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Honey/bee product rich diet

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YogiBearMead726

NewBee
Registered Member
Aug 21, 2010
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San Francisco, CA
After reading some of Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers: The Secrects of Ancient Fermentation, I was intrigued by the section about bees. While I had known the some of the benefits of eating raw honey, I had no idea that consuming most of what the bees produce would produce such amazing healing properties. Apparently, Pliney the Elder documented several examples of people living to be 120+ years old, mostly beekeepers and those who consumed bee products regularly. This, to me, sounds a little too good to be true, but is worth checking out myself.

Just as a little experiment, I plan to up my intake of bee products (honey, propolis, bee pollen, and royal jelly) for the next six months to see if I feel any effects. I've already taken to eating a tablespoon of raw honey twice per day, and will be ordering the other stuff once my next paycheck arrives.

Has anyone else tried doing something like this? According to the book, honey and bee pollen are complete foods (as in, you could survive eating just that and water). That plus all the antimicrobial properties of honey, propolis, and royal jelly, seems to indicate some beneficial health properties.

Anywho, just thought I'd share some info and start up a discussion about it, since we as mead makers are so reliant on our friends the bees. Perhaps we should be a little more so in our diets as well?
 
Well I can tell you 100% for sure that honey is definitely not a complete food, actually it's probably almost as far from it as you could get (you'd be better off living off of bacon than honey), it's really just sugar. If someone tried to eat it and nothing else they'd be malnourished very quickly. Mix it with pollin would definitely improve it though.

I don't really know how much to trust this idea, but as a food suppliment it may work well, hard to say. Would be nice to get some modern takes on the subject.
 
I have heard that eating raw local honey decreases allergic sensitivities to the plants the honey's made from... (hay fever etc)
 
That is really the simplest way to put it, people have all kinds of crazy schemes to good diets, but the reality is just eat as much variety as possible and one will be fine. Don't always eat the same kind of leafy green, the same kind of bean, same kind of fruit, same kind of meat, same kind of grain... I've yet to strike a balance I like but I'm getting better.

We're realistically pretty hard to kill with food unless we take in too many calories for our lifestyle, too much sugar, bad fats, etc. People on this planet survive on some pretty extreme diets (not always for that long of course...).
 
Moderation in all things, including moderation. Now and then, one must have a complete chocolate bender or half a pizza.
 
I disagree that raw honey is basically just sugar. The sugars in honey are different from the sugar in white table sugar (fructose/glucose and sucrose, respectively). Thus, honey is easier for our body to digest, since the sugars are monosaccharides, requiring now special enzymes to digest (unlike sucrose).

On top of that, the mineral content (all necessary minerals for humans are present in raw honey, varying in quantity based on source), vitamin content (most all the necessary ones again), the enzymatic properties, all eight essential amino acids, and who knows what else, present in raw honey set it far above simple sugar.

Add in bee pollen, propolis, and royal jelly (and bee venom, if you want to be really like those ancient mead makers) and you've got something really good for you. The royal jelly alone extends the queen's life from the average six weeks to about 5 years.

And, if you factor in the fact that most mead back then was made by just tossing the whole hive in, angry bees and all, the larva and bees would provide a good deal of protein, on top of that found in the royal jelly.

Thus, if we consider that these proposed bee keepers from Briton were utilizing all of these things, both as food stuffs and as mead, it stands to reason they were pretty healthy.

That said, I do agree that other foods are vital for a healthy diet, I just wanted to examine the added benefit of utilizing all these things as a supplement to a normal diet/exercise routine. And just eating honey all day would probably not be very good either. ;)

Edit: The "ancients" also probably just drank the yeast along with the mead, adding even more vitamins and amino acids to their diets. This is why I bottle condition my beers, and save the slurry for a final vitamin shot, if you will. :)
 
Oh yeah, I wasn't trying to poo-poo honey or anything, just saying that it doesn't qualify as "complete" in my opinion - it does have lots of other stuff in it, but in nowhere near the amount needed to keep a human healthy/alive if trying to live on a honey only diet (to call a food "complete" to me it has to be something you could survive on indefinitely).

