Peter cited:
>The popular idea that whereas white sugar is bad for
>health, honey is good, and whereas white sugar injures
>the teeth, honey does not, is quite erroneous.. Honey
>is a product of nectar from flowers which has been acted
>on by formic acid from a beers organism, and is relatively
>poor in minerals in comparison with the acid-forming
>tendency of its high sugar content, being a much more
>mineral-poor, acid-forming and decalcifying sweetening
>agent then unfiltered maple syrup: The writer has known
>of cases where misguided persons, giving up sugar, commenced
>to use honey liberally, believing that since it was a
>"natural"sweet, it was good for them, and could be eaten
>freely, even excessively, without ill effects.

I have some comments here.
First, I'd like to say that honey is indeed a natural food but
it is questionable whether it should be used as a sweetener.
It certainly was not used this way in evolution. If you had
good luck in old stone age you found a honey comb and ate it
just like you found it by chewing it and spitting out the wax.
You certainly did    n o t    extract the honey (how?) and
smeared it on a piece of bread (non-existent at that time).

Second, the mineral and sugar composition is nothing we can
call "bad" because each natural food is complete and perfect
just as nature provides it.

Third, if you use any product "excessively" you will come into
problems. So excessive use has nothing to do with honey.

>The result
>was that their teeth became decalcified even at a faster
>rats than when they used white sugar, which., knowing that
>it was bad, they would tend to use more sparingly.

If you leave the path of eating your foods as you found them
in nature, i.e. instinctively, you always need your mind to
artifically control your intake. In nature your intake of honey
would be restricted by your body. If you eat honey in the
comb you soon will notice that you cannot overeat it provided
it is natural quality, i.e. not heated, not from sugar-fed bees,
etc. The so called instinctive stop of honey in the comb is
so hard in my experience that overeating is impossible. The stop
of extracted honey (in the jar) is much weaker by the way. There-
fore I prefer honey in the comb.

>Use of honey by vegetarians is an anomaly, since honey is
>an animal food in the true sense of the word, just as cow's
>milk is. The cow eats grass and from it produces a mannary
>secretion called milk. The bee takes nectar from a flower
>and by adding to it formic acid produced by glands of its body
>this formic acid being a sort of "insect milk" forms the
>product known an honey. In addition to formic acid, honey
>contains manite acid, which interacts with protein, forming
>alcohol, ammonia and carbonic acid. Thus honey introduces
>three acids into the body - formic, manite and carbonic.
>This produces acid fermentation in the stomach, leading in
>some casts to milder or severer nervous intoxication and
>systemic poison. The old Norse, by soaking malt grain in
>solution of honey, made an alcoholic beverage named "nyod
>(mead ).

There's no use in discussing acids, minerals, vitamins and
other contents of natural foods. Like I said above, each
natural food is perfect and is not intended to harm its
eater. But if you find a way to overeat it you have to face
the consequences.

>Many honeys are toxic due to bees going to flowers with toxic
>elements In their nectar. This is especially true when bees
>are in the vicinity of trees or plants that have been sprayed
>with poisonous insecticides.

That's a problem generated by humans and has nothing to do with
honey.

>Combined with starches, the sugar of honey sets up
>fermentation and Gas production.

Maybe one shouldn't each such nonsense-combinations then.
But don't blame the honey. Why not blame the starches?

>There are several excellent substitutes for honey and cane
>sugar which Have been imported from the Near East. One of
>these is carob or St. John's bread. This is a long, dry
>fruit which is available in powdered form or, as a thick
>syrup resembling molasses.  In either case there is present
>levulose, or fruit sugar, in combination with an abundance
>of alkaline minerals. This is one of the finest sweeting agents,
>since it is sufficiently rich in minerals to prevent its
>highly digestible fruit sugar content from having any
>acid-forming or decalcifying effect.

Carob is an excellent natural food too. But carob isn't honey
and if I need honey I probably can't replace it by carob. Each
natural food is a unique combination of sugar, vitamins, proteins,
etc.

>Another sweetening agent now available is Grape Nectar and
>Butter Imported from Turkey. These are made entirely from
>the juice of organically grown Turkish grapes, which has
>been concentrated down to a syrup or a butter consistency.

This is not a natural food then since it has been concentrated
(and probably heated and denatured).

>These products supply pure grape sugar, one of the best of
>all sugars, in combination with iron and alkaline minerals,

Come on, there is no "good sugar" and "bad sugar". There's only
natural nutrition and non-natural nutrition.

>CAUTION
>
>Don't feed honey to infants under one year of age, cautions the
>Centers for Disease Control. Honey can carry bacterial botulism
>spores that germinate in a baby's immature intestine, colonize,
>and make a deadly toxin.

This is typical for people who don't live natural and have pro-
blems if they introduce the slightest amount of natural foods
into their otherwise unnatural diet.
I'm sure that a baby on raw foods will enjoy natural honey (in
the comb) if it has a need for it and there will be no problem
at all.
But maybe the raw youngster instinctively avoid honey, who knows?
Has anybody stories about that?

Instinctive greetings,

Stefan