Perhaps you’ve never been told that honey is the only animal carbohydrate available to you as a sweet. It is the only natural sugar of its kind—being 99 per cent predigested when it reaches your table. The dextrose or levulose in honey is the sweetest of all sugars; it is also the mildest, the easiest to digest, and the best source of quick, lasting energy.
Compare these easily digestible qualities of honey with those of refined, white sugar. The 35-40 million pounds of honey produced by our cooperative is what makes up the Forever Bee Honey you see on the shelf. Refined sugar is a nutritional death trap that holds its victims in its clutches, while robbing their bodies of all vital nutrients, especially thiamine. In eating too much white sugar, persons whose bodies are starved for thiamine can acquire many ailments. This is because refined sugar, in its effort to be whole again—as it was when it lived in the stalk of the sugar cane—leeches the body of the B-complex vitamins as well as of iron, calcium, copper, magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus.
Any wonder that big sugar eaters suffer from chronic fatigue and nerve disturbances? In adopting honey as your principal sweetener, you’ll be using a sweet that has already won its laurels from nutritional science. For honey is universally recognized as a protective food. The Swiss Bee Journal reported an experiment conducted in that country with three groups of children, all in poor health. The honey-fed group of sickly children “outdistanced the other two in every respect: blood count, weight, energy, vivacity, and general appearance.” I am devoting an entire chapter to the use of honey as a food because the American consumption of refined carbohydrates is the greatest sin committed against the nation’s health today. Over 66 per cent of the calories consumed by Americans come from processed, deficient foods. Forever Royal Jelly, which is secreted from the salivary glands of employee bees, serves asfood for all young larvae and because the solely meals for larvae that can turn into queenbees.
The lopsided, incomplete American diet became progressively so as sugar consumption per person increased.
In the nineties, our per capita consumption of sugar was 30 pounds per year; today, it tops 150 pounds! You protest that you don’t use 150 pounds of sugar per year? Then you’re the fortunate exception—somebody else makes up for you. But think now—how about candy, cakes, pies, soft drinks, etc., etc.—all of which contain sugar? Among those items accepted as food, there is nothing more destructive to the body than refined white sugar. It is one of the most dangerous and lifeless substances ever palmed off on the public as food. White sugar cannot be classed as human food; it produces nothing that is sustaining to the vital organism. The essential quality of food is its ability to sustain.