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The Healing Power of Pollen

Chapter Eleven: Which Pollen and How to Take It

‘Remedies do cure without a Physician, but not a Physician without remedies.’ – Robert Wittie (1651)

Pollen preparations are formulated in a number of different ways and from many sorts of flower. The different manufactures have concentrated on different aspects of the virtues of pollen but all have found that there is a considerable overlap so that it is a matter of individual trial and error to find which pollen is best for you and your particular need – all will be good but some will be outstanding.

This chapter, then, is to give you some useful guidelines concerning pollens that I have personally tried. There are other good makes available in different parts of the world but I believe that most types available are described here. Let us begin with the simplest and most natural pollen of all.

Ortis Pure Plant Pollen

Adolf Horn the founder of Ortis, like so many other producers of honey and pollen products, began his business because of the wonderful results he had personally witnessed of therapy with bee-produced remedies.

His modern and attractive factory is set in a rural area, surrounded by lush green fields in the very highest part of Belgium not far from the borders of Luxembourg and Germany. He has worked on the benefits of pollen with Alin Caillas, a distinguished French scientist, and, like other pollen producers of repute, Adolf Horn personally examines and tests not only every sample but he also personally inspects the gathering areas and has scientific checks made upon the product to ensure that there are no unwanted additives.

The Ortis pollen is gathered by the bees themselves who, when entering their hives, go across a special pollen-trap which is harvested one or more times every day during the season. The pollen is then carefully examined to exclude any extraneous material, gently dried and sent to the Ortis factory where it is checked once more before being packed into sterile bottles.

Because pure natural pollen is less well absorbed than if the exine, or tough outer coat, has been removed or broken down, the doses for Ortis Pollenflor are much higher than for those pollens where the outer coat or exine has been removed.

So, with pure pollen such as Ortis Pollenflor the advice is:

Take a course of pollen between one and three times a year, preferably before the changes of the seasons in order to build up resistance.

It is best to take pollen on an empty stomach at least half an hour before a meal.

For adults, the normal dose is 20g (2-3oz) a day. The therapeutic dose is 32g (just over one ounce) a day.

A full course should last one month.

Pollen-B

Raymond Matthews is another person who has had long experience in business and yet finished up producing pollen preparations because of a deep conviction as to their efficacy.

Pollen-B’s tablets are made by unique ‘cold’ process of tableting which ensures that all the enzymes and other active ingredients reach the alimentary canal in their natural effective state.

Also incorporated in the process, is a coating made of entirely natural ingredients to preserve the freshness of the pollen. Many experiments have convinced Ray Matthews and his co-workers that there is an optimum dose for pollen prepared by his special process. This means that a smaller dose is very effective and a larger dose has no extra benefit. In fact, one tablet a day in a normal-sized person is about right for most purposes.

Of course, bigger animals need more pollen! They are now producing a bumper-sized pollen tablet because of the wonderful results produced in American racing stables through feeding race horses twenty-five or so pollen tablets a day. A tablet is now being specially produced to meet this requirement and is sure to catch on amongst the racing fraternity the world over.

In the USA Pollen-B is called Bee-pollen from England. There too it is enjoying wide favour amongst athletes and the old who need extra ‘lift’ from the 150mg of dry pollen that constitute the effective dose.

The Melbrosin Idea

During World War II Paul Urban, who was born in Sarajevo, and moved later to his present home in Austria, was a leading resistance fighter. His revolutionary instinct did not desert him after the war when, having had a good career in commerce and in journalism, he decided that the results from pollen preparations coupled with royal jelly were so remarkable that someone must really see why they worked and promote them so that the world could take advantage of their benefits.

The pollen preparations produced by Melbrosin are unique in that Paul Urban believes that it is not only vitally important for the bees to gather the pollen but that the results are far superior when the pollen is collected painstakingly from the combs by hand. This means that the yield is minute and the end product is unquestionably expensive.

Because of the lack of solubility of the outside coat of the pollen grain Paul Urban has devised a method whereby the pollen grains are fermented so that, without heat, all the active ingredients are released and then gently dried so as to leave them in perfect condition – quick to absorb.

