If you look around the web at the many sites promoting bee products, you’ll see many references to royal jelly and -
- hormonal regulation
- skin care
- fertility
As such it might erroneously be considered to be a ‘woman’s health supplement’, whereas it can be equally beneficial for men. I recently spoke with the owner of a nutritional store specializing in energy and training products. Their product range included body-building supplements, products to boost testosterone, energy enhancement supplements etc. Their customer base was around 70% male and their best selling products were aimed at building muscle and losing fat. Quite surprisingly, the store had just begun selling a royal jelly and bee pollen blend, and the feedback was that it sold well, but mostly to women. I think this is simply a perception born from online marketing, which seems to pitch the products mostly towards women. Those of us in the know realize that bee pollen has been taken by athletes (men and women) for centuries and that royal jelly is taken to promote energy, something required by both men and women!
If you look at the list above, men seem to confuse the meaning of ‘hormonal regulation’ and think it to be something specific to the females of the species. Likewise with fertility.
So royal jelly can be a very useful supplement to men, as can bee pollen, propolis and honey. It might not be something the body building crowd would flock toward, but both products are high in amino acids, which seems to be the key ingredient in training and body building supplements.
It’s also worth mentioning that in the training world, the dosages of powdered supplements tends to be much higher. Many of the amino acid supplements suggest dosages upwards of 10,000mg daily. With bee products, the dosages tend to be much lower, but generally there’s no reasons why people cannot take higher dosages, assuming they’ve become accustomed to taking the products without any negative affects.
People do buy pollen powder and consume it by the teaspoon or more (5,000mg+) but generally not royal jelly or propolis, why is that?
The simple point is that bee products may be just as beneficial to men as they are to women, there’s nothing but vitamins, minerals and amino acids etc in these products, so they should be equally beneficial to men and women alike.
Archive for February 23, 2012
Royal Jelly for Men
Royal Jelly Capsules
I’ve covered this here and there, but the subject cropped up again recently via an email from a customer. What’s actually in royal jelly capsules and is it fresh liquid royal jelly?
There are 4 types of capsules / tablets on the market.
Solid Bee Cap – termed a caplet or tablet
These bee caps are hard tablets and are made from pressed royal jelly powder along with a non nutritive compound to facilitate the forming and shaping of the caplet. The powder which forms the active ingredient is the same powder found in royal jelly capsules.
Royal Jelly Capsules
These are the most common types of packaged vitamin you’ll find. The capsules are generally made from gelatin, which is derived from animal products, usually bovine. Some manufacturers use a natural vegetable gelatin (we do) which includes non nutritive substances like vegetable cellulose and vegetable staeric acid. These sound like chemicals but they are plant based and are used in the capsule shells and/or as excipients in the capsulating process.
These royal jelly capsules are generally white in appearance (the shell is semi translucent and you’re seeing the white powder withing) or sometimes the capsules can be color-died to give them more of a pharmaceutical look.
The gelatin shell is a two-piece shell which can usually be pulled apart easily and the contents removed. With our royal jelly and Total Bee Plus capsules we suggest to people who have trouble swallowing pills to just pull the capsules apart and empty the contents into a cold drink. They’re not completely water soluble but mostly so.
Soft Gel Royal Jelly Capsules
Here we start with a little controversy. Many people who buy soft gel caps believe they’re actually buying fresh liquid royal jelly inside a capsule. Most manufacturers who make their caps this way do little to point out the fact that this is incorrect. The royal jelly contained within most soft gel caps has usually been freeze dried then reconstituted with a solution for encapsulation. So it might look like fresh liquid royal jelly but it’s important to understand that it has been freeze dried.
Liquid Royal Jelly in a Capsule
Some manufacturers do package liquid royal jelly in a capsule but it’s generally combined with other substances to help preserve it. These can be natural preservatives and/or chemical preservatives. Oddly enough the liquid royal jelly has most likely been pasteurized prior to capsulation, so the process doesn’t really fit in with the end product. It’s being sold as being somehow beneficial but it’s actually a damaged product due to the heat processes involved. Also, when you package your royal jelly in this way it cannot be concentrated. So generally the liquid caps you’ll encounter contain only around 150mg of active ingredient, where the freeze-dried caps contain 1000mg or more.
