Eli5 if honey is naturally antibacterial and yogurt has probiotics, does eating them together cancel out the benefits?
In: 5
It depends on how many each product claims to have. Whoever has the largest army, prevails!
No, the honey isnt powerful enough to wipe out the good bacteria in yogurt. If it was, honey would be dangerous to eat because it would wipe out your gut bacteria. The antibacterial properties of honey mostly stay in your mouth and throat by getting caught in the mucus to help the mucus do what it already does. The honey that goes to your gut would be overwhelmed by the digestive system and gets broken down before it harms your gut bacteria.
Edit: guy bacteria is not a thing, lol
No. Honey only inhibits the growth of bacteria because of how concentrated the sugar is. Mixing it with yogurt dilutes this concentration.
Probiotic claims are mostly unsupported by science. In fact, some people have exhibited negative interactions due to bacterium-host interactions. While honey is antibacterial in nature, it’s uses are mostly in topical applications and considered alternative medicine. If you are asking if honey will kill the microorganisms in priobiotic foodstuffs, the answer would be probably not (depending on amount consumed, interactions in the digestive tract, and the organisms themselves). Especially since the “benefits” of probiotics is questionable at best.
The amount of antibiotics in honey is so small that it have no impact on bacteria population once you mix it with water. You can literally ferment honey into meed just by mixing it with water. Similarly the amount of bacteria from yogurt that will make it past your upper digestion system is so little that it will not have any impact in anyone except a few rare conditions. So honey does not cancel out yogurt because both do nothing to your microbes.
However if you are curious as to which of the two will win if you mix them the yogurt will. This is because the primary defense against microbes in honey is the lack of water in it. Any bacteria which end up in honey is going to dry out. The antibiotics are just to make it harder for any bacteria which specialize in these dry conditions. But yogurt have a lot of water in it. So if you mix it into honey there is a lot of water for the bacteria to thrive. And all the added sugar of the honey will just feed the microbes even more.
Honey being antibacterial doesn’t mean that it has health benefits. It means that it’s unlikely to grow bacteria in a dish. This is because the concentration of sugar in honey is super high, which kills bacteria (similar to how foods are preserved with salt to prevent spoiling). But it doesn’t prevent infections or do anything significantly beneficial when you eat it.
Honey is antibacterial because it desiccates any bacteria that it grows on. Adding water to honey makes it sugar that helps bacteria grow
Honey is only antibacterial when applied pure to a topical wound.
So, mixing it with yogurt would negate the antibacterial properties
Another reason honey doesn’t spoil is the sugar content is too high, sucking the water right out of bacteria & such. Once so dilute in yogurt or probiotic smoothies, you’ll see it go bad pretty quickly if you don’t get to eating right out the fridge!
*Pure* honey is antibacterial. It contains so much sugar that it literally sucks the water out of bacteria and kills them.
*Diluted* honey no longer does this.
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