Unfortunately, wild claims, usually of an aphrodisiac nature, were made in the early days of the introduction of royal jelly thus making the whole area of discussion full of prejudice. None the less the remarkable series of clinical trials organized and supported by Melbrosin and reported in detail elsewhere in this book leave no doubt as to the efficacy of the combination as devised by Paul Urban. His bees are in the wild and remote parts of Yugoslavia where they too are untouched by insecticides and the pollution of industrial society.

He has gone even further than most other producers by deciding through experimentation that some pollens are more effective for different purposes than others. He found that some pollens are particularly good for men and some for women. For the men he has two products, Melbrosia for Men and Melbrosia Executive which contains a substantially increased quantity of royal jelly. The women use Melbrosia PLD and many have found that this special mixture has improved their whole state of well being and, what is more, increased muscle tone so that the effect is that, for example, breasts become firmer and skin becomes smoother. This is just a natural result of a move towards normalization inherent in the effect of pollen supplementation.

In some countries the Melbrosin products are called by the name Florapoll. The research goes on as indeed it does in England with Pollen-B and in Sweden with our next subject, Cernelle.

Cernelle Pollen Products

All the previous pollens are bee-gathered. Cernelle have pioneered a technique of cultivating plants with specially good pollens and then harvesting the pollen with a sort of giant vacuum cleaner!

The fields where the flowers are grown are located, near their factory, in the Northwest corner of the country of Scania in southern Sweden. Most of the pollen is collected on the estate of Vegeholm, bounded to the north by the sea, to the east by forests and roads and on the south by shrub-edged rivers and streams. The district on the western boundary is a small community of private houses and gardens. The nearby pasture land acts as a wind break for the carefully supervised pollen fields preventing airborne insecticides drifting from more distant pastures. The prevailing winds in that part of Sweden come from the west and the northwest from the sea and are so clean and uncontaminated that they cannot affect the quality of the pollen from the organically-grown flowers free from insecticides and other poisonous substances.

In order to monitor the absence of contaminants they have a number of bee hives and use the bees as detectives. Bees that have been in contact with insecticide-contaminated pollen exhibit symptoms of sickness or even die and so if there is any inadvertent pollution of the pollen fields then they know at once.

The pollen used to make Pollitabs and Cernitin ™ is, twenty-six percent timothy, twenty-six percent maize, nineteen percent rye, six percent each of hazel, sallow, aspen and oxeye daisy and finally five percent pine pollen.

Gosta Carlsson, the founder of Cernelle, began to study pollen between 1940 and 1945. He came to the conclusion that the resistant sheath surrounding pollen prevented the efficient absoption of the pollen grain when it reached the digestive organs.

He therefore developed special methods in order to extract the contents. On the pollen grain itself there is a hila (a small germinal opening) covered by a membrane which can be dissolved with a solvent. It is then possible to force other solvents into the pollen grain itself and to wash out the contents. After this extraction, the mass is filtered separating the husks from the pollen extract which is then extremely pure.

After this extraction and filtration there is a micro-biological digestion allowing microbes to break down those substances which have high molecular weight and can cause side-effects or give rise to allergies if they remain in the extract.

Cernelle believe that this transformation of the high molecular proteins into ordinary amino acids is very beneficial. They produce a number of different extracts because, by choosing different solvents, it is possible to get many different types of products and this combined with a choice of raw material from specific flowers can affect the content of the finished product.

After the digestion the extract undergoes evaporation under high vacuum so that the solvents and moisture are completely eliminated without increasing the temperature over 35° C.

This is followed by spray drying, again under vacuum at very high speed so that in the end no changes are made in the chemical composition of the preparation, and standardized effectiveness and quality is achieved. Pollitabs and the stronger Pollitab Sport capsules (especially developed for athletes) are composed of a mixture of two specific extracts and are designed to provide the maximum result without any side-effects. They also produce a much more potent product called Cernilton which is used medically for cases where very strong pollen therapy is required. Yet all these substances are completely harmless in use.

One of the very interesting possibilities which is sure to be explored with great excitement in the future is the idea that interferon, that substance produced by human bodies which prevents the multiplication of virus cells, can be greatly stimulated by the active principles in pollen.

There are a number of different ways of preparing pollen, ranging from the whole natural pollen grain to the solvent extracted active principles. All have important merits, so if you are disappointed by the effect of a particular pollen for a specific condition that you feel could be helped by this valuable substance then do please try a different preparation.

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