Consumer preferences and attitudes to honey vary. Some people prefer natural honey that comes from the mountains, some opt for carefully raised beehive honey, while others choose commercially-produced honey which is widely available at reasonable prices. Given this diversity, the question arises as to whether locally produced honey differs from commercial products in terms of composition and sugar.

In a College of Medicine and Health Sciences lab, Dr. Haider Al-Lawati led a team of researchers to address this question. Their innovative study aimed to identify and determine the amount of different sugars in honey, including glucose, fructose, sucrose and maltose, using a fast, new and cheap technique.

Traditional methods of investigating this issue require sophisticated and expensive devices, such as liquid chromatography, which usually take a long time to yield results. As a result, the team decided to look for a faster and less expensive solution, namely, the lab-on-paper technique. This technique uses paper as a reactive material to explore chemicals by taking advantage of its capillary property, which allows materials to mix naturally without the need for complex devices.

The technique helped the research team obtain accurate results in fewer than five minutes, which allowed it to conduct various accurate analyses of different samples of local and commercially-produced honey. The findings were surprising. Although many people believe that commercial honey contains larger amounts of table sugar, the analyses proved that the concentration of sugars in local honey and commercial honey were very similar, while there was no significant difference between the sugars in them in terms of quality and properties.

But what makes this finding stand out is the paradox between price and quality, as it turns out that local honey produced in the Sultanate of Oman, such as Samr and Sidr honey, has the same sugar composition as cheaper commercial products, despite the big difference in price. The study also reported that Samr honey, which is the most expensive local honey, has concentrations similar to the less expensive commercial types.

With these results, the study not only revealed a surprising scientific fact, but also provided a new opportunity for consumers to think more carefully about their food choices. Local honey is delicious and healthy, and is a strong competitor to commercial honey in the market, although the price difference does not always reflect a difference in quality.

Dr. Haider Sabah Al-Lawati – College of Science