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Life's Sweeter with Honey Part 1: Which Honey Do I Choose?


raw honey

What’s the Difference Between Raw Honey and “Honey”?

You can buy honey anywhere. From grocery store shelves to farmers’ markets, there’s no shortage of the bees’ magical brew.

But if you’ve ever looked closely, you’ll see that honey naturally has different colors, and those colors vary significantly from the grocery store than they do from the organic bee farmer.

Why is that?

The Problem with Grocery Store Honey

Honey Without Pollen

Grocery stores want products that have a long shelf life to increase profits. To keep honey a profitable food product, manufacturers ultra-filter honey and sometimes water it down. (You may have noticed that grocery store honey is much thinner.) Sometimes they even mix it with other ingredients, like high-fructose corn syrup!

The ultra-filter process damages honey in three ways:

  • Removes bee pollen, the heart and soul of honey

  • Removes any definable way to determine whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources

  • Removes the medicinal properties from honey

  • An astounding 76% of commercial honey contains no pollen. This includes stores like TOP Food, Safeway, Giant Eagle, QFC, Kroger, Metro Market, Harris Teeter, A & P, Stop & Shop and King Soopers.

  • 77% of honey from Costco, Sam’s Club, Walmart, Target, and H-E-B had the pollen removed.

  • 100% of honey packaged in small individual containers from Smucker, McDonald’s and KFC also had the bee pollen removed.

photo credit: www.foodsafetynetwark.co.za

If you purchase honey labeled organic from the grocery store, your chances of getting real honey are better. The Food Safety Network found 71% of the samples tested were heavy with pollen.

However, honey bought at co-ops, farmers’ markets, PCC and Trader Joe’s had the full amount of bee pollen.

Buy raw honey from food co-ops

Beside the Lack of Pollen, Why Is Commercial Honey Scary?

Removing pollen makes no sense from a nutritional viewpoint and it’s costly! “I don’t know of any U.S. producer that would want to do that. Elimination of all pollen can only be achieved by ultra-filtering and this filtration process does nothing but cost money and diminish the quality of the honey, “says Mark Jensen, president of the American Honey Producers Association.

Jensen goes on to say that most of the ultra-filtered honey sitting on store shelves comes from China. It has entered the country un-inspected and in violation of federal law.

In the honey business, it’s no secret that the reason pollen is filtered out is to hide where it initially came from. In almost all cases, that’s China.

What’s Wrong with Chinese Honey?

Honey from China--Beware!

In 2001, the Federal Trade Commission imposed stiff import tariffs to stop China from flooding American markets with dirt cheap, poor quality, heavily subsidized honey.

The Chinese honey market responded by simply laundering the honey, shipping it to other countries, then switching the color of the shipping drums, the legal documents and labels.

The new information claimed a bogus, tax-free country as the origin of the honey.

The Raw Honey Difference

Raw honey, by contrast, does not have all the political drama that commercial honey does, and it’s good for you!

Bee pollen