Uploaded November 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
To start with, let me say that I like the taste of maple syrup. On the infrequent occasions that I have a pancake, I don’t defile it with corn syrup. I go for real Canadian maple syrup. But I do not expect the syrup to deliver any health benefit. After all, it is mostly sugar. A tablespoon contains about 12 grams of the sweet stuff, which is almost one third of the maximum amount of sugar, 40 grams a day, that should be contained in a healthy diet. However, a little surfing on the web will unearth numerous articles about the health benefits of maple syrup, mentioning the vitamins, minerals and amino acids it contains, but the greatest emphasis is generally on the syrup’s content of polyphenols.
Polyphenols have made the jump from complex papers in science journals dealing with their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, mostly seen in cell cultures or animals, to popular articles in the lay press that bestow these chemicals with virtually miraculous effects on human health. There is a dearth of clinical trials showing a benefit of polyphenol supplements on human health. It is just assumed that the health benefits attributed to fruits and vegetables are due to their polyphenol content, but the situation is much more complex. Fruits and vegetables also contain fiber as well as a host of compounds not in the polyphenol category.
Maple syrup does indeed contain polyphenols, but even if we assume that these are “healthy,” other questions have to be raised. Polyphenols constitute a whole class of compounds, and individual ones can have different properties. For example, a polyphenol in maple syrup, imaginatively named “quebecol,” is not found in the sap that is tapped from the maple tree, but forms upon boiling the sap to drive off water leaving the syrup behind. Does this have any health benefit? Nobody knows. Then there is the issue of the amount of polyphenols present in a tablespoon of syrup. That turns out to be about 200 mg. Have a couple of cups of coffee a day, and you have doubled that amount. A cup of blueberries will have five times that the amount of polyphenols found in a tablespoon of syrup.
The sap from the maple tree is mostly water, but of course it is the source of the polyphenols that eventually appear in the syrup. These days that sap is marketed as “maple water,” often with slogans like “naturally better.” The polyphenol content of such waters is insignificant. It is of course possible that some polyphenols really do have health benefits by virtue of their ability to destroy “reactive oxygen species” that are the byproduct of oxygen metabolism, and maybe maple syrup has particularly effective ones. We don’t know. But if that turns out to be the case, then there may be some benefit in extracting these polyphenols and incorporating them into a supplement in biologically significant amounts. Actually, such an extract has been shown to slow down the aggregation of a protein called beta-amyloid, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. But the subjects were worms. Headlines such as “Maple Syrup May Protect Against Alzheimer’s” are totally unfounded. There is some worthwhile research to be pursued here, but as far as any health benefit from the maple syrup on your pancake goes, you can forget it. And if you are consuming enough maple syrup to have a significant intake of polyphenols, you are overdosing on sugar.
To start with, let me say that I like the taste of maple syrup. On the infrequent occasions that I have a pancake, I don’t defile it with corn syrup. I go for real Canadian maple syrup. But I do not expect the syrup to deliver any health benefit. After all, it is mostly sugar. A tablespoon contains about 12 grams of the sweet stuff, which is almost one third of the maximum amount of sugar, 40 grams a day, that should be contained in a healthy diet. However, a little surfing on the web will unearth numerous articles about the health benefits of maple syrup, mentioning the vitamins, minerals and amino acids it contains, but the greatest emphasis is generally on the syrup’s content of polyphenols.
Polyphenols have made the jump from complex papers in science journals dealing with their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, mostly seen in cell cultures or animals, to popular articles in the lay press that bestow these chemicals with virtually miraculous effects on human health. There is a dearth of clinical trials showing a benefit of polyphenol supplements on human health. It is just assumed that the health benefits attributed to fruits and vegetables are due to their polyphenol content, but the situation is much more complex. Fruits and vegetables also contain fiber as well as a host of compounds not in the polyphenol category.
Maple syrup does indeed contain polyphenols, but even if we assume that these are “healthy,” other questions have to be raised. Polyphenols constitute a whole class of compounds, and individual ones can have different properties. For example, a polyphenol in maple syrup, imaginatively named “quebecol,” is not found in the sap that is tapped from the maple tree, but forms upon boiling the sap to drive off water leaving the syrup behind. Does this have any health benefit? Nobody knows. Then there is the issue of the amount of polyphenols present in a tablespoon of syrup. That turns out to be about 200 mg. Have a couple of cups of coffee a day, and you have doubled that amount. A cup of blueberries will have five times that the amount of polyphenols found in a tablespoon of syrup.
The sap from the maple tree is mostly water, but of course it is the source of the polyphenols that eventually appear in the syrup. These days that sap is marketed as “maple water,” often with slogans like “naturally better.” The polyphenol content of such waters is insignificant. It is of course possible that some polyphenols really do have health benefits by virtue of their ability to destroy “reactive oxygen species” that are the byproduct of oxygen metabolism, and maybe maple syrup has particularly effective ones. We don’t know. But if that turns out to be the case, then there may be some benefit in extracting these polyphenols and incorporating them into a supplement in biologically significant amounts. Actually, such an extract has been shown to slow down the aggregation of a protein called beta-amyloid, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. But the subjects were worms. Headlines such as “Maple Syrup May Protect Against Alzheimer’s” are totally unfounded. There is some worthwhile research to be pursued here, but as far as any health benefit from the maple syrup on your pancake goes, you can forget it. And if you are consuming enough maple syrup to have a significant intake of polyphenols, you are overdosing on sugar.