The pollin is great stuff, lots good for you in there, that's quite a bit more substantial than the honey for sure, the royal jelly is a bit of a mystery as I understand it though. I don't think anyone has really figured out what it does for humans yet (I could be wrong), obviously it's practically an immortality drug for bees though. It's got lots of nutrition in it, but the real question is that protein that triggers larvae to become queens, whether that does anything for humans at all.
 
I think some other cultures use the jelly for medicinal things, but I think you're right...what exactly it does to us is still a big mystery.

I figure it can't hurt to try it out and see if I feel a difference though. :)
 
Well not to poo-poo your efforts, but it's a very unscientific approach, ie. it can't answer any question really. You may feel better but you'll have no way to determine what made you feel better (or worse for that matter).
You have no control group and a sample size of one which is better known as an anecdote.
I guess this is why diets are so unproven. To show that you increased life expectancy, you would need a study over several hundred years with several hundred participants willing to test unproven diets. ;)
 
chams said:
Well not to poo-poo your efforts, but it's a very unscientific approach, ie. it can't answer any question really. You may feel better but you'll have no way to determine what made you feel better (or worse for that matter).
You have no control group and a sample size of one which is better known as an anecdote.
I guess this is why diets are so unproven. To show that you increased life expectancy, you would need a study over several hundred years with several hundred participants willing to test unproven diets. ;)
Click to expand...

I realize this won't be some scientific study, but it'll be something I just do for my own curiosity. All things constant, I want to see what, if anything, happens. :)

There are also quite a few studies referenced/cited in the aforementioned book. While I haven't looked at the citations at the end yet (still about halfway through), there seems to be quite a few in the bee section.
 
chams said:
Well not to poo-poo your efforts, but it's a very unscientific approach, ie. it can't answer any question really. You may feel better but you'll have no way to determine what made you feel better (or worse for that matter).
You have no control group and a sample size of one which is better known as an anecdote.
I guess this is why diets are so unproven. To show that you increased life expectancy, you would need a study over several hundred years with several hundred participants willing to test unproven diets. ;)
Click to expand...

That's what mice are good for... time passes 10 times faster for them :-D
And they're pretty good analogs for humans, believe it or not.
I just don't know if they'd be all too pleased at eating honey...
 
kudapucat said:
That's what mice are good for... time passes 10 times faster for them :-D
And they're pretty good analogs for humans, believe it or not.
I just don't know if they'd be all too pleased at eating honey...
Click to expand...

I don't see why one couldn't follow up a promising result with mice with a human study. Except for that several centuries thing... ;D

Perhaps soon we can digitally describe the human analogue and run some interesting tests! That's a lot of chemical reactions! ;)
 
kudapucat said:
That's what mice are good for... time passes 10 times faster for them :-D
And they're pretty good analogs for humans, believe it or not.
I just don't know if they'd be all too pleased at eating honey...
Click to expand...

I've had a lot of rodents over the years and I don't think any of them would turn up their noses at honey. Especially if the wild one that lived under my bed and got into my chocolate stash is any indication of potential for rodent sweet tooth...
 
"gooey" doesn't really calculate when you're a rodent... you've obviously never watched a hamster or rat go at something with peanut butter on it! :)

Plus once they discover something's sticky, they'll just lick the edges...
 
Chevette Girl said:
"gooey" doesn't really calculate when you're a rodent... you've obviously never watched a hamster or rat go at something with peanut butter on it! :)

Plus once they discover something's sticky, they'll just lick the edges...
Click to expand...

I see, no, I was a pretty reserved child. My rats only ever got fed dry foodstuffs. No outside the box human foods, barring a little bread. ;-)
 
YogiBearMead726 said:
After reading some of Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers: The Secrects of Ancient Fermentation, I was intrigued by the section about bees. While I had known the some of the benefits of eating raw honey, I had no idea that consuming most of what the bees produce would produce such amazing healing properties. Apparently, Pliney the Elder documented several examples of people living to be 120+ years old, mostly beekeepers and those who consumed bee products regularly...

Just as a little experiment, I plan to up my intake of bee products (honey, propolis, bee pollen, and royal jelly) for the next six months...

According to the book, honey and bee pollen are complete foods...
Click to expand...

How's your experiment with this going, Yogi? Do you notice health benefits?

I know Simon (a la The Shamanic Way of the Bee) survived on just honey and pollen for some 23(?) days and I know his mentor, Bridge, lived a good long while and died happily reclining under his hives...
 
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