Glucose Metabolites in Honey Samples From Diverse Botanical and Elevation Ancestries

Honey is a natural sweet substance composed of major and minor constituents. The major honey constituents include sugars and water, while the minor components include organic acids, proteins, short peptides, enzymes, flavonoids, phenolic acids, minerals, vitamins, dicarbonyls, and hydrogen peroxide. It is evident that the constituents of honey affect each other such as the vice versa relation between methylglyoxal and hydrogen peroxide. This study investigated the relations between vitamin C, hydrogen peroxide, and dicarbonyl concentrations in Ziziphus and Acacia honey samples from diverse floral origins and altitudes in Saudi Arabia. Vitamin C and hydrogen peroxide were assessed by redox titrations, and the dicarbonyl molecules were measured using spectrophotometric method. The obtained data were analyzed using SPSS (Version 21.0). The floral origin and the altitude had significant effects on all the studied parameters except vitamin C. Our findings indicated that when the mean concentration of vitamin C in the Ziziphus honey (576 m) (283.84 ± 116.54 mg/100 g) and the mean concentration of the dicarbonyl molecules (176.4 ± 98.06 mg/kg) were high, the hydrogen peroxide mean concentration was low (3.19 ± 0.18 g/kg). When the hydrogen peroxide concentration in the Ziziphus honey (113 m) was high (6.68 ± 0.23 g/kg), the concentration of vitamin C and the dicarbonyl molecules was low (194.48 ± 16.36 mg/100 g and 55.1 ± 38.09 g/kg, respectively). Thus, the present findings suggested that honey samples rich in dicarbonyl molecule concentration are expected to have a high amount of vitamin C and a low concentration of hydrogen peroxide. The medicinal and nutritional values of honey depend on its active enzymatic and nonenzymatic reactions.