Honey Safety Hazards and Public Health

Abstract

Honey is the oldest natural food produced by honeybee and comprises wide variety of valuable ingredients including carbohydrate, proteins, minerals, vitamins, organic acids, polyphenols and flavonoids that contribute to well-known therapeutic properties. This review provide available scientific information on different ways of honey adulteration and chemical contamination with the certain focus on the variety of methods for analyzing the residue levels in honey samples. For data collection, different scientific databases including Science Direct, Springer, PubMed and Magiran were searched. Honey such as other food products at risked to various types of contaminations and adulterations. Microbial and chemical hazards have been reported in various honey samples all over the world. Therefore, its use without knowing the source and its safety may be significant health risks. Honey labeling according to qualitative analysis is very necessary confirmed that health care. Health officials in all countries have to introduce firm regulation and laws that control and regulate honey production, handling, and analysis to ascertain its safety. Obviously, investigation of sensitivity of methods in order to detect the chemical residue levels for preventing the disruptive impacts on consumer’s health is momentous and all reasonable efforts should be taken for having adequate control over honey production and standardizing the maximum residue levels of chemicals to minimize possible contaminations.