Honey Power

The Sweet Ben­e­fits of Cold Packing

While in Tempe, AZ to cheer on my sis­ter as she com­pleted the Iron­man there Sun­day – so impressed with her – we stum­bled upon the farmer’s mar­ket. In addi­tion to dis­cov­er­ing some excel­lent, micro-roasted cof­fee from Car­tel Cof­fee Lab, we came across a guy and girl sell­ing honey. At first I thought it was just another fla­vored honey dis­play. How­ever, the cou­ple behind the dis­play of honey bot­tles began to explain how this was no ordi­nary honey. They did such a good job of explain­ing their prod­ucts that they con­vinced my wife and I that this was some­thing quite special.

What impressed us about the honey was learn­ing that when honey is heated over 120F degrees it breaks down into a sim­ple sugar. Fur­ther­more, all of the good enzymes are killed. As far as the body is con­cerned, you might as well be hav­ing table sugar at that point. To com­bat this prob­lem, Honey & Gold uses a process called cold-packing. Instead of heat­ing the honey to a high tem­per­a­ture (some­times 300F degrees), they keep the honey cool.  While it’s more labor­some, the results are a full-flavored, full-enzymatic honey with nat­ural insulin properties.

Endurance Ben­e­fits

As some­one with dreams of being an ultra­run­ner one day, I was espe­cially inter­ested when I heard that using a cold-packing process likely trans­lates into an increased ath­letic per­for­mance. Zack shared that stud­ies were done of long-living folks in Rus­sia and why they were liv­ing so long. It turned out that the bee-keepers who con­sumed raw honey each day were liv­ing the longest. This lead to more research and some inter­est­ing findings.

In an email Zack explained, “Honey is an ideal builder of glyco­gen stores because its sugar is com­posed of a 1:1 ratio of glu­cose to fruc­tose. The fruc­tose unlocks the proper enzymes in the liver to allow the glu­cose to store as glyco­gen. This can pro­foundly increase recov­ery time as well as pro­vide an ideal pre race fuel. Fur­ther­more there has been research done with ath­letes to ascer­tain if honey could be used as an ergogenic aid (ath­letic per­for­mance aid). The ath­letes who con­sumed pro­tein shakes with honey had more sta­ble blood sugar, glyco­gen restora­tion, faster recov­ery, and more sus­tained energy than the group who con­sumed sugar or mal­todex­trin with pro­tein shakes.” Some good food for thought indeed.

I did a lit­tle more research online and found that ath­letes dur­ing the ancient Olympics, ate spe­cial foods, such as honey and dried figs, to enhance their per­for­mance. Fur­ther expla­na­tion how honey is able to pro­vide a supe­rior car­bo­hy­drate source while main­tain­ing opti­mal blood sugar lev­els can be found here.

Q. & A. with Zack Funke of Honey & Gold

Back at my par­ents’ house a few days later we began sam­pling the honey on dif­fer­ent foods. The Avo­cado Honey (bees feast­ing on Avo­cado blos­soms, not honey with avo­cado!) is a very dark color and tastes like molasses. It is incred­i­bly good on toast, in cof­fee, and on oat­meal, grits, or the like. The other honey we bought was a Creamy Wild­flower. This honey is a light, creamy color and is good on just about any­thing. There were at least 15 more types of honey on dis­play at the mar­ket with all vari­a­tions of color from dark brown to gold to yel­low to cream.

Want­ing to learn more about the honey and com­pany, I asked Zack a few ques­tions via email. His responses follow.

RQ: How did you get into honey?

H&G: I ini­tially got into honey after exper­i­ment­ing with a dietary shift to pre­dom­i­nately raw foods for a period of about seven months in 2007 while liv­ing in San Fran­cisco. I expe­ri­enced a dra­matic increase in energy and clar­ity dur­ing this period and real­ized the vital impor­tance of intro­duc­ing highly enzy­matic food into my diet. Through­out this period I pri­mar­ily used raw agave syrup as a sweet­ener in smooth­ies and desserts. I found after pro­longed usage of agave (derived from the same cac­tus that is fer­mented into tequila) that I was hav­ing highs and lows in my energy.

After research­ing agave more I found that while it may not nec­es­sar­ily reg­is­ter a high glycemic response, the abnor­mally high fruc­tose con­tent can be tax­ing on the liver. This led to me to look into alter­na­tive sweet­en­ers for daily usage in my diet. Honey, being the most ancient sweet­ener, imme­di­ately piqued my inter­est. The ancient Egyp­tians used the sub­stance cer­e­mo­ni­ally and as a food and they seemed to have some things fig­ured out! Honey really is the most nutri­tious, min­eral rich, antiox­i­dant packed, enzy­mat­i­cally active, and reju­ve­nat­ing food in exis­tence. Unlike most sweet­en­ers it actu­ally dra­mat­i­cally enhances health rather than degrade it.

RQ: What makes Honey & Gold honey unique?

H&G: The unique aspect of my honey is that it is all hand packed and bot­tled with­out the use of cen­trifuges or heat. Many raw hon­eys on the mar­ket are heated to about 110–120 degrees to help facil­i­tate the bot­tling process as it makes the honey eas­ier to pour. While still a supe­rior prod­uct to com­mer­cial hon­eys on the mar­ket (many are heated to 300 degrees!) these hon­eys do lose some enzymes as well as known and unknown nutri­tional fac­tors. For instance, honey that is never heated above 94 degrees pos­sesses an insulin like sub­stance that can help restore insulin func­tion­ing and help rebuild pan­cre­atic func­tion. This very del­i­cate fac­tor is lost with even mild heat. Bees don’t con­sume honey that is heated to more than 94 degrees. Nei­ther should we!

RQ: What are your goals for the company?

H&G: My goal is to expand the cur­rent line of hand packed hon­eys to dif­fer­ent vari­etals. I want to work with bee keep­ers and restore this pack­ag­ing process. While costly and time con­sum­ing, I would like to have con­sumers able to con­sume truly raw honey that pos­sesses the true magic of the sub­stance. I also want to cre­ate infused hon­eys with raw wild-crafted spices and herbs.

Health foodie, which is the par­ent com­pany to honey and gold, will be releas­ing and pro­duc­ing foods that sat­isfy both gour­mands and health afi­ciona­dos. Truly gourmet food can be mind­fully cre­ated to enhance the health of our nation. The French seem to grasp this con­cept! Research has shown that many rich foods thought to be detri­men­tal to health, such as but­ter, cheese, and liver actu­ally con­tain vital fat sol­u­ble nutri­ents that are crit­i­cal to health. This has inspired me to sup­ply foods that delight the palate and nour­ish the body.

All of Honey & Gold’s hon­eys are organic. Zack works closely with the bee keep­ers to make sure the best qual­ity honey is sourced.

It will be inter­est­ing to watch as Honey & Gold and The Health Foodie grow and expand and deliver more prod­ucts. DM973UBY9AJ3

What do you think?