Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Health Risks of Royal Jelly

Bees create Royal Jelly from their salivary glands in order to feed the young bee larvae. In essence, you could consider royal jelly to be bee vomit. They continue to feed this jelly to the larve that develop into queens in hopes this will make her healthier, grow bigger and live a longer life.

Royal Jelly retailers claim that it will increase your energy and vitality and help reduce the symptoms of arthritis, multiple sclerosis, baldness, decreased libido, menopause, osteoporosis, heart disease, high cholesterol, and decreased muscle and skin tone.

Royal Jelly is also claimed to be able to treat asthma, depressed immune system, insomnia, fatigue, ulcers, and a bunch of other digestive and skin disorders. You can buy it at pretty much any health food store and at about a thousand places on the internet. It is true that there are a lot of antioxidants and nutrients found in royal jelly, but the same can be said about many different foods on the market.

Not only can royal jelly be expensive, but there is no scientific evidence to back up any health claims the royal jelly advocates tell you in their advertisements. There is only evidence to show that it can actually be dangerous, even fatal if taken by some people. There have been reports of people developing hives, asthma, and even going into anaphylactic shock after ingesting royal jelly. If you are allergic to ragweed, dandelions, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, bees, or honey make sure to stay away from royal jelly as you have a very high chance of going into anaphylactic shock when you consume it.

Use much caution when deciding to feed royal jelly to your children, you may not be aware of what allergies they may or may not have. The risks definetly outweight any possible benefits that could be gained by taking it

Personally, I have never felt that royal jelly should be part of the human diet. It is something that was created and designed by bees to feed their young, it was never meant to be human food. The consumption of royal jelly is against the proper course of nature because we are taking the food of another species for our own selfish benefits when greater benefits can easily be obtained by simply eating food meant for our own bodies.

Just because royal jelly makes a queen bee live longer, it doesn't mean it will do the same for us. First of all, the anatomy of a bee compared to a human is completley different. You cannot say that because something helps a bee it will help a human. We cannot live in harmony with nature when we consume things that were never meant for us.

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1 Comment:

FlanMaster said...

I've often thought this about honey in general. While honey is made from flower nectar, the bees suck it up into their body then regurgitate it into a wax pod and fan it with their wings until it thickens. It's bound to have some insect parts in it from the process.