By Nicole Chiu - Contributing Health Journalist

It’s been long known that honey is a delicious addition to tea, cakes, and even poultry. Yet what exactly may be the benefits – not only in regards to taste – if you added honey to your salad dressing?

The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry has published a study by researchers from the University of Illinois, concerning honey and its health benefits, especially compared with artificial sweeteners or chemicals in salad dressings.

The study, led by Nicki Engeseth, an associate professor of food chemistry at the University of Illinois, explained that they decided to use salad dressings as an example in their experiment to reveal the positive health effects of honey. “We found that the antioxidants in honey protected the quality of the salad dressings for up to nine months while sweetening them naturally,” said Engeseth.

The specific honeys used in the experiment were clover and blueberry. It was a choice that had been narrowed down from profiling 19 different honeys and their sweetening potential, antioxidant activity, as well as various other characteristics.

One problem the researchers found with honey in salad dressing was the issue of thickening. As salad dressings are usually emulsions of oil and water, to keep these ingredients together, manufacturers often used thickening agents or emulsifiers. When adding honey to the mixture, the starch from the thickened dressings was often attacked by the enzymes found in honey.

A more natural alternative that the researchers found for thickening a salad with honey was xanthum gum. This new formulation of salad dressings with honey and xanthum gum was then used for analysis under various conditions. Such conditions included leaving the dressing in accelerated storage of 37 degrees Celsius for six weeks, 23 degrees Celsius for one year, or 4 degrees Celsius for one year. The dressings’ oxidative stability was then analyzed after the storage period.

What Engeseth and her team found was that after nine months of storage, both types of honey – clover and blueberry – were as effective as EDTA in the protection against oxidation or spoilage. “Blueberry honey performed slightly better than clover,” Engeseth added.

In order to have a “healthy twist” on your salad dressing, then, Engeseth has concluded that their research demonstrates how honey is the key ingredient, as both an antioxidant and a sweetener.