So these are the most common types of royal jelly caps. We favor the second option, using freeze dried powders in the 2-piece veggie cap shell. The powder is never heated, it’s had only its water content removed, and the cap is not an animal based product. You can see our royal jelly caps here
Lastly, there are 2 common capsule sizes used in the vitamin supplement industry. The size O and size OO. Using the smaller size O cap we can get up to 1000mg of concentrated powder (3:1) and using the larger size OO cap, which we use for our Total Bee Plus, we can get 1250 mg of active ingredient from a combination of concentrated and non concentrated powders.
Royal Jelly and Diabetes
I came across and article a few days ago with a title something along the lines of
“Fighting Deadly Diabetes With Royal Jelly“.
There’s a lot inferred in that short title, so let’s dig into the facts surrounding royal jelly and diabetes. Firstly, there aren’t that many facts to look at since very little research has been conducted into this substances affect (if any) on diabetes.
It seems to start with China, where royal jelly has been used to combat diabetes and to keep regulate blood sugar levels. That is at least what it is taken for, though we can’t say with confidence that it is ‘effective for’.
Clinically, which is more of what we’re interested in, it has shown to reduce blood sugar levels in lab animals. According to the article I referred to at the start, “Royal Jelly effectively decreases hypoglycemia, metabolic and hyperglycemia”. It goes on to speculate that diabetes is actually caused by the lack of the hormone “insulin” and that certain compounds (Chromium and Sulphur were named) are “like” insulin and therefor help the body to protect itself from diabetes.
These articles are written not be researchers or medical professionals but most commonly by people who write articles for a living on a wide range of different subjects. The web is rife with such nonsense, written by people entirely unqualified to be let loose with an opinion.
Now I’m not saying that all of what you read online about the benefits of royal jelly, bee products etc, is erroneous, just that you need to be careful with what you read, starting with ‘where you read it’.
What perplexed me regarding this particular article is that the writer crossed the line “The most important thing is that Royal Jelly is free from side effects” – that’s the type of irresponsible statement which can get people sick, and really drags down the industry as a whole. If you’re going to employ these cheap article writers at least have the diligence to check their work and make sure they’re not getting into areas which are completely false and could cause people harm.
Royal jelly can be a beneficial component within an all around healthy approach to diet and nutrition. Sure, it has certain vitamins, minerals and amino acids which have proven beneficial in many areas of nutritional health, and sure, it might well contribute in some ways to managing blood sugar and working alongside other lifestyle components to prevent the onset of diseases like diabetes. But as publishers, let’s be safe and responsible about what we publish online. As readers, I recommend that you do your research only at reputable websites like this one. If you’re looking to start a more in-depth exploration into the benefits of royal jelly, then WIKI is a good place to start, along with this page here.
Understanding Bee Products and Other Vitamin Supplements.
After being in the vitamin supplement business for almost 14 years, I’ve come to believe that there are still many misconceptions surrounding their use. In a nutshell, people misunderstand their uses and benefits and take them for the wrong reasons.
The main focus on my business has narrowed over the years to concentrate on products from the beehive – royal jelly, bee pollen, propolis and honey. When I started this business in 1999 my focus was actually on generic herbal products like American Ginseng, St. John’s Wort and Ginkgo Biloba. Through an affiliation with a company in Green Bay WI called ‘Ancient Herbs’, I was introduced to the world of vitamin supplements and natural herbal remedies.
For a while my business concentrated on standard herbs, I sold American Ginseng produced in the fields of Northern Wisconsin and worked closely with the supplier to understand the importance of raw ingredient quality and the integrity of the manufacturing process.
After a year or so I was introduced to bee products by an associate based in Canada. His company at the time specialized in a royal jelly / bee pollen product and had a very small buy loyal customer base. I learned a good deal about these bee products and began using them in my own nutrition regimen.
Being in the industry I had the impetus to research the products and obtain only those which I knew were being well made.
