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Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn’t Honey

144K views 557 replies 46 participants last post by  John Smith 
#1 ·
I've found this article just recently, and many facts surprised me.

For example:
"•76 percent 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 percent of the honey sampled from drugstores like Walgreens, Rite-Aid and CVS Pharmacy had no pollen.

•77 percent 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 percent of the honey packaged in the small individual service portions from Smucker, McDonald’s and KFC had the pollen removed. "

From: http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-show-most-store-honey-isnt-honey/#.UQ1sbh3m1n5


Boris Romanov
 
#224 ·
deKnow,i'm not talking about eating x amount of honey to get my daily vit. intake? I'm talking the nutritional value of Raw honey over Pasteurized honey, we've seen the nutritional value of Raw honey, now show me the nutritional value of Pasteurized honey?
sqkcrk, Why couldn't i put fat free and cholesterol free on my labels? packers have been putting Pure Clover honey on their pasteurized honey and getting away with it.
 
#226 ·
sqkcrk, Why couldn't i put fat free and cholesterol free on my labels? packers have been putting Pure Clover honey on their pasteurized honey and getting away with it.
There are Laws about this sort of thing. I can't quote them. But, there is a reason wy you won't see such things stated on labels on grocery store shelves.

Check w/ your State Labeling Authority. State Weights and Measures or Dept. of Ag maybe?
 
#231 ·
You have absolutely no idea what your talking about Boris,
I think your eyes are crossing when your reading all this stuff.

BeeMaid is the actual packing company to which it buys all its honey from the Manitoba and Alberta Honey Producers. Its a Cooperative.
Its owned by the beekeepers of western Canada, ITS A COOPERATIVE

everything is on the website, everything is clear and transparent , all the honey supplied to BeeMaid is from the beekeeper either from the Manitoba or Alberta members

HACCP is something completely different, is third party auditing. It has nothing to do with packing honey, its a facility standard. I believe is North American wide, its way larger than something your able to comprehend Boris
 
#263 ·
Ian,

Once again.

Please look into the BeeMaid's MOTTO: “Hive to Home” This is the FALSE statement!
Why a packer as the main component is missing?

After processing is not ethical to call/label a final product as HONEY - it's PROCESSED HONEY - forever liquid substance!

Boris Romanov
I think you are taking things too far here Boris. On purpose.

How can a person eat honey w/out processing it in some manner. Unless you cut the comb out of the hive yourself and eat it comb and all.

People call me a troll. What's the opposite of a troll? Someone who Posts Threads and Posts to illicite reactions.
 
#234 ·
Did you read that heating (pasteurizing) honey up to 37 C or 99F causes loss of nearly 200 components ... -brooksbeefarm
Isn't 37C the mean internal temperature of a human body? Are those components similarly lost as soon as they enter the human body?

Along those same lines, doesn't bearding on hives begin at around 37C to 38C? Why wouldn't those components be destroyed right in the hives under those conditions?

Heating up to 40 C or104 F destroys invertase an important enzyme. -brooksbeefarm
I'll confess I'm ignorant on what these sorts of enzymes do physiologically in the human body. Why is consuming invertase so important or helpful?
 
#235 ·
Again,

They are fully certified with HACCP, and currently in the process of fully registering its membership with CFIA. Right now, they are packing honey on the shelf all around the world which has the ability of tractability from that store shelf right back to the beekeeper, and the hives the honey came from.

Hive to Home,

Boris, what cant you understand ?
 
#241 ·
Boris --

I think you're missing a bit of the organization here. Let me see if I can make it clear:

A number of beekeepers in Canada own and manage hives. (Ian is one of those beekeepers). They harvest honey from their hives.

Most commercial beekeepers either bottle and market their honey themselves, or they sell their harvested honey to "packers," businesses that process and bottle ("pack") honey and sell it wholesale.

In this instance, rather than sell to an independent packer (a free-standing business), the Canadian beekeepers organized themselves, invested in the equipment to "pack" honey (the processing and bottling machinery), and hired individuals to do that work. This sort of organization is called a cooperative. The business owned and operated collectively by the members is the packer, in this case. Therefore, BeeMaid is the packer. The beekeepers who own shares in BeeMaid are the honey producers. And HACCP is the set of health and safety standards used to inspect and certify the business packing the honey.
 
