Dear friends of Centers for Healing,
This week, I want to continue our discussion on honey. We all know that bees make it. Now, it’s time to consider exactly why they make it . . . and, why it tastes so good!
Food For Bees
Since bees make honey, it only makes sense that they make it for themselves. In fact, honey is the natural food for adult worker bees and drones. (Young bees eat bee pollen, while their queen diets exclusively on royal jelly. But, that’s getting ahead of ourselves.)
This is an important point. Namely, if the bees can live solely on their own products, it stands to reason that they are foods. We’ll see, in fact, that they are super foods.
Food For Us
“Honey is so much more than glucose and fructose, it is a nutrient rich substance with an impressive array of vitamins and minerals with trace amounts of amino acids and antioxidants.”
I highly recommend downloading this free resource at the following link:
Natural Healing Remedies From The Hive
Just Another Natural Sugar?
Sure, honey is sweet. However, it is much more than a simple sweetener. In fact, it would be much more accurate to call honey a sweet food. Better: a sweet super food.
A tablespoon of honey contains 64 calories, about 67% of which come from glucose and fructose. Meanwhile, a tablespoon of white sugar contains less than half of that, at just 30 calories. However, those calories are 100% sucrose.
it hits your digestive system and immediately passes into your blood stream.The practical difference is this: when you swallow that tablespoon of white sugar (from which practically all of the nutritional content of the natural sugar cane has been processed away), it hits your digestive system and immediately passes into your blood stream. This causes an immediate insulin response by your pancreas.
On the other hand, when you eat that tablespoon of honey, it is digested as food . . . one that actually helps regulate your blood sugar level! Maybe this is because honey contains almost all of the B vitamins, which are necessary for proper metabolism of sugar!
Think about it for a moment. Have you ever heard a dietician tell an overweight patient to consume more sugar in order to lose weight (i.e., body fat)? Not hardly.
However, honey has been used effectively as a weight loss supplement, especially when mixed with warm water, apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, ginger, and cinnamon. Here’s a link to Dr. Josh Axe’s website, where he gives the exact recipe for his version of this popular drink:
Secret Detox Drink
A Complete Food
Again, there’s much more to honey than its sugar content. In fact, honey contains proteins (with several important amino acids), carbohydrates, organic acids, enzymes, minerals, and a host of antimicrobial and antioxidant compounds. (Those beneficial enzymes are destroyed, though, when honey is heated excessively, so it’s better to consume it at room temperature or in drinks that are only warm, not hot.)I don’t know about you, but that’s a pretty impressive list of benefits from one tablespoon of honey!
My friends, so many of us exist on diets that leave us overfed and undernourished. Isn’t it about time to fix that problem? Wouldn’t all of us prefer vibrant living to mere existing? And, doesn’t a moderate use of honey seem like it might be an important ingredient in the solution?
Next week, we’ll talk about bee pollen, one of the other amazing “gifts of the hive.” Until then, take good care!
All the best,
Dr. Blanche Grube
