What's the buzz about raw vs store-bought?
Why Raw Honey?
Pure, raw honey is an incredibly precious commodity. A single honeybee contributes a mere 1/12 teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. To produce just one pound of honey, bees must visit an astonishing 2 million flowers and fly over 55,000 miles.
Raw honey is only strained through a stainless steel sieve to remove larger pieces of wax, wayward bee parts 🙁, and such, before bottling, so it retains the beneficial nutrients and antioxidants it naturally contains.
Conversely, store-bought honey is the third most adulterated food product available today. Most commercially produced honey may undergo various processing; Pasteurization not only changes the texture and taste of honey but also affects its nutritional value. Honey that is heated (commercial honey) becomes less nutritious than raw, pure honey, and here’s why.
Heating honey to make it easier and quicker to bottle removes the natural aromas, yeasts, and enzymes in raw honey. As a result, it has fewer nutrients and antioxidants responsible for honey's amazing health benefits. Similarly, filtering, or ultra-processing, produces less nutritious honey since it removes vital particles like pollen. What you end up with is really just the equivalent of table sugar.
There are currently no legal requirements by the FDA, or any other governing body, for labeling honey, so terms like pure, raw, 100%, etc., really don’t mean that you are in fact getting 100%, real, pure, raw honey! That’s why it is so important to know from whom you’re purchasing your honey. I often have customers tell me that “this is the best honey I’ve ever tasted!”, I share with them that unless they’re buying from a beekeeper, it may be the only real honey that they’ve ever tasted.