The untold story of Natural honey
Honey is a natural food product and one of the oldest ones. It has incredible medicinal benefits. It infuses energy in your body and its mention brings a smile on your face and symbolizes positivity. Honey is associated with good health. Most people love the taste of honey and are well aware by now that it has a lot of health and medicinal benefit.
But we find all types in the market. Pure natural honey is healthy but we can find processed honey in the market too. So, let us understand a bit more about natural honey.
Honey has fructose and glucose and it’s a supersaturated solution- roughly between 76% to 80%. Moisture present in it is from 18% to 20%. Other ingredients are up to 4% to 6%.
How is natural honey prepared?
Honey bees collect nectar from the surrounding flowers and then park it in small combs in their beehives. Later they dry up the excess water with their wings. When the moisture levels reduce to less than 20% then the nectar is converted to honey. In this topic, we try to learn The untold story of Natural honey.
All through, bees relocate honey from one comb to another and transfer higher levels of enzymes. The taste of honey and its smell primarily depends on the nectar the bees collect nectar from different flowers. Honey derives its medicinal qualities from the pollen in the nectar, enzymes from bees, various minerals, and antioxidants.
Honey is used in beauty products since it helps to maintain your skin. It also has incredible health benefits like reduction of cholesterol, relief from cold, cough, and allergies. In fact, it helps significantly in weight reduction.
Why is it that in our present stressful lives, honey hasn’t been able to make a space in our lives:
the untold story of Natural honey
Why honey hasn’t been able to become a part of our diet?
Honey has a lot of health benefits and most of us are aware of this fact. But, the biggest challenge is to identify pure honey.
Honey is processed and it’s a challenge to identify pure honey. There are some reasons why we tend to reject honey. We have some misconceptions about honey that stops us from including it in our diet.
Misconceptions about honey:
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Myth: Pure honey doesn’t crystallize:
It’s been ingrained in our minds for many years that pure honey doesn’t crystallize. Well, we have just been hearing this from everyone. But it’s true that honey from mustard nectar will crystalize within few days. And honey from lychee might not crystalize for many years. It all depends on the type of honey you are referring to.
Why does honey crystalize?
Honey is an oversaturated solution and has 76% to 80% reducing sugar which is in the form of fructose and glucose against less than 20% water. This implies water holds more sugar than it can out of fructose and glucose, later on, it becomes relatively less soluble. Thus, over a period of time glucose separates out from honey and takes the form of dehydrated crystals.
And these crystals actually resemble in appearance with refined sugar.
The speeding of the crystallization process depends on the following factors:
- Percentage of glucose in honey
- Moisture level in the honey
- Temperature levels of the surroundings
- Days for which the honey stays undisturbed
- And the pollen content.
When the glucose and pollen content is high the speed of crystallization is high too. Lower the temperature i.e. less than 10 degrees for few days, honey crystallizes faster.
But crystallization is a natural process. We need to understand all these factors before rejecting any honey as processed.
So it’s important that you read the name of ingredients written on the honey jar. Yes, natural honey doesn’t crystallize that is a popular belief but under some circumstances it does.
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Taste and viscosity:
People use viscosity and taste to test the purity of honey. But in reality, honey from one location is quite different from honey collected from various other places. When the beehive shifts from one place to another the taste of the honey becomes different because the nectar collected by the bees is different.
Even if the location is 10 km away the difference is evident. Honey collected in one beehive is different from that collected from another beehive, even if they are on the same beehive. It all depends on the flowers the bees collect the nectar from and the quantity as well.
You have to understand that honey comes from the nectar collected by bees and the bee travels within 2 to 5 km of the radius of the beehive to collect the nectar.
So, the flora and fauna in the surroundings of the beehive decide the taste, viscosity, and smell. Thus, when people judge the purity of honey based on the taste, viscosity, and smell it’s unfair. One cannot rule out any honey as impure based on these parameters.
People expect honey to have a particular taste and viscosity and a slight variance is just unacceptable. Honey is naturally made by bees and it isn’t made in factories, and is a natural product the taste and consistency are bound to vary depending on the climate and nectar collected by the honey bees.
Having a universal taste of honey is just impossible. So, we should stop doubting the purity of honey due to the inconsistency.
We have primarily touched upon general misconceptions and confusions about honey. Based on these myths and misconceptions honey is marketed as consistent in taste, color, viscosity. But this consistency is impossible to achieve as we explained earlier; it is an illusion that is being created.
These are some facts about The untold story of Natural honey
Visit Navmi website www.navmi.co.in to buy pure and natural honey as our focus since inception has always been serving customers with natural foods of the best quality. All our products like coconut oil, flaxseed oil, ghee, A2 milk, different types of natural honey, jaggery, turmeric, etc are chemical-free. Unprocessed foods contain higher amounts of antioxidants, they reduce the risk of heart disease, cancers, and other health issues.
Visit our site (Nirlesh Foods Private Limited or Navmi) www.navmi.co.in to know more about nutritionally pure and unprocessed food. Make a conscious and healthy choice of foods.
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