I apologize if this has been asked before but I am confused about raw honey vs honey in the supermarkets. Is it that the ones in the stores are pasteurized? How exactly are they different and am I wasting my money on store bought honey.
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Honey at the grocery, unless stated it's "raw" is pasteurized so it will be clear and golden. Raw honey is off-white and cloudy. Definitely buy local if you can, any greenmarket should be able to hook you up, support your farmer :) I know that Trader Joe's does carry raw at a good price. Most definitely there are benefits over pasteurized, as the pasteurizing process destroys all the goodies in raw: enzymes, phytochemicals, nutrients. Also, raw honey has a high potassium, iron, calcium, magnesium, protein, and vitamin C content. It is also a strong antibacterial, and awesome immunity builder. I know people use raw when they get burns as it works as an antiseptic and a painkiller. Neat right? Magical bees! Nerd Alert:
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The major store brands very likely contain tainted/illegal chinese honey. http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/12/mislabeled-chinese-honey-leads-to-criminal-busts/ http://healthland.time.com/2011/08/22/tainted-chinese-honey-may-be-on-u-s-store-shelves/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/07/smuggled-honey-ultra-filtered_n_1079948.html |
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You want to look for three things (and finding all three at a supermarket is pretty hard, your best bet is your local farmers market, failing that, a Whole Foods or other health food store):
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As has been noted here, store bought honey is basically just sugar, with few/none of the ancillary benefits usually attributed to honey. Short story: buy your honey from your local farmer's market, or find an apiary nearby that will sell to you. Longer story has two parts. 1) Honey that is pasteurized has likely also been stripped entirely of it's pollen. Besides losing the possibility of health benefits from pollen, stripping the pollen also makes the honey untraceable, since the pollen acts as a "fingerprint" of the locale it's from. What this means is that you are getting honey from who-knows-where, and readied for market by who-knows-what methods. See here for more info: http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/11/supermarkets-sell-fake-honey . 2) If you want a dash of sweetness from honey, and are also already getting your honey locally like you're supposed to ;-) , then consider also getting honeycomb. Honeycomb is delectable in it's own right, and pairs fantastically with meats. Eating the honeycomb ensures that you are getting the widest range of the various trace minerals and vitamins the bees bring into the comb. I find the honeycomb "wax" to be tasty and quite palatable (I've never had it chewy in a gross way ever). |
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Honey from the supermarket has either a glucose-fructose ratio of 1:1 or 30:70. Or somewhere in the middle. It is either identical to sucrose, or high fructose corn syrup in its sugar contents and type. Here is a nice pro-bee website which proves that there is such little difference between sucrose and honey they are for all practical application the same thing. http://www.buzzaboutbees.net/honey-vs-sugar.html If your doing the Paleo, Primal or Perfect Health Diet, Honey clearly falls under the 'Do Not Eat Sugar' category. Sorry bee-keepers. |
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Essentially if it's a clear runny liquid then yes, it's been pasteurized, and so has much fewer nutrients than found in raw honey. There's lots of different levels as well, as with other foods, so not all raw honeys are created equal. If you want some honey, then you're not wasting your money to get the stuff from the store - it's a reasonable, palatable source of sugar. But if you want the bonus nutrition that bees have to offer, then there's better options available. |
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