Your honey might not be real honey
Honey is one of the greatest superfoods used for thousands of years for its healing and medicinal properties. However, based on a report by Food Safety News, 75% of the honey sold in the US grocery stores today aren't exactly honey produced by bees.
According to FDA guidelines any product that is ultra filtered and doesn’t have pollen isn’t honey. However most honeys in US are ultra filtered at high pressure. Then the honey is heated and watered down and then it’s forced though small filters and pollen is removed.
Based on Food Safety News, thousands of honey brands (in jars) are dumped on the US market by Chinese and some of them even contain illegal antibiotics, heavy metals and other toxins.
Also, somehow Indian honey found its way to US market after it was banned in Europe. Indian honey in Europe is labeled as unsafe because of its contamination with antibiotics, heavy metals and total lack of pollen.
Since thousands of unidentified honeys have been dumped into the US market, the Food Safety News decided to do a full investigation on 60 different honey brands from 10 different states. The professor Vaughn Bryant from A&M University of Texas did full tests on the content of honeys for pollen.
Here are the findings of Professor Vaughn Bryant according to Food Safety News:
•76% of samples bought at groceries had all the pollen removed, These were stores like TOP Food, Safeway, Giant Eagle, QFC, Kroger, Metro Market, Harris Teeter, A&P, Stop & Shop and King Soopers.
•100% of the honey sampled from drugstores like Walgreens, Rite-Aid and CVS Pharmacy had no pollen.
•77% of the honey sampled from big box stores like Costco, Sam’s Club, Walmart, Target and H-E-B had the pollen filtered out.
•100% of the honey packaged in the small individual service portions from Smucker, McDonald’s and KFC had the pollen removed.
•Bryant found that every one of the samples Food Safety News bought at farmers markets, co-ops and “natural” stores like PCC and Trader Joe’s had the full, anticipated, amount of pollen.
For centuries honey is valued for its flavor and nutritional value but removing pollen from honey destroys all its nutritional:
Mark Jensen, the president of the American Honey Producers Association, told Food Safety News that removing all the pollen from honey makes no sense and runs contrary to marketing the highest quality product. He also mentioned that the whole thing doesn’t make sense since elimination of the pollen isn’t more profitable and even cost money and destroys all the nutritional value of honey. But the truth is that, they remove the pollen and sell it separately to double their profit.
He also stated that he doesn’t know that any US producer would eliminate all the pollen and therefore any ultra-filtered honey is Chinese honey that’s entered inside the country uninspected and in violation of the Federal law.
How about honey produced by the American producers?
Unfortunately, many bee keepers cannot afford organic cane sugar and feed their honeybees with processed bleached white sugar or high fructose corn syrup which is even worse than sugar.
Feeding honeybees with white processed sugar or high fructose corn syrup damages the immune system of bees. Also the honey produced by bees that are fed on white sugar or high fructose corn syrup doesn’t have the nutritional value of raw honey produced by wild bees.
What has happened to our food supply? We are feeding cows with GMO corn instead of green grass, feeding farm fish with pallets from dead and sick cows, feeding our chickens with hormones and arsenic and feeding our honeybees with white processed sugar or high fructose corn syrup.
Feeding honeybees with sugar and high fructose corn syrup remains one of the main reasons behind malnutrition and auto-immune disorder in bees. Other factors that have caused colony collapse of bees are use of neonicotinoids pesticides, GMO crops, environmental pollution and electromagnetic radiation of cell phones.
So, don’t waste your money and health since 75% of honeys in US grocery store are not real honey and are harmful to your health.
Instead, next time you went to your local grocery store, look for organic raw honey produced by wild bees. I know organic raw honey is more expensive than regular honey, but organic raw honey is an amazing superfood and great source of anti-inflammatory which can also helps to improve allergies, flues, rhinitis and asthma.
Resource:
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-show-most-store-honey-isnt-honey/#.UaU3rJy5bIV
