My daughter is a big consumer of honey, using it to sweeten drinks and even to put on hamburgers instead of ketchup, if you can believe it. Two years ago, I put bee hives in our backyard so I could keep her supplied with her favorite sweetener and as a family hobby. However, a recent article by Food Safety News provides compelling reasons for producing your own honey or buying it at the farmers market.
More Than 75% of Store Bought Brands Flunked the Test
According to tests done by Food Safety News, more than three-fourths of honey brands purchased at grocery and club stores had been ultra-filtered and contained no pollen. Without pollen, these products do not meet the standard for what is considered honey in the United States. Filtering out pollen from honey adversely effects both its taste and its nutritional content, but ultra-filtered honey is a tale-tell sign of more concerning problems; specifically, adulterated and contaminated honey.
Adulterated and Contaminated Honey
Most of the honey sold in the United States in now sourced from other countries including China and India. In order to have a price advantage, some suppliers from these countries have been cutting real honey with cheaper sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup, cane sugar, or one of 13 other illegal sweeteners. Furthermore, the actual honey from these countries is often contaminated with antibiotics, pesticides and heavy-metals, making them a health hazard.
The Pollen Connection
Natural honey contains pollen from plants that are local to the place where the bees produced it. Samples of honey taken from different countries, or even regions within a country, will have different pollen profiles that can be used to identify the place or origin, much in the same way fingerprints can be used to identify individuals.
Suppliers of adulterated or contaminated honey know this. To prevent adulterated or contaminated honey from being traced back to them, these suppliers ultra-filter it to remove the pollen grains. Since ultra-filtration serves no beneficial purpose, (doesn't improve flavor, perceivable clarity or nutrition of the honey) ultra-filtered honey should be viewed as highly suspicious and a "smoking gun" for potentially adulterated or contaminated honey.
Where to Buy Your Honey
The Food Safety News analysis showed that most supermarkets, drug and club stores carry brands that have been ultra-filtered. If you buy honey from these retailers you have a 75% chance of getting ultra-filtered honey.
In stark contrast to this, samples taken from farmers markets and "natural" stores such as Trader Joe's, PCC and WholeFoods are likely to be safe - none of the samples tested by Food Safety News from these retailers were ultra-filtered. My advice to those buying honey is as follows:
- Your safest option is to buy locally produced honey at a farmers market or from a local bee keeper.
- If you don't have access to a farmers market, buy honey from a natural food grocery store.
Produce Your Own
One final option is to produce your own honey. If you would like to learn more about bee keeping, see some of my other postings on the topic including:
- What Equipment You Need To Keep Bees
- Ten Steps for Installing Bees In A Beehive
- What You Get When You Buy A "Package" of Bees
You can be 100% certain that your homemade honey has not been adulterated with other sweeteners or doped with antibiotics. Assuming you don't live near a toxic waste site, you can be pretty darn sure your own honey will also be free of heavy metals as well.
In candor, you can't be 100% certain that your honey will not contain some pesticides because bees forage over a range of 6 miles and may collect pollen and nectar from neighboring yards that have been treated. However, your home-made honey doesn't differ in this respect from honey sold at the farmers market because their bees may also be located in areas that are adjacent to land that has been treated with pesticides. Unless pesticides are completely banned, this will be a risk for honey regardless of who produces it.
That said, I feel our suburban neighborhood is still a safer place to keep bees than a foreign country where there are few to no controls on the type and amount of pesticides used.
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