Honey: Nature’s Miraculous Healing Food – But is the Honey You Buy Contaminated by Commercial Agriculture’s Herbicides and Pesticides?

Honey is one of nature's most perfect and beneficial foods. The documented research on the incredible health benefits of honey is truly astounding. If you type in the search term "honey" in the National Library of Medicine on the NIH Government website, you will get 15,480 results from peer-reviewed medical journals. It is the ONLY sweetener on the market that you can purchase that is a complete, whole food, as opposed to granulated sugar which is an extract from either a grass (sugar cane), or from beets (sugar beets). But purchasing real, pure, unadulterated raw honey that is not contaminated with herbicides or pesticides, is another matter altogether. Testing done in 2011 on grocery store honey showed that up to 80% of the honey sold in grocery stores is adulterated and even fake, much of it imported from China illegally. I know for a fact that this is true, because my company, Healthy Traditions, has been importing high quality pure honey from outside the United States for more than a decade, and while we do NOT import honey from China, every single shipment of honey that we have imported goes through an FDA hold to ensure that it is not "honey" that originated from China and is relabeled. It takes us more time to get honey across the border than any other product we import. Honey that is produced in the U.S. and Canada is mostly a by-product of professional bee keepers who make their primary income from leasing out their bees to pollinate crops in commercial agriculture, which are heavily treated with herbicides and pesticides, and the resulting honey from these bees is just a by-product of these commercial bee operations, and that includes most "local" honeys. So what I am going to do in this article is educate you on the numerous health benefits of raw, pure honey, and the lucrative bee and honey operations in commercial agriculture, so that you can be an informed consumer and look for pure, raw honey that is not contaminated. Pure raw honey has been proven through numerous studies to be more effective than drugs in treating many diseases, and since honey can be stored indefinitely and tends to improve with age, like fine wines, this is a food that you want in your long-term food storage plans, and you want honey that heals, not honey that is contaminated, or "honey" that is not even real honey at all.