This is one area which I believe many user of nutritional supplements fail to understand. They’re not all created equal. We tend to be sold on packaging, price and the marketing blurb we encounter on the manufacturers website, yet we rarely look beyond the packaging and investigate how these products are made and where they originate from.
I don’t claim this to be the case with everyone. I know from some of the comments we receive at our website that people do take the time to do their research into the benefits of royal jelly and other bee products. It’s interesting that nowadays when you search for a product you tend to find the Wiki sites listed high in the search results, so oftentimes your first encounter with a product can be from a very informative and factual resource like WikiPedia.
Yet when I look at our site stats I see that most of the searched performed on bee products are not related to people looking for manufacturing information, they’re people looking for specific benefits or they’re from people looking to purchase.
For example, one way our website is commonly found online is by people typing “benefit of royal jelly” or perhaps “health benefit of royal jelly”. And whilst it’s normal for people to want to focus on the benefits and what’s in it for them, we see very few people using searches like “how is royal jelly made”.
The last two search terms would indicate an interest in understanding the processes involved rather than simply looking for the benefits. The point I’m making is that the process combined with the raw materials will ultimately determine the benefits which the product might deliver. [here's a link to benefits of royal jelly]
In simple terms, it’s possible to take two bottles of any supplement with seemingly identical ingredients, yet for one of the products to be effective and the other not so.
But how can this be?
If you realize where bee products come from and the state they are in when collected you can imagine how the subsequent handling and processing of the products can effect their quality and integrity. The substances are fresh and raw and contain moisture / liquid / water. They can spoil quickly. Different processes are used to try and ‘lock them down’ not all of which are concerned with preserving the nutritional integrity of the products. Bee products are amongst the most difficult to handle, at all stages of the collection process. If you think about something like American Ginseng, which is a root, it has far less potential for abuse by the manufacturing company than something like propolis. Making bee caps from moisture laden ingredients requires special skills, special equipment and very strict handling processes. One of the ways in which royal jelly and bee pollen are converted from the substances we find in the beehive into usable capsules with a shelf-life, is via a process termed ‘lyophilization’. Also known as ‘freeze drying’ this process sees cold air passed over the liquid to remove moisture. But a quicker and more convenient way would be to use hot air, and some people do. But what does that do to the nutritional quality of the product?
Propolis also has a very complex procedure for converting it from the sticky resin that’s removed from the beehive, into something which can be ingested safely. A common process involves the use of food grade alcohol to extract the active ingredient of propolis and discard the debris which is found within the raw propolis.
This video has some useful information into the different types of bee products and how they’re used -
Understanding how royal jelly is made, how propolis is extracted, what is ‘potentiated bee pollen’ and how honey is commonly pasteurized, will give the end user an understanding of what to look for when buying a product that actually can deliver the benefits one might expect.
So you might say there should be two stages to the research. The first is to understand and learn about the potential benefits. This might involve using searches like ‘royal jelly fertility’, ‘royal jelly for skin’ etc, the second stage should be to find suppliers who can demonstrate how their products are made and how the ingredients are processed. That’s generally not too easy, but it is possible if you know the right questions to ask.
Mailing List / Newsletter for Weight Loss Facts and Information
Hey!
We’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback from subscribers to our ‘weight loss’ news series, so I thought I’d drop a quick post here with a link to the subscription page – natural weight loss newsletter (It’s right at the end of the page)
If you’re not familiar with how these things work, basically you just drop your email into the signup form on the page above and we filter news for you pertaining to the specific subject, in this case, ‘natural weight loss’. We send articles and information to you via email and the weight loss series covers information on bee pollen, royal jelly and their use as weight loss supplements. As many of you are aware, bee products are taken for a wide range of uses and benefits, and one which seems to bring a good deal of positive feedback is in the use of weight control and loss.
So pop your name into our news list using the above link and we’ll send you very occasional information, and you can use our ‘safe unsubscribe’ link at any time.
For access to more info quickly, try our information page on the benefits of royal jelly, bee pollen and propolis. And for an all-round product which contains all of the above, don’t forget to take a look at our Total Bee Plus here
Lower than Wholesale pricing on four or more. Suggested Retail $39.95