I am 100% raw/vegan, except I eat raw honey. I love it. I bought some amazing honey the other day and I can't stop eating it, on apples, in smoothies, with cacao beans and goji berries. I keep telling myself I will not eat anymore and then I indulge. I feel like a bear. I am craving sweets lately for some reason. Is too much honey (all the sugar) bad for your body?

Fruit would be a better source of sugar, as it has fiber in it to slow down the absorption of sugar into the blood stream. Also, eating honey kills bees, something like 1 bee per spoon.

That is good to know. I was under the impression that sustainably harvested organic raw honey was not very intrusive or harmful to the bees, but what you say makes sense. I will look into it a little deeper. Thank you.

ps. I do love bees and would not want to contrubute to hurting them.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/19/2008 06:59PM by Joanne81.

honey is so incredible, it really is. unfortunately it's just not vegan, no more so than wool is. it's meant for bees, not for humans i think. i can find so many other things to eat and use in place of it in my life. that's ok, i don't miss it at all.

Heh...heh. Yeah. Trees may freely drop their fruits....but you won't find too many bees 'freely' offering you any honey!

-David Z. Mason

WWW.RawFoodFarm.com

>I keep telling myself I will not eat anymore and then I indulge.

^It sounds like you need to reevaluate some things with yourself. Why do you not want to eat honey? Why do you still eat it? If *you decide* to stop, consider trying a slower process/smaller goals to avoid binges/backslides.

There are lots of reasons to not eat honey. But yes, it tastes good. Storm and Jinjee are big advocates of honey. My heart melted when I heard, "For every spoon of honey, a bee dies."

More pertinently, there IS a massive bee dieoff happening right now, and if nobody's left to pollinate our fruits, we'll have a lot more problems than no honey...

honeybees are not native to north america, they are actually an invasive species. there are plenty of other indigenous bees here to pollinate things.

Coco,
I enjoy reading all your post,even on other threads.I HEAR U on the price of orgain produce.
On HONEY, I eat raw honey & hear you. I believe sugar is highly addictive generall speaking. I dont even consider it food but a toxin and my body point blank responds poorly to it and the more I eat the more I crave it.

Did it last night,putting raw honey on bannanns before bed. I wa a BAD boy.

I am trying to find my place in this whole raw thing in which I AM comfortable with.I am glad I read this tread. Maybe 4me the answer is if I cant eat it in a reasonable,healthy way then dont keep it in the house.

A couple of times,a while back I resorted to putting the jar of whatever------- in my car 4 the night.Silly but it worked.lol

Just remind yourself whenever you eat honey that you're actually eating bee vomit.

Gotta admit that's some tasty vomit though.

-DaveK

bee barf! eww, gross!


thanks keepitsimple. sometimes i think i come off as pretty darn bossy actually. that's not how i am in real life i don't think, just really practical and straight-forward. it doesn't exactly translate in type so it's nice to hear that someone is getting something from what i write!

someone else was weaning themselves off of nama shoyu and the trick they used was to tell themselves that the bottle of it that they had in the fridge was the last one that they were going to buy so they had to ration it to make it last. turns out they used less and less, every time they wanted some the idea of stretching it out to last made them think twice, use much less, even forgo it altogether. eventually there was more than half a bottle left in the fridge that they didn't even want anymore, they had broken the addiction!
don't know if that will help you but i thought it was a pretty smart solution.

medjool dates are my sweet craving fix, they are just so tasty delicious. one is often enough to totally satisfy me too.

As a former Commercial Beekeeper and Commercial Packer I would agree that nowadays honey production is nothing more than a numbers game that disregards the livelihood of bees. What isn’t about profits nowadays?

Many honey bees die due to suffocation from traveling from pollination yard to yard and others are killed by pesticide spays. Others are crushed, disabled, lost, etc during the husbandry process. The main purpose of honeybees in the US is pollination where the bees are used as pollinators thus yielding honey production. Large commercial operators in many cases do not properly care for their livestock and cut back on medications, are hasty in their husbandry concerns, and are planning on the next location to drop bees to earn pollination contracts. Remember commercial operations are large companies that have a corporate mentality and have shareholders they must please.

Unfortunately our society has forced the beekeeper to earn a meek existence and labor extremely hard since feral lands are disappearing and crops are being genetically engineered so that complete pollination is not required in some cases. Additionally, if you purchase honey from you local grocery store you are guaranteed to purchase a product that has been heated, moisture level adjusted, color adjusted, and if the honey is crystal clear it has gone through a filter press thus filtering out particles up to 1 micron in size. Also most of the honey in the US is imported from Argentina, Brazil or China. This overly processed honey is nothing more than a non-nutritious sweet colored syrup. Even a small operation on the grocery store shelves will heat their honey for filtering/straining and shelf life. Interesting how in North America most honey is sold in the liquid form – around the globe it is either crystallized, creamed or in the comb form.

If you are on a honey kick, please support you local hobbyist beekeeper since most hobbyists take pride in their husbandry and do produce high quality honey. Honey in the raw state is the most nutritious, especially comb honey. As for bees sacrificing their life –the average lifespan of a honey bee is 21 days from egg to hatching and a mature life between 1-4 months depending on the time and geographical venue of the colony. Make you own decision. The honey bee is disappearing........ Is it our negligence, greed, or just humanity?

Thanks NeonBee for all that interesting information. Much appreciated.

this attitude that the life of a bee being only 21 days makes it somehow not valuable enough to play a part in determining honey consumption baffles me. 21 days is still a lifetime to the bee, who am i to rob it of even one moment of that?

As I mentioned Coco it is a decision for each and everyone to make but here is the true irony……

Almost all of the commercial fruits and nuts in the US are produced via the use of pollination by commercial beekeepers. This includes organic fields as well as commercial or industrial pollination requirement crops. There are not enough natural pollinators at this time in history to produce lush fields or orchards full of fruit so hence the traveling honey bee. So in retrospect, if we eat any food that is commercially pollinated we are supporting the efforts of the beekeeping industry and using their services regardless if their husbandry skills are good or bad. So if one is perplexed about the life of a honey bee think of the number of bees that have met an early life the next time anyone eats a nut or fruit.

Right. There's not too much dancing around the issue. Everyone does what they can. And the extent that you can grow your own food and plan for the growing of your own food...and eating locally grown foods.....from farms you know.....is a good thing. For a beginner....the goal of eating a lot of your own sprouts....and growing your own greens and herbs....is a powerful and liberating one.

-David Z. Mason

WWW.RawFoodFarm.com