what I did at 20, and have no other current issues barring the sleep issue.
As I am completely averse to ever stepping foot into a doctors office I started to trawl through the internet for answers. It’s taken me weeks to get to this blog and the honey solution after wading through site after site talking about diabetes. Given I have no issues during the day and never really feel as though I have to eat even if only doing one feed a day, I ignored much of the discussion on diabetes. In any case I have an almost zero sugar diet with very low carbs – typically no more than 50g a day.
Having read through this interview I decided to give the honey solution a try as the nighttime liver glycogen issue resonated with me. So for the last two nights I have taken a tablespoon of honey just before bedtime and have woken up at 6am with no sleep interruption, no headache and very little brain fog. I’ll be convinced this has legs if I can go for a month with no more 3am wakeups and morning fogginess.
Great blog Seth!
Seth: Thanks, that’s very meaningful praise — that this blog provides better (not just different) advice than other blogs. I think the failure of paleo gurus to advise a diet that produces great sleep is their single biggest failing. Obviously such a diet is paleo, that is, eaten by our ancestors, because I’m sure our ancestors slept well. Please write again after a month, whatever the results. I hope you will buy McInnes’s book, at least to thank him for the improvement.
Does it need to be raw honey or will normal honey work? How about combined with potato starch and kefir?
In Germany existes a ‘Betthupferl’ which means literally ‘bedjumper’ it’s a small sugery food taken just before jumping into the bed and to sleep well. Ray Peat says that bed time sugar reduces adrenaline and this improves sleep. He thinks that darkness is very stressful and antimetabolic and that is why we sleep. He says that total darkness would make good sleep less possible. Red & infrared light could improve sleep. https://oneradionetwork.com/health/dr-ray-peat-ph-d-answering-a-plethora-of-questions-regarding-health-diet-and-nutrition-january-1-2014/
Seth: I disagree about darkness. I found that when I made my bedroom darker I slept better. Now my bedroom is extremely dark and I sleep great. I haven’t tested red or infrared light.
Seth: I disagree about darkness. I found that when I made my bedroom darker I slept better. Now my bedroom is extremely dark and I sleep great.
So the break of dawn or the sunrise doesn’t wake you up in the morning? Do you wake up in a dark room?
right, I wake up in a very dark room.
“I lost weight when I drank sugar water. Can you explain that?
I saw that. The fructose would replenish the liver. ”
@Seth, it would have been interesting if you would have followed up with: I (and others) also lost weight by drinking extra light olive oil. How does your theory account for that?
Seth: I don’t like to ask questions I know the answer to. I know the answer to that one: It doesn’t.
The Honey at nighttime advice worked for me the first night. I have continued it for the last 5 nights. Even when I didn’t get optimal amount of sleep – it still worked.
When I say it worked, I mean I wake up refreshed, no grogginess, no headaches later after coffee – raring to go. I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt this good waking up and throughout the day. I still feel like napping around 3-4 PM everyday, but I can muscle through no problem now.
In short, three words: I feel great!
“We go to bed with a depleted liver. There is not enough fuel in the liver to supply the brain overnight. The way to resolve that is to forward-provision the brain, via the liver”
“Your liver has about 65-75 g of glucose in capacity. It releases 10 g every hour into the circulation – around 6-6 and a half grams to the brain. Do the math, you see the brain is in trouble at any tome is the 24 hour cycle if the liver reserve is low – especially in advance of the night fast.”
Assuming this is all true, it seems that the liver would be fully depleted upon waking. Would McInnes suggest honey in the morning, as well? If not I would think the brain would be “in trouble”.
Seth: One possibility is that brain function during the day is less important than brain function at night so that brain function during the day can get by with less blood sugar. Or maybe we should eat honey in the morning. A friend of mine who is a lawyer said that when he did the Atkins Diet he lost cases he would have won. It really did reduce how well his brain worked.
Stuart King said, (January 2nd, 9:42 pm) it isn’t as much to do with the diet as it is to do with the good sleep! Well summarized Stuart! Diets are varied and contradictory, but sleep is universal!
And, Seth, balancing the diet is done simply by using the honey at night instead of in the morning which is our traditional (American?) way. Even those souls who conscientiously use real honey from their own back yards, tend to see it as a breakfast food, especially in wintertime. By switching it to a nighttime food, the balancing act is dramatically induced.
We use honey to start us, to stimulate us, to extend our activity levels, but decline to use it to balance us up with the rest and recuperation stage.
And to Eric, If you want to improve on your Vitamin D production, put a thin (watery) lotion of honey on your skin ‘before’ you go out in the sun. It feeds the cells that make the D, and even prevents burning to a great extent.
Depending on one’s age, learning to use this new-found energy from these insights, is critical. Honey and all nostrums than give increased energy tend to prompt us to get out there and make up for lost time. BIG MISTAKE!
Do use some of that energy investing time in restful activity, or down time. Restoring the body is a long time project. Think of the honey as fuel in you motorcar. Just doing double the miles is great, but what about the long term servicing, repairing and repainting?
Real honey enjoys about 1% of the sweeteners market. It won’t take much of this kind of talk to double the demand, and still the potential is enormous (98% untapped). Honey production is a dying industry. Don’t get caught shot of real honey.
Many thanks to Mike McInnes for his brave venture into these truths. To you also, Seth, for hosting intelligent discussion. As a long term commercial honey producer I figure my industry may just survive. Mankind himself may even survive! Hooray!
Seth: I hope honey producers will realize that they themselves can gather data — studying themselves — on the value of honey for sleep. And they can publish it themselves on a website. There are a hundred questions to answer. For example, what is the best dose? What is the best time?
Would you believe there are more like 7 billion questions to answer? Why? Because to get it 100% right it must be on an individual basis. We all need to do our own experimenting and believe in the results we find for ourselves.
Leaving it to experts will always trend towards mass medication, mass profiteering and computerized averaging which will be good if the masses do it, but will produce poor results for many individuals.
Seth: We are on the same page.
david s Says:
January 9th, 2014 at 11:42 am
[ Assuming this is all true, it seems that the liver would be fully depleted upon waking. Would McInnes suggest honey in the morning, as well? If not I would think the brain would be “in trouble”. ]
I thought the same thing and have been taking a shot of honey every 8 hours or so since I started doing this. I missed an 8 hour window just the other day and I didn’t notice any difference though. I’m still doing it every 8 hours as a snack, if anything else.
Seth: There may be subtle improvement due to eating honey during the day. The improvement in sleep is not subtle.