Mona SharmaCelebrity nutritionist and wellness advocate

🌼 Wellness Isn’t Complicated: Nature Already Had the Answers

6 May 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:10

In this segment of the YouTube video, Mona Sharma and a co‑speaker discuss how the honey most consumers buy in grocery stores—typically sold in squeezable plastic bottles—is often pasteurized, a process that heats the honey to high temperatures for extended periods. This heat destroys many of honey’s natural enzymes and bioactive compounds, reducing its nutritional value. They explain that while all honey will eventually crystallize, raw, unpasteurized honey from diverse wildflowers may stay liquid longer, but crystallization is natural and not a sign of spoilage. The conversation then shifts to the broader issue of food sourcing: modern monocropping leads to large expanses of a single crop, making farms more vulnerable to pests and prompting increased pesticide use. Consequently, bee products derived from such environments may contain pesticide residues. The speakers urge listeners to seek raw, unpasteurized, pesticide‑free honey—preferably from sources that practice diverse, organic, or wild‑flower foraging—to ensure maximum health benefits.

Chapters

When you see the squeezy bottles of honey, like those aren't nutrient rich. So tell us a little bit about the differences between wild honey. I want people to know that when they go into the grocery store, it's not about just getting honey. It's not about just getting wild honey. And literally, you know, in the same way that I teach people how to shop for their food, quality matters, where your food comes from matters, whether it's organic matters.
So when you go to the grocery store and you get that squeezy honey, it's typically been pasteurized, which means it's heated for a very long time at such a high heat point that it kills a lot of the enzymes and nutri and the incredible compounds of honey that make it so healthy it doesn't crystallize. All honey will crystallize. So honey from certain flowers will stay liquidy longer, but all natural raw wild honey will crystallize at some point. And that's totally fine. You do really want to look for a raw, unpasteurized honey. That's really important. And then another thing that people don't consider, and I feel like this is a little bit of a misnomer, I think oftentimes people are looking for local honey. Today we have monocropping. When it's all one crop type, it's very vulnerable to pests, which means more pesticides are used. Make sure that the bee products you're using are pesticide free.