Who Says Cactus Honey Powder is Honey!
I never knew what Cactus Honey Powder is until a few visitors wrote to Benefits of Honey asking about its benefits. A search on this white icing sugar-looking powder in the World Wide Web reveals it all.
Many seem to think that it’s a honey varietal from the flowers of cactus that’s been processed into powder form for the convenience of use -- 'just scoop and mix it into your coffee and tea like you would use sugar or creamer'. This honey powder is not sold here in Singapore, but many suppliers of honey products in the World Wide Web seem to be carrying this product. Claimed to be all natural, this honey powder is marketed as all natural, healthy to eat, and an excellent sugar replacement suitable for the
diabetic.
And it’s positioned as a brilliant ingredient for baking or drizzled on cereals, pancakes and waffles. However, I had all these questions in my mind: How can it be a product from the
bees
when even the lightest-coloured honey cannot be colourless or white? And even if it is really honey, what’s the process involved in making honey liquid into powder form? Are any health benefits compromised as a result processing?
 
Leading consumers to naturally think it’s a variety of honey,
the name “cactus honey” is a misnomer. Actually, cactus honey powder doesn’t come from the bees. It’s made from the juice of a Mexico-native cactus plant called Agave. Like maple syrup and
cane sugar;
its juice after filtering is heated to remove excess water. The liquid form is probably a lot better known – Agave syrup or Agave sweetener, which started to appear on the shelves of health food in the early 2000s. This plant-based sweetener is about 90% fructose, the
natural sweetener
found in most fruits. And more viscous than honey, Agave syrup is not as aggressive as
table sugar
in spiking our body blood sugar due to its
low-glycemic index.
Would I Eat Cactus Honey Powder?
When I sent out the above article to Benefits of Honey BuzZStop readers, I was asked if I would eat Cactus Honey Powder. Good question, as I think my stance on this product is really not clear in the article.
Out there, there is a dearth of information on the Cactus Honey Powder benefits and I have yet to find any research findings that advise against its consumption. Hence, I won’t reject this “honey powder” with whatever information I have now. In my opinion, it is like most highly processed sweeteners which are useful in enhancing the taste of the food we eat, but not in providing any good nutrition. My only annoyance with this product perhaps has to do with the way it’s named and claimed – “natural”, “honey”, “healthy”, which I could hardly make any association with the product.
Actually I am not against eating most foods, including table sugar and other artificial sweeteners (except chemical-laden ones, for instance
Sucrolose
and
Aspartame
), as long as they do not pose any serious harmful health damage when normally consumed. I am not a purist when it comes to sweeteners; I do occasionally eat ice-cream, enjoy chocolates and the sweet stuff like most ordinary women. When I am out of the house, we all know that most foods prepared and sold in the stalls are sweetened with sugar or corn syrup, and I can live with moderately buying and eating these foods. Nevertheless, everyone knows that everything, including honey, should not be taken excessively. When I am at home, I like to replace empty-calorie sugar with honey in my food and beverages. I use honey as a home remedy for quite a few ailments like cold, cough, sore throat and eat it before I sleep for general good health.
After finding out so much about what honey is, realising how incredibly intelligent this food is, and having personally experienced its health benefits, you just can’t help but insist that natural honey must be differentiated from other sweeteners. So, when there is a choice of picking up a sweetener amongst all the sweeteners in the shop, I would naturally choose honey.
Postings on "Cactus Honey Powder"
| Further to my thoughts posted above, I am reading confusing and conflicting reports about the Agave Sweeteners.
To date I cannot confirm that the Mexican Beekeepers are in fact now or traditionally putting their bees to work on the agave flowers.
However, I do read the word 'nectar' often enough in reports on the production of these products.
Suffice it to say, I am very suspicious of there emerging many ways to create and present the products of the agave plant.
The world is critically short of sweeteners now, and managing a population undergoing sugar withdrawal would not be an easy task, so be prepared for every contrivance available to humankind when it comes to keeping us sweetened up.
More Questions and questionable indications:
How much actually bee collected nectar would it take to make "honey" out of a beehive located near an agave plantation, when the bees were possibly also being supplementally fed on factory derived agave syrup? And how many combinations of bee collected honey with factory derived syrups could they invent?
Is the naturally occurring nectar in the flower (if in fact the agave does secrete nectar as many cactus varieties do)the one referred to when they speak of 'nectar' or is this word simply referring to the sweet juice that results from the conversion of the starch derived from the cactus leaves though mechanical and chemical means?
