When most people think bees they think honey, but did you know that bee pollen is an incredibly nutrient dense food as well?
Not long ago, I visited a local bee farm in NSW to learn more about the health benefits of bee pollen and how we can incorporate it into our diets.
What I learned is that bee pollen is rich in:
- Carbohydrates, protein and B vitamins, making it a great energy booster
- Enzymes – it helps your body get all the nutrients you need from the food you eat, which helps to promote good digestion
- Antioxidants that protect the cells from the damaging oxidation of free radicals.
- Rutin – an antioxidant bioflavonoid that helps strengthen capillaries, blood vessels, assists with circulatory problems and corrects cholesterol levels
Photo courtesy of beepollenhub under Creative Commons. License.
One of the most interesting facts about bee pollen is that it cannot be synthesized in a laboratory. When researchers take away a bee’s pollen-filled comb and feed her man made pollen, the bee dies even though all the known nutrients are present in the lab-produced synthesized food. Many thousands of chemical analyses of bee pollen have been made with the very latest diagnostic equipment, but there are still some elements present in bee pollen that science cannot identify. The bees add some mysterious “extra” of their own. These unidentifiable elements may very well be the reason bee pollen works so spectacularly against so many diverse conditions of ill health.
The bees put a lot of work into gathering their pollen too. One teaspoon of pollen takes one bee one month to gather, working eight hours a day. Each bee pollen pellet contains over two million flower pollen grains and one teaspoonful contains over 2.5 billion grains of flower pollen.
Bee pollen comes in granule form and is taken at mealtimes. It works particularly well when taken with fruit because the fruit fibers (raw hemicellulose) reinforce the activity of the fresh pollen.
If you’d like to learn more about bee pollen, I invite you to check out this quick video I made for Healthy Me TV. I really think you’ll like the recipe I show you at the end for a winter salad incorporating bee pollen.
Give it a test run and let me know how you find it!
