Healthy Facts about Honey

Honey is the best known apicultural product; it is a substance that the bees produce through a complicated process of absorbing nectar into their stomach where acid and albumen are added to the nectar to ferment the mixture while it's delivered to the beehive. Honey contains over 180 different nutritional ingredients including essential mineral that our body needs. Beekeeping to harvest honey goes back to ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece and is also mentioned in the Bible. Honey was considered sacred and was also used to pay taxes and debts back in the good old days. Besides all this, honey was used to draw and to paint. The proteins, essential minerals and vitamins contained in honey elevate our body’s energy level and are also known for its medicinal and therapeutic assets. 

Honey is a food that is easy to digest and that makes honey a great energy food, however, there is a caution. More than once I have come across warning stating that honey should NOT be given to children under the age of 12 months. So moms take heed, I have also never met anyone who claimed to have an allergy to honey. So let me just say that honey has been proven (by me) to do all of the wonderful things above, in my lift, especially the energy boost, but not for babies under 12 months, or those with food allergies the includes honey.

Honey consumed as food is important for the balance of the biological process that can lead to good health. This nectar from the bees contains glucose and fructose, which goes directly into the blood, becoming an energetic product. For a long time, I used honey as a natural sweetener in my coffee and as a medicine for minor burns because of its antibacterial properties. Eaten regularly honey can assist in the control of rheumatism and arthritis, and has even been known to prevent all types of respiratory illnesses and helps in the digestion. Honey is good for the skin and is an ingredient for some shampoos. It is used extensively in the cosmetic industry as well (creams, cleanness facemasks, and tonics) because of its astringent and softening abilities honey is good at hydrating the skin.

Eating honey will improve your quality of life since it stimulates and increases physical resistance to infection. Used regularly honey can act as a mild sedative, discouraging insomnia; and as mentioned, because of its antiseptic qualities helps with the healing. Nigerian doctors were able to cure serious wounds, burnings, and ulcers of the skin in 59 patients, using honey and nothing else. Skin injuries that were submitted previously too conventional treatment with antibiotics without any satisfying results; honey was applied on the infected skin. One week later, no microorganism appeared after a laboratory examination. Honey's bacterial agents, slightly acid, extremely viscous and absorbs water, cleaned the burn wounds, diminished their size and protected the patients from new infection. 

I have only been able to experience some of the healing health benefits of honey but here is a list of conditions honey is said to help. My hope is that you will be just as successful in your experimentation with his medicine from the bees. Honey has been indicated to prevent, control or cure the following illnesses:  Respiratory diseases, Cramps, Intestinal disturbances, Digestive disturbances, Throat irritation, Urinary irritation, Irritation of the eyes, Dental caries, Illnesses of the liver, Rheumatic pains, Physical Fatigue, Insomnia, Skin burn, and Stomach ulcer.

The flavor, aroma, and color of the honey differ according to its botanical origin, in accordance with the flowers from where the bee has collected the nectar to manufacture this nature produced food. The climate, humidity and even the altitude will affect the characteristics of the honey. That is why honey can range in color from dark brown to nearly colorless. The darker the color of the honey the stronger it is in minerals and proteins.

Light or dark honey seems to maintain all of its healing properties. I really can say that I have a honey color preference, the darker honey is the most intense in honey flavor and the sugar in honey generates fat on the body less that of processed sugar. 1 teaspoon or 5g of honey = 16,4kcal. Biologists looking into the amazing properties of this nature grown food say honey is the best source of carbohydrates and energy for athletes and adults.

Growing your own Food

Some Reasons To Grow Your Own Fruit and Vegetables

Not long ago I decided to join people returning to the old tradition of growing their own produce. Now based on the acres necessary and the suburban area I find myself living in I could never hope to accomplish what my southern relative once was able to do, namely, self-sufficiently producing all their own fruit and vegetables, even preserving some of their fruit crop with the process called canning so that even out of season fruits could sometime still be had. I decided to restrict my indoor/outdoor farming to a small mobile herb patch land. I plan to maintain an herb garden so that I can also enjoy certain herbs, all year round. Why is growing our own food becoming popular again, and why should you start your own food garden? Well here are a few things to think about.

Let's do this!

It's sometimes hard to believe that having your own vegetable patch or fruit garden was once commonplace but fell out of favor as the food industry grew more commercial and supermarkets began to take charge. More recently, however, more and more people (myself included) have started to explore growing their own produce again. So the following are some reasons why you might want to join us and even think about starting your own kitchen garden.

You can't beat the freshness

To me, fruits and vegetables always taste better when eaten as soon as possible after picking. You can't beat the freshness or all of the health benefits that come from fresh fruit. The fruit from supermarkets is often picked well before it is properly ripe, to extend shelf life, and this usually has an impact on flavor. Growing your own fruits and veggies lets you taste the freshest possible produce as it's meant to taste.

You can't beat the Quality

Commercially grown crops are often selected for their uniform appearance and high yields rather than for quality and taste. Growing your own produce lets you concentrate on the quality rather than the economic quantity.

What about the price?

A lot of supermarket fresh produce is incredibly overpriced, in spite of their advertising claims. Raising your own produce from a seed is about as inexpensive as you can get, even the small plants you buy at the nursery are likely to provide you with better food at a lower cost. With a lot of plants, you can use the seeds from one growing season to provide you with plants for the next in a self-sustaining cycle making you total cost only your time and effort to keep going.

Provenance

With chemical pesticides and GMO's (Genetically Modified Organisms), from genetically engineered food more and more people have concerns about how our food is produced. Growing your own vegetable patch means you know exactly where your food is from and how it was grown.

Expand your produce variety

Supermarkets tend to concentrate on only the most profitable and easy to sell fruits and vegetable even though there are literally thousands of different varieties of fruit and vegetables to choose from to grow in your garden. For as long as I can remember fruit from the supermarket has always been limited to a few select varieties of apple, for example, rather than the hundreds of traditional kinds that exist. You pick the varieties you like most when you grow your own herbs and produce, and experiment to find new ones you'll rarely see in the supermarket.

The only downside to all of the above is that it takes time and effort. I had to overcome the thought that I might not have the time to spare, and starting small with a few herb plants on my windowsill, my little herb farm has grown to a multi-mini-acres spread that laid end-to-end would extend almost to the end of my kitchen table. My plants are healthy and still growing. Growing your own produce can be easier than you think and give you a taste of reconnecting to the earth by growing your own lemons, peppers, apples or corn and like me; the experience just might be enough to hook you into growing your own food for life!