Honey – help with menopause symptoms

Are these a bit too familiar to you lately? Memory loss. Depleting energy. Creeping blood pressure.

If they are, you might be interested to know that Mother Nature has come to your rescue.

Honey. To me it really is the Elixir of the Menopause. It all started when I got hayfever in my late 40’s. Never had it before, and it was awful. My husband had read that local honey can help sufferers build up a resistance to the cause of it. So he didn’t just buy me some, he took up beekeeping! For him it is a fantastic hobby, but for me, I was able to kiss hayfever goodbye once and for all. But what I had not appreciated was that as I headed towards menopause I discovered its other valuable qualities:

• It’s the only food that contains ‘pinocembrin’ – an antioxidant associated with improved brain functioning. Apparently a daily teaspoon can boost post-menopausal women’s memory
• Its antioxidants have been linked to slightly lowering blood pressure
• It reduces total and ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol while significantly raising ‘good’ HDL cholesterol
• Studies have shown that honey can lower triglyceride levels (risk factor for heart disease and type 2 diabetes) particularly when used as a sugar replacement
• As an unprocessed sugar (fructose and glucose) it can deliver a quick boost of energy

Mother Nature has come to your rescue. She is an older woman after all!

As I started to become the other woman to my husband’s 500,000 ‘little ladies’, I thought I would try and understand them a bit more, and in particular about the honey they worked so hard to produce. My first amazing discovery was that the majority of bees are female. Imagine, a whole society predominantly of one sex working in harmony for the greater good (don’t believe DreamWork’s ‘Bee Movie’, it totally infuriates beekeepers). There are only a handful of males (drones) who have one purpose only, to mate with other queen bees (they die in the act too!).

My second and probably most amazing fact is that the average worker bee produces 1/12^th teaspoon of honey in her entire lifetime, and it takes an astonishing 1,100 bees visiting 4million flowers to make just 1kg of honey – breaks my heart and as a result I never, ever waste a drop of it.

Bees fly and forage a 3 mile radius from their hive, so if you are specifically looking for local honey as a hayfever cure you need it produced really close to where you live, so it’s important to understand exactly where the hives are, under 3 miles from you is bull’s eye.

Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, that’s enzymes, vitamins, minerals and water, plus its natural preservatives ensure it never goes off. Apparently some was found in Tutankhamun’s tomb and it was still edible!

If you do buy honey, do take care to check the ingredients. If it is natural honey, there is nothing whatsoever added, pure and simple. There are some pretty poor practices in place where companies add high fructose corn syrup, sweeteners and colouring so you are effectively buying something very different, and not healthy at all.

Enjoy!