Seventy-five percent of honey bought at the supermarket isn't real honey

Tuesday, May 28, 2013 by: Lance Johnson
Tags: honey, supermarkets, counterfeit food

(NaturalNews) Large scale tests on US supermarket honey now reveal that roughly 75 percent of honey on the market isn't even real. According to investigation by Food Safety News, today's mass produced honey is often times void of real pollen, artificially processed and laundered from China. Honey manufacturing experts and the World Health Organization agree that real honey must contain true microscopic particles of pollen, to be considered real, with an identifiable source. Honey void of pollen is an artificial, nutrition-void, watered-down scam.

Watered down, heated, pressurized honey not real at all

Much of the honey hitting supermarket shelves is derived from an ultra filtering procedure that heats honey to high temperatures, forcing the natural substance at high pressure through extremely small filters to remove pollen. In this way, manufacturers conceal the identity of the source of the honey, which is a technique used by the Chinese, who have illegally dumped tons of their honey on the U.S. market for years. The Chinese are responsible for dumping dangerous antibiotics, artificial sweeteners, and leeching copious amounts of heavy metals into imported honey products.

The Food Safety News investigation

After hearing about US grocery stores being flooded with unidentified honey, Food Safety News began an investigation into several outlets that sold foreign honey. They purchased 60 different containers of honey from 10 different states, buying from a wide range of supermarkets. They then sent the honey samples to premier melissopalynologist and professor at Texas A&M University, Vaughn Bryant. What he found was that roughly three fourths of the honey contained no pollen, making it unidentifiable and unsafe. Of that average, he found that:

• 100 percent of Winnie the Pooh sold in Walmart stores had all pollen removed.

• 100 percent of honey from individual packets from KFC and McDonald's had all pollen removed.

• 77 percent of honey from big box stores like Costco, Sam's Club, and Target had no traced of pollen.

• 100 percent of honey from drugstores like Walgreen's and CVS Pharmacy had all the pollen filtered out.

• He did find out, however, that honey purchased from co-ops, farmers markets and stores like Trader Joes contained the full amount of original pollen.

Ultra filtering of pollen has to do with concealing honey's true source

Mark Jensen, president of the American Honey Producers Association, says that removing all pollen from honey "makes no sense." He continues, "I don't know of any US 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."

Jensen added that pollen-void honey is most likely Chinese honey that has entered the country illegally and not inspected.

Richard Adee, who produces 7 million pounds of honey each year from multiple states, explains that real honey is valued for its flavor and nutritional value and that this "is what's being removed during the ultra filtration process."

He says that, "It's no secret to anyone in the business that the only reason all the pollen is filtered out is to hide where it initially came from and the fact is that in almost all cases, that is China."

Most honey packers are worried about what is being imported and what they are pumping into their plastic bears. Much of the honey sold in the US is imported from Asian countries. Two hundred and eight million pounds of honey have been imported over the past 18 months; 60 percent of that comes from Asian countries that typically launder honey illegally for China.

By using in-house private testing, some US manufacturers have found out that their Asian imported honey is watered down with high fructose corn syrup and a myriad of illegal sweeteners and antibiotics.

This is causing many people to seek out local trustworthy supplies of honey, who leave this precious resource in its unadulterated, nutritional form.

Look around and find a local distributor of honey. Real honey is a valuable resource.

Sources for this article include

http://www.foodsafetynews.com

http://www.motherearthnews.com

http://www.foodrenegade.com/your-honey-isnt-honey/