#247 ·
I have customers who come directly to me because they want raw honey, I have customers come to me because they want comb honey. I hae customers come to me because they want honey that has not been processed in anyway, I also have customers come to me and buy some processed honey I get from my packer because they love the product and want to support me directly

I do not understand the direction Boris is taking this conversation. Consumers know what processed means. They encounter it with all foods. Its reality of our day. THe ones who actually care are the ones who come directly to me and get the good straight from the source. It takes more work doing it that way but that is the way getting raw food has always been. It is avaliable, they go find it
 
#254 ·
Ian, if i brought up that the Pure Honey lable was True at the club meeting they would laugh me out of the building. After you heat your honey at 161 F and filter it (pasteurized) you should feel Rediculous passing it off as a nutritional product. It can be called honey because that Was it's base product, but that's about all you can claim it is after pasteurizing it.
 
#257 ·
Ian, if i brought up that the Pure Honey lable was True at the club meeting they would laugh me out of the building.
I understand what your saying, until you make the point that it is the pasteurization that removes the pureness from it.

We sell our honey according to our flows, its how the public associates the honey types, as do the beekeepers. Never can we get 100% of a floral source, but we can get close. And so we market it as such.
 
#256 ·
I will try to show my definition of HONEY. -Boris
Very cool exercise, I think. Concentrating and narrowing a definition in a case like this really make you consider a wide range of factors, makes you think about what should and should not be included, makes you more aware of what might or might not be included and what exceptions might have to be granted. If nothing else, creating such a definition deepens the understanding of the topic by the person who creates his definition.

For example, I got to thinking about water as a parallel to this discussion. I turn on the tap in my house, run liquid into a glass, and drink it. I refer to that liquid as "water." Now, I realize fully that it isn't pure water. It has other things in it. But it also has had things removed and added by human intervention. Call it "processing," I guess. It's pulled by machinery out of the ground, filtered, treated with chemicals to kill some organisms, and delivered by machinery through pipes to my tap. Does the process make it something other than water? I don't define it that way. I know some folks separate "tap water" from "bottled water," but, in my experience, I tend to refer to both as simply "water."

In the case of honey, does pollen have to be in it for it to be honey? How about all of the enzymes and trace amounts of various things that have been suggested above? Do trace amounts of various pesticides (as demonstrated by a number of recent research studies on pesticide residues and diseases in bees) have to be present for it to be defined currently as "honey?"

I haven't given that much thought in the past as to what is and is not "honey." I've always believed that if I extract it from a bee hive and it's a sweet liquid that bees have gathered and developed from floral sources, it's "honey."
 
#267 ·
... For example, I got to thinking about water as a parallel to this discussion. I turn on the tap in my house, run liquid into a glass, and drink it. I refer to that liquid as "water." Now, I realize fully that it isn't pure water. It has other things in it. But it also has had things removed and added by human intervention. Call it "processing," I guess. It's pulled by machinery out of the ground, filtered, treated with chemicals to kill some organisms, and delivered by machinery through pipes to my tap. Does the process make it something other than water? I don't define it that way. I know some folks separate "tap water" from "bottled water," but, in my experience, I tend to refer to both as simply "water."
Indeed, interesting exercise! I think, this discussion drifted away from original post. Water and honey are opposite - "water" is a chemical term for H2O. H2O contains only H2O. If it contaminated by something, from chemical point of view, it is not water anymore. Thus, pure water is more "water" than water with "additional" content. Honey from another hand is not chemically defined and it is a "composite" - something, which contains many components. Each component, which is chemically defined may be treated as water above (pure water is more water). But, does "composite" remain the same if some component removed or destroyed or changed? The answer for this, one could ask school-level chemistry teacher. I suspect, the answer would be that removing or destroying or changing one component of the "composite" will affect the integrity of the whole. In another words the "composite" before and after modification is not the same. It is sort of obvious to me as a scientist - if my technician will grab anything from the shelve in my lab and heat it to +70oC - do you really think I will use it in my research after heating? No, that "something" will go in the chemical waste immediately. It is very simple - ALL chemicals must be stored at room temperature or below, so any drugs. Did anybody tried to heat DayQuil to +70oC and after that use it as a medicine?
 
#258 ·
A couple of years ago, we were invited to speak at the Fl state beekeeping meeting. They had just passed their honey standard, and part of our talk focused on the standard.
One of the issues that will have to be addressed in the future is that the FL standard allows for zero adulteration with feed According to the letter of the standard, .005% feed in the honey would make it not honey. At some point, testing will get better, and beekeepers and packers that are used to a LOD of 5% will have a problem.

I think beekeepers are shooting themselves in the foot with these standards.....all the while there is plenty on the market that is demonstrably not honey....have any of these standards resulted in pulling a single jar from the shelf?

Deknow
 
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