Overview
About Honeyberry
Honeyberry, sold through most of the trade as haskap, is the fruit of Lonicera caerulea: an edible honeysuckle, not a blueberry, however much the colour suggests otherwise.
On the trigger data it is one of the quietest fruits in this journal. It grades A for histamine content, tyramine, nickel, sulfites, nitrites, free glutamates, lectins, nightshade, gluten and lactose, with only mild grades for histamine liberation, salicylates and oxalate. Its FODMAP columns are untested rather than cleared. The thing genuinely worth knowing about honeyberry is not intolerance at all, it is identity. Lonicera runs to roughly two hundred honeysuckles and this is the one species bred to be eaten. The ornamental honeysuckles in hedges and front gardens carry red and orange berries that commonly cause vomiting and diarrhoea, so the oblong blue fruit on a nursery haskap bush and the bright red fruit on a hedge are nothing like the same proposition.
Sensitivities
How Honeyberry scores
Watch for
What trips people up
- Only Lonicera caerulea is the eating honeysuckle. The widely planted ornamentals, Tatarian and fly honeysuckle among them, produce red or orange paired berries that are routinely reported to cause vomiting, cramping and diarrhoea. Colour is the tell: haskap is deep blue, oblong and slightly waisted, and it grows on a low bush sold under a cultivar name. Never eat a honeysuckle berry off an unidentified plant
- Graded a mild histamine liberator while the fruit itself grades clean for histamine content. Those are two different mechanisms, and this is a fruit where the liberator column is the only histamine entry that carries anything at all, so log flushing or itch separately from gut symptoms
- FODMAP grades are unrated, not low. Haskap is intensely tart and is drunk as juice or eaten as thawed puree more often than by the handful, and a glass of juice represents a great many berries. Start with a food-sized portion rather than a drink-sized one
- Cultivar makes a real difference to how it tastes and to how your gut reads it. The older Russian lineage cultivars can be markedly bitter and astringent from tannin and acid, which is not a graded trigger but is a fair reason for reflux or a rough feeling on the teeth
- The berry is too soft to travel fresh, so almost every commercial exposure is frozen fruit, puree, juice, jam or a freeze-dried powder. Sweetened haskap products carry sugar that the fruit grades here say nothing about
Diet fit
Where it fits
Swap ideas
More alternatives
FAQ
Common questions about Honeyberry
Is honeyberry high in histamine?
No. Honeyberry grades A for histamine content and A for tyramine, which puts it among the cleaner fruits for anyone managing histamine intolerance. The one entry it does carry is a mild histamine liberator grade, meaning it may prompt a small release of your own histamine rather than delivering any. Most people in a maintenance phase handle a normal portion without trouble. During a strict elimination it is worth introducing on its own day so that the liberator grade gets tested rather than assumed.
Are honeysuckle berries poisonous?
Most of them should be treated as though they are. Of the roughly two hundred Lonicera species, only the blue honeysuckle, Lonicera caerulea, is grown to be eaten, and that is the plant this page describes. The familiar garden and hedgerow honeysuckles produce red, orange or translucent white paired berries that are widely reported to cause nausea, vomiting, cramping and diarrhoea, particularly in children who eat a handful. The safe rule is to eat honeysuckle fruit only from a named haskap or honeyberry cultivar you planted or bought, never from a hedge.
Is haskap low FODMAP?
It has not been tested, so every FODMAP column here reads as unrated rather than low. That is the usual position for a fruit that only reached commercial scale in the last twenty years. Nothing about honeyberry suggests a heavy sugar alcohol load, but that is inference and not data, so treat a first serving as a test and note the amount. Juice and puree deserve more caution than whole fruit simply because the portion is so much larger.
Is honeyberry better than blueberry if I am salicylate sensitive?
On our grades, yes, and by a clear margin. Blueberry grades high for salicylates and high FODMAP with a moderate polyol load behind it. Honeyberry grades only mildly elevated for salicylates and carries no polyol grade at all. The two fruits get used interchangeably in baking because they look alike and behave alike in a muffin, so if blueberry has been a reliable trigger for you, haskap is a sensible one to retest in its place rather than writing off blue fruit altogether.
References
Read the background
Ratings reflect the Triggerbites ingredient database and may vary with portion size and preparation.