Why Honey Is Not Vegan Or Necessary To Eat

Honey is actually not vegan or necessary to eat.

Most of us would have heard at one time or another that it’s some kind of wonder food. And it is. However, only for the bees.

We talk about honey in our video today.

Why Eating Honey Is Not Vegan And Healthy To Eat

When people think of honey (and we were just the same when we used to eat it before becoming vegan) they imagine large green pastures of grass and flowers where bees would fly around in the beautiful sunshine under a blue sky and collect nectar all day.

They would then return to the bee hive with their large sacks of nectar and turn it into honey ready for us humans to eat.

But this very simplistic and romanticized view is very far away from the actual reality.

The production of honey is a big industry and bees are treated like simple commodities just like many other animals are on our planet.

Let’s look at some examples of the kinds of cruelty that are inflicted upon bees:

• Queen bees can have their wings clipped so they cannot leave the nest.
• Queen bees are also often artificially impregnated with bee sperm (not with their consent of course).
• Queen bees can live for a number of years but often have their lives cut short by the bee keeper and are replaced by new queen bees.
• Some bee hives are even set on fire to kill all the bees before winter time comes so to reduced costs.
• The handling of bees to extract honey from their hives also causes bee deaths.
• Some commercial operations will also remove all the honey from a bee hive and in its place give the bees a cheap sugar substitute to eat instead.
• Bees are also transported all around the country which of course is completely unnatural and adds to their stress levels.

If someone asked us if honey was vegan we would say no it’s not because it exploits animals, unnecessarily interfering with their lives and causes their injury and death.

With all that said, now let’s look at some of the facts and health aspects of honey itself:

• Honey is 80% sugar – made up of basically fructose and glucose.
• It also contains trace amounts of nutrients like minerals, vitamins and some water, but offers very little if anything nutritional wise for human beings.
• It is acidic and averages around 3.9 on the Ph scale.
• Due to its makeup, it can cause blood sugar spikes just like refined table sugar can so this is something to definitely be avoided.
• It often contains high levels of chemicals such as fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides due to the bees foraging from plants that have been treated with these chemicals.
• It should never be given to young babies as it can cause food poisoning due to the potential for it to contain a certain type of bacteria that produce toxins in the baby’s gut if ingested.

So as you can see both animal welfare wise and health-wise there is no good reason for you to eat honey.

Instead of consuming it, which is actually made by bees for bee consumption and not human consumption, we would recommend you satisfying your sweet tooth by eating whole, sweet fruit.

Fruit is the perfect food for human beings and it contains a wealth of nutrients, including fiber, antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, fats (omega 3 and 6, protein and much, much more.

Eat your fruit, but leave honey for the bees!

What are your thoughts? Please post them below!

Resources for this article include:

http://www.peta.org/