Filtered Honey Has No Value

According to a recent study done by the Food Safety News, three quarters of the honey sold in the US is not proper honey but in fact is ultra filtered honey.

What this means is that the honey being sold is missing pollen. This is caused by the ultra-filtering the honey. Ultra filtering removes the nutrition in honey and is only being done to obfuscate the source of the honey.  Why would anyone try to cover up the source of the honey? Well it is a complex mix of economics and FDA food policy but too often results in illicit honey from China and other countries making its way in the US.

Why is honey ultra-filtered?

Honey is normally filtered to remove wax and bee wings and legs. This normal and the pollen is not removed.  Honey is ultra-filtered  to remove the pollen so that the origin cannot be traced. Since honey from China is heavily tariffed it is ultra filtered to hide it’s origin to avoid the tariffs and then routed to the US through other counties thus getting around the tariffs. China does this because of money, distributors buy the adulterated honey because of money, stores sell the adulterated honey because of money. It doesn’t have to be that way but it is all money driven.

What is so bad about ultra filtered honey?

Ultra-filtering honey diminishes the quality of the honey by removing a key component and the nutritional value. No reputable source of honey would do this.

The FDA and Filtered Honey

Chinese honey is heavily tarrifed because its low prices was putting American bee keepers out of business. This is why it is laundered, like a black market product. The FDA has done very little to stem the flow of this practice and fewer than 5 laboratories can do the analysis of this adulterated honey.

It is suspected that fewer than 5 percent of honey imports are checked. The result of the inaction by the FDA has let laundered honey, ultra filtered honey, and adulterated honey which is contaminated with antibiotics and other chemicals to find it’s way into the US markets and distributed by Smuckers and Sara Lee just a few years ago.

Unfiltered Honey Facts

The Bad Honey

• 76 percent of the samples bought at major grocery stores had all the pollen removed
• 100 percent of the honey bought at drug stores had no pollen
• 77 percent of the honey sampled from big bx stores had all the honey filtered out
• 100 percent of the honey packaged in small individual service portions had no pollen

The bottom line of all this, it done for the sake of money with no thought about you or your health.

The Good

All honey from farmers markets, co-ops and natural stores contained the expected amounts of pollen

Gold Standard Honey is pure raw natural honey and has all of the natural pollen from nature left in. When you purchase a jar of our honey you can be assured that you are getting all of the nutritional benefits of natural honey with nothing removed. I hope to see you at the Cherry Street Market and the other markets this year so that you can enjoy all the markets has to offer including raw natural honey from Gold Standard Honey.