You have probably thought it, even if you never said it out loud: “It’s just honey — so a couple more can’t hurt.”

It feels like common sense.

Your small intestine disagrees.

Why this myth is so persuasive

The reasoning runs like this: synthetic gels cause problems, therefore the synthetic part is the problem, therefore natural products don’t have that problem. Each step sounds reasonable. The conclusion is still wrong.

The premise smuggles in an assumption — that gastrointestinal trouble comes from the artificiality of a product rather than from the quantity of carbohydrate it delivers. Once you drop that assumption, the whole argument collapses.

What your intestine is actually doing

Carbohydrate does not simply flow into the bloodstream. It has to cross the intestinal wall through specific transporter proteins — a limited number of doors, each with a throughput ceiling.

Glucose crosses primarily via SGLT1. Fructose crosses primarily via GLUT5. These are separate routes, which is why combining the two sugar types raises the total ceiling.^[1]

The fructose route is the more easily overwhelmed. An analysis of studies in healthy adults found a strong dose-dependent relationship between fructose intake and malabsorption, concluding that absorption capacity is limited even in healthy individuals.^[2] This is not a disorder affecting a sensitive minority. It is a throughput ceiling that applies to everyone, and it is reached by dose.

What happens past the ceiling

Carbohydrate that is not absorbed in the small intestine does not vanish. It continues into the colon, where gut bacteria ferment it — producing gas, drawing water in osmotically, and generating precisely the symptoms endurance athletes describe.^[3]

Note what does not appear on that list: the provenance of the sugar. Your colonic bacteria have no opinion about whether the fructose they are fermenting came from a bee or a laboratory.

So what does the ceiling look like?

Research on carbohydrate intake during exercise indicates that a single-transporter carbohydrate source approaches saturation somewhere around 60 g per hour. Combining glucose with fructose — separate routes — allows higher rates, with guidance extending to roughly 90 g per hour for very prolonged efforts in trained athletes.^[4]

Those figures are absolute rates, not scaled to body weight, and duration-dependent. The Race-Day Fuelling Calculator works out the hourly target for your event duration and converts it into how many gels that actually means.

Where honey genuinely does help — and where it doesn’t

Honey contains naturally occurring glucose and fructose in meaningful proportions rather than a single sugar type.^[5] A honey-based gel therefore delivers carbohydrate across more than one intestinal transport route without anything being added to achieve it.

A critical review of glucose–fructose composite formulations reported enhanced carbohydrate oxidation and improved gut comfort compared with single-saccharide formulations.^[6] That review drew mostly on cycling studies in men, so the population is narrower than the conclusion often gets stretched to cover.

Here is what that does not do. It does not remove the ceiling — it raises it. Beyond the raised ceiling, honey behaves like any other carbohydrate that has arrived faster than it can be absorbed. Any marketing that implies otherwise deserves suspicion, and that includes ours. We would rather you bought fewer gels and had a good race than bought more and spent it looking for a toilet.

The useful reframe

Gut tolerance is not fixed. Research on training the gastrointestinal tract indicates that gastric emptying, stomach comfort during exercise, and carbohydrate absorption capacity can all improve with deliberate practice, with symptom reductions reported over roughly two weeks.^[8]

So the honest version of the question is not “how many can I take?” It is “how much have I trained my gut to handle, at the intensity I will actually race?”

What to do instead

Work out your hourly carbohydrate target with the Race-Day Fuelling Calculator. Rehearse that intake at race-like intensity and build up gradually. If your event is short, the answer may be that you need less than you assumed — sometimes nothing at all. That case is covered in The Pre-Load Protocol.