Paleo Diet: Raw Paleo Diet and Lifestyle Forum
Other Raw-Animal-Food Diets (eg:- Primal Diet/Raw Version of Weston-Price Diet etc.) => Primal Diet => Topic started by: Haai on April 19, 2010, 09:14:10 pm
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I havn't seen a jar of honey anywhere which states that the honey in it is unheated. But I saw a jar of cold-pressed honey...anyone know if this is the same thing as raw/unheated honey?
Am I also right in thinking that unheated honey will greatly increase the population of candida in the body, just as (I assume) heated honey would?
Thanks
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the honey i get from my local guy is "cold packed" meaning it was packed without heat(this includes without a centrifuge). I would call up the company who has the honey and ask if they use a centrifuge to pack there honey, if they do its not raw.
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I would avoid having even raw honey as a staple of the diet. As an occasional food-item, it's fine and healthy, but that's all.
Since you live in the UK, I'm sorry to tell you that UK law allows honey to still be officially labelled "raw" as long as the honey has only been heated for a short time up to 80 degrees Celsius. I suspect that virtually all liquid honeys are not raw at all(indeed I was told by a beekeeper/honeyseller that one can't produce raw honey on an industrial scale, one has to do it manually which adds to the cost. At any rate, I tried several kinds of supposedly "raw" liquid honeys and got the same negative reaction I got from pasteurised honey products.
My solution was simple:- I only bought raw honeycomb as, as long as it was not in a jar, one can be 100% sure it hasn't been heated. I also bought only from local farmers/beekeepers as I feared that international regulations would force international sellers of honeycomb, such as in New Zealand, to heat the honey for no good reason.
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Am I also right in thinking that unheated honey will greatly increase the population of candida in the body, just as (I assume) heated honey would?
From personal observation I would say yes.
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Thanks for the replies guys. Much appreciated.
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I use a centrifuge at work and can attest that at somewhere around 5000 rpm's it doesn't noticeably heat what I'm spinning up. So unless these bee farmers have more powerful centrifuges than my chemical company, I wouldn't call centrifugation cooking.
Having said that, separating a food by spinning it down in a centrifuge might not be a good idea health wise. But it's not cooking.
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I tried several kinds of supposedly "raw" liquid honeys and got the same negative reaction I got from pasteurised honey products.
What is the negative reaction that you get?
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What is the negative reaction that you get?
Very difficult to describe. I got a deeply unpleasant feeling in my mouth as though I'd just taken in a toxin. My mouth became numb as well for a time. I also got very uncomfortable blood-sugar reactions as a result.
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As the weather is getting warmer, my son noticed something and showed me. The wax floats to the top of the honey on it's own. I don't know how, as our honey is thick honey. It does though, I've seen it. So, I wonder, do you NEED cold "pressed" honey? Or should you just allow it to separate somehow on its own? Prop the comb up, and let the honey eventually drip out. It may work this way too.
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I use a centrifuge at work and can attest that at somewhere around 5000 rpm's it doesn't noticeably heat what I'm spinning up. So unless these bee farmers have more powerful centrifuges than my chemical company, I wouldn't call centrifugation cooking.
The centrifuge heats it up to like ~100F this is high enough to deactivate over 200 compounds!
Heating up to 37°C causes loss of nearly 200 components, part of which are antibacterial. Heating up to 40°C destroys invertase, an important enzyme. Heating up to 50°C turns the honey into caramel (the most valuable honey sugars become analogous to sugar). Generally any larger temperature fluctuation (10°C is ideal for preservation of ripe honey) causes decay.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey
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I emailed the company selling the 'cold-pressed' honey. They replied with the following:
"The organic forest honey starts as virgin combs built inside a bark hive. The combs are cut out and pressed by the beekeeper (ie cold pressing)to separate the honey from the wax. This is a small scale operation done by each of the thousands of beekeepers. The honey from these separate beekeepers is gathered together and packed into drums which are exported. Once the honey gets here it is usually crystalised so we have heat it until it is melted, at about 42 -45C and can be strained to remove bits of wax etc. The honey is then packed into jars."
So it is indeed heated and I guess it can't be considered as raw?
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I don't think honey is supposed to be brought to over 92F if you still want the health properties, according to AV and my nose tends to agree with his honey experience.
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Any food heated above 40 degrees Celsius/104 degrees Fahrenheit cannot be considered raw, though some foods are of course more slowly affected than others by increasing heat. 92 degrees F, eh? Well, if so-called "cold-pressed " liquid honey is normally heated to 42 degrees centigrade, that explains why I could never handle liquid honeys, however "raw" they supposedly claimed to be.
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The problem with honey is hat it starts to cristalyse after some time, some types of honey more quickly than others. While this doesnt affect the nutricional properties of the honey, from a purelly comercially point of view it is much more difficult to sell. Consumers want liquid honey to spread on toasts and so on.
If the treated with heat, it becomes liquid again.
I doubt that it is possible to get unheated honey from large commercial beekepers,problably only from farmers and so on, that also produce some honey as a suplement to their activity.
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Haai,
What company did you get that response from?