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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Raw Honey
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Who doesn’t love the sweet taste of honey? In fact, Americans love honey so much, we have dubbed September “Honey Appreciation Month”. You might think of honey as just another way to sweeten up your coffee or your smoothie but honey has so much more to offer than just a means of sweetening up our foods and drinks.
Honey has been used for ions for medicinal purposes. Even HippoRaw honey that has not been treated, heated, or purified in any many is the healthiest honey of all. When you taste raw honey you will instantly know the difference, and so will your body. Raw honey still has its natural enzymes, antibacterial, and antioxidant properties. Although Manuka honey has been tested as being the most healthful but all types of raw honey, even the popular heather honey has been shown to kill four strains of bacteria, including the superbug MRSA virus.
Honey has been used as medicine in Ayurvedic medicine for 4,000 years or more. In ancient Hindu yedic texts, honey is the ingredient mentioned in more than 634 remedies. Nearly every ancient Egyptian “prescription” for healing called for at least a small amount of honey. Even in ancient Greece, the father of medicine, Hippocrates, wrote that “Honey and pollen cause warmth, clean sores and ulcers, softens hard ulcers of the lips, heal carbuncles and running sores.”
Now don’t think that you can trot down to your local store, pick up that little plastic bear filled with honey, and start curing all your ills. Unfortunately, those little bear shaped containers, cute as they are, don’t contain any real honey. The FDA allows any product that contains some pollen to be called honey. So, basically, you can take sugar, water, and a bit of color, drop a quarter teaspoon of pollen in it and you have honey, according to the FDA rules. Bees would probably not agree with that definition!
Many honeys have been ultra-filtered to the point that the actual source of the honey cannot be found. Why would manufacturers do this? Because they don’t want you to know that their honey comes from China, from questionable sources where many of these products have been watered down with high fructose corn syrup and come from contaminated fields that use antibiotics, pesticides, and have heavy metal contamination from plants grown in contaminated soils. One study done at Texas A & M University showed that 76 percent of the products tested in American supermarkets do not contain even one drop of pollen.
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Photo credit: bigstock
As with most products, the closer you get to the source, the better off your search for raw honey will be. OK, so not all of us look forward to scooping the stuff right out the hives, but you can usually find bee keepers selling their product at your local farmers market. Although all honeys heal, the rule of thumb here is that the darker the honey, the more healing properties it has.
Now that you know what you are looking for, let’s take a look at all the good things raw honey can bring into your life.
- Boosts energy
- Regulates blood sugar levels
- Heals wounds
- Improves your skin (find out beauty benefits of honey)
- Anti-viral, Anti-fungal, and Anti-bacterial properties
- Super nutritious with lots of B vitamins, magnesium, calcium. phosphate, and potassium
- Boosts the immune system
- Reduces cholesterol levels when taken daily
- Alleviates seasonal allergies when taken daily
As if this were not enough, honey can be kept indefinitely. Honey has been found stored inside the ancient pyramids of Egypt. Scientists believe that this honey was at least 5,000 years old and it was still edible. Now sometimes, due to temperature changes, honey crystalizes, but all you need to do is place your jar of honey in a bowl of hot water and it will soon return to its normal appearance. You can still use it in its crystallized form; however, there is nothing wrong with it. Find ways to add raw, organic honey to your life. Add it to your morning smoothie or coffee, replace that sugar bowl with a small jar of honey, drizzle it on your toast or pancakes, put some in your tea, drizzle some over your yogurt, or just take a teaspoon every morning as a means of keeping your body healthy and your mouth happy!