I suspect I was misguided by earlier reports I read that the Agave Products were from the flower. A small portion could well be, whether gathered by bees or simply by harvesting the whole plant when it was in flower.
One thing is certain, if ever there was a time suited to a maximum amount of cheating by food producers, it must be now. Food is in big demand, governmental controls are mostly aimed at protecting the food chain from outages, meaning there will be little quality control or policing of large producers, and there is so much confusing evidence about, the general public are simply not fully aware of the many tricks and naming games that are going on.
Dr. Fessenden sure did sum it up well, when he said, "Buy your honey from someone you trust!"
One writer said, "I don't know who to believe now!" This is so true for many of us. I prefer to stick with the time honoured ways, and there is none more ancient nor more revered than natural honey!
Cheers,
JohnS
John Smith, Australia
8 July 2010
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Your sentiments almost exactly match my own. I had no knowledge of the exact nature of that product, however, so thanks for the research you have done and for sharing your findings with the rest of us.
Natural honey from flowers and bees has yet to be powdered successfully, as I gather you fully understand. Honey attracts moisture from the air, which explains why it is not suited to making biscuits (cookies?)that need to remain dry and crisp, but is great for things like cake, which are meant to remain moist. Efforts to powder honey can create something of a product, none the less. However, once exposed to air, it will commence immediately to soften, adhere and go all sticky as it draws moisture in. Who knows but what someone will soon invent a way to remove this hygroscopic feature from honey, which would then release it for powdering. At what cost this would be to its quality would be a worry.
Good Luck to Powdered Cactus Sweetener! I too wish they would not further confuse the public about what is meant by the word HONEY. But as far as promoting health is concerned, perhaps they could be doing the world a favour. I am more concerned about the 90% Fructose you mentioned than any other aspect of the product. I believe (as per Mike McInnes) that fructose would be overdosed at that rate. However, if judiciously mixed with some form of natural glucose, it could be an acceptable sweetener, for the simple reason that the fructose is naturally produced. I do believe though, that as the cactus is a sun-loving plant, the cactus sweetener would possibly overstimulate the liver function and lead to burn-out.
To my notion, all these starch derived manufactured syrups are suspect, so would not suggest mixing with commercial glucose. All these modern syrups are derived through the use of chemically produced (+ electrolysis) hydrochloric acid. Herein lies their great shortcoming, in my opinion. All that 'rough' hydrochloric acid going into the liver, which is itself a source of hydrochloric acid cannot be good.
We have a product on the market here in Australia called "Powdered Honey." It is probably similar in many practical ways to the cactus product. However, it is a complete lie. Well, who can be sure, but 99% anyway! The ingredients label reads, "Maltodextrin, 100% Australian Honey."
For starters, if it were honey no ingredient label would be required. So with only two ingredients in it, the law specifies that the one with the highest percentage be put first. So I read it thus, "Maltodetrin 99%, Local honey, 1%." We have a factory in my city (and I worked there for 5 years), which produces maltodextrin (a low conversion syrup from wheat starch), and it is produced in both liquid and powdered form.
The powdered "honey" as described above, looks cheap beside a bottle of real honey, as the powder is fluffy and the bottle contains a lot of air, so it makes a very profitable product indeed to merchandise.
As desperately as I would like to see everyone using honey, there is simply not enough to go around, and it would take such massive lead times and special emphasis to produce adequate honey, I am glad other natural sugars are entering the market. Cane sugar itself is starting to look like a "health food" when compared to this HFCS. A paradigm shift to honey (by the masses) would be catastrophic unless we had fifty years in which to effect it. Even then, it would require the banning of most pesticides and all sorts of major changes in food production, to the extent that mankind as we know him would probably starve to death before the changeover was complete. Pandemic will probably resolve the overpopulation problem first.
Only yesterday I was photographing a lovely flower of the Prickly Pear Cactus. It fed my bees beautifully last year, and this first flower is giving me hope for survival this season. Unfortunately no major crop has come my way from this source, although in earlier times straight line cactus honey was produced. In Arizona, USA, we once produced small crops off the flowering cacti. Just what the specific nature of this honey might be in the medicinal sense is not known to me. All honey is good honey, however, ............. with which I believe you will agree.
John Smith, Australia
3 Nov 2009
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End of "Who Says Cactus Honey Powder is Honey!" Back to "Use Natural Sweetener Honey for Healthy Immunity System".
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