Honey - Nature's Sweetener
Honey is widely used in food products, cosmetics and
ayurvedic medicines. It contains a variety of sugars
(e.g. fructose, glucose, maltose, sucrose).
Honey is composed mainly of different sugars,
traces of pollen and water. In smaller amounts, acids,
proteins and minerals are also present. The typical
composition of honey is: fructose 38.38% (range: 30.90
– 44.25%); glucose: 30.30% (range: 22.90 –
40.75%); water 17.2% (rage: 13.4 – 22.9%), maltose:
7.31% ( 4 – 8%) and sucrose: 1.31% (range 0.25
– 7.57%).
Fructose is about two and a half times as sweet as
glucose. From the numbers above it can easily be seen
that fructose and glucose are present in natural honey
in a ratio of 1.2:1. As honey is widely used in food
products, cosmetics and ayurvedic medicines, the perspective
of additional gains by adulterating
honey seems to be tempting.
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Titration offers a fast way to determine
the sum of all reducible sugars (e.g.
glucose, fructose, maltose and lactose). Electrochemically
inert sugars (non-reducible sugars as sucrose) can’t
be analyzed by normal titration.
If you need to distinguish between different kinds
of sugars, ion chromatography
is the method of choice as you gain more detailed information
about your sample than by titration.
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Food
Analysis 
