Dr Afifa Khatun, chief scientific officer at the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission, opens her column with a case from Feni, where fake honey was being made in a hotel toilet by boiling sugar and mixing it with real honey. Police said 2 kg of real honey was mixed with 10 kg of sugar to make 12 kg sold as 'pure honey', for about eight years. The column appeared on Prothom Alo's opinion page; the views are the writer's own.
She asks why the trade keeps returning despite raids and fines. One reason is that real honey depends on natural sources while sugar is cheap and plentiful. The harm is not only to the wallet, she writes: added sugar raises total sugars, which can add to the risk of diabetes and obesity, and some in vivo studies have linked adulterants in honey to damage to the liver, kidneys, heart and brain.
Home tests based on colour, smell, thickness or how honey mixes with water are not reliable, in her view, because these traits vary with the flower source, region and processing. Around the world, adulteration is detected with chemical analysis, spectroscopy, isotopic analysis and chromatography.
She cites the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority: of 1,713 food samples tested in fiscal 2024-25, 571, or 33.3 per cent, had adulteration, contamination or nutrition problems, honey among them. The authority tests honey for moisture, the type and ratio of sugars, HMF and pollen.
Under international standards such as AOAC 998.12, pure honey should contain less than 7 per cent C4 plant sugar. A study of Bangladeshi honey found C4 sugar adulteration in about 18 per cent of samples, at levels from 11.90 to 86.61 per cent, she writes.
She advises buyers to check the label, producer, source and approval and to buy from verifiable sources. But her main point is that producers, sellers and regulators share responsibility: without regular sampling and tracing where adulterated products come from, fines alone will not solve the problem.
Source: Prothom Alo
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