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The Healing Power of Pollen

Chapter One: Pollen - The Mysterious Nutrient

Pollen: ‘The fine granular or powdery substance produced by and discharged from the anther of a follower, constituting the male element destined for the fertilization of the ovules.’ – Oxford English Dictionary.

Even the dry dictionary definition of pollen conveys some of the mystery and wonder of the substance. But pollen as a food?

Yes, in the same way that wheat germ is now well known to be a valuable and nutritional source of the B vitamins, and vitamin E and is so rich in protein that half a cupful contains as much protein as there is in a quarter pound of beef, so pollen researchers are finding more and more precious food substances and micro-nutrients in the pollen grain.

Extensive medical trials in all parts of the world convince more and more hard-headed and orthodox doctors that the health, virility and vitality of the human body depends not just on the basic food ingredients – proteins, fats, carbohydrates, minerals, and vitamins – but also on minute quantities of biologically necessary elements many of which are found in pollen.

Pollen the Giver of Balance

There are certain parts of the world where people live extraordinary long lives. Although such areas are continents apart there is a strong thread linking those groups of people who have a reasonable expectation of being well and happy when well past their century.

They are well-balanced in every way. People of deep religious convictions, whether they be Mohammedans as are the Hunzas, Moslems and Russian Orthodox in the Caucasus and Roman Catholics in Ecuador. They eat little and they eat differently but the result is that they eat a balanced, natural but meager diet.

The degenerative diseases of western civilization are almost unknown. Hard work, exercise and their diet all contribute to a virtual absence of fat people. They have a real joy of living – singing songs, running races and fathering happy children.

Honey, rich with natural pollen, is widely used among such long-lived races and it is most likely that this is a crucial factor in the preservation and maintenance of health. The report of the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research of Milwaukee stated in 1963 that the composition and nutritional value of the collected pollen is so perfectly balanced that it represents a complete survival food by itself provided that it is extended by roughage and water. The bee-collected content of this diet would need only to be three to four per cent of the total weight.

Health and happiness are normal states of mankind. Evidence is mounting that, even though the effect may be like a rejuvenation, pollen simply restores balance and normality to many who have lost it for so long that they have forgotten what true health is really like. The extent of the evidence and the remarkable results of pollen supplementation in transforming for the better the lives of countless people is the subject of later chapters. First a few words about pollen itself.

Amazing Pollen

Although the word pollen means, in Latin, pine flour, there is no evidence to suppose that the ancient Romans or Greeks had a special word to describe pollen. Indeed, there is no record of its botanical use until 1523 and it was not in popular usage until the great Swedish botanist Karl Linné, known as Linnaeis, began using it in his descriptions of plants in 1751.

Yet more than 5,000 years ago the Assyrian priests were well aware of the dual sexuality of date palms so, to ensure large crops, they had a ritual of dusting pollen from the male date palms on to the inflorescences of female trees.

So – called primitive peoples knew also of the food value of pollen grains. The early natives of India and the Maoris of New Zealand made cat’s tail (Typha) pollen into cakes whilst the Apache and Pueblo Indians used cat’s tail (great reedmace) and maize pollens in their fertility rites. The Navaho Indians must have been well aware of the balancing properties of pollen because it was part of their ‘search for peace’.

Certainly, man must have unwittingly taken a lot of pollen in honey. It is only recently that honey has been strained so that much of the pollen is removed. Regrettably, many of the cheap honeys are not only finely filtered but also heat treated so that the natural and vital enzymes are destroyed turning honey from a healthy food into just another calorie laden sweetener.

The pollen grain has around it two protective and durable coats. The outer waxy exine is made of sporopollen, which is able to resist most acids and temperatures as high as 300° Centigrade. Beneath this is the fragile inner wall, the intine, which surrounds and protects the nuclei and the reserves of starch and oil.

The pollen grain is physically so indestructible that identifiable grains are found in the earliest geological strata from the time when, millions of years ago, plants first bore pollen grains.

Even the largest pollen grains are so minute that more that 14,000 of them would be needed to weigh a single gram or over 400,000 grains to one ounce. Small pollen grains such as that of the spruce tree weigh only 1/20th of this so that an ounce would require the staggering total of more than eight million pollen grains!

An idea of the vast numbers of pollen grains which must cover the earth since the first possible traces 300 million years ago can be pictured from the fact that the spruce forests of southern Sweden alone deposit 75,000 tons of pollen a year upon the surrounding countryside. This equivalent to 10-followed-by-twenty noughts grains of pollen!

There are wide variations in the size of a pollen grain ranging from, at the smallest end for plant like Myosotis, two microns across. That means that almost 13,000 would be required to be laid end to end to represent just one inch. One of the largest pollen grains, on the other hand, is that of Eelgrass. This measures no less that 2,550 microns long by 3.3 microns wide. It would take only ten of these to make up our inch.

The number of grains produced by a plant can be equally extreme ranging for Araucaria (a genus of conifers) which has a thousand million grains from a single male cone, to one maple floret which has but eight thousand.

Pollination

The act of transference of pollen from the anther to the stigma is called pollination, but the actual process of fertilization can take much longer. In some species the process takes less than a day and in others, such as Agathis, a year – and in Juniper fifteen months.

Sometimes, plants are able to pollinate themselves and when pollen is transferred from the anthers of one flower to the stigma of another of the same species it is called cross pollination which, like sexual reproduction in animals, keeps alive the vitality of the species. The pollen may be transferred, as in the case of the buttercup, by the action of insects or it may be carried on currents of air. The wind-pollination plants tend to have far more grains of pollen than do those that are insect-pollinated and it is when these wind-pollinated plants are shedding their pollen that attacks of hay fever occur.

The Composition of Pollen

Pollen is so complex that the time is not yet in sight when we will have a precise analysis of it. Indeed, there are certain to be differences between various plants, some of which have already been established. The two main analyses were done by the Lee Foundation and by the Swedes, Nielsen, Grommer and Luden in 1955.

There was also an important analysis by Vinino and Palmer of the University of Minnesota in 1944 but they lacked some of the sophisticated pieces of apparatus available to the more modern researchers.

Amino acids are the constituents of proteins – the muscle builders of our bodies. Table 1 in the Appendix shows the amino acids present in three different pollens and Table 2 the actual quantities of some of the more important amino acids present in four pollens one of which is sampled over successive years to show that there are seasonal variations but that these would not appear to be very large.

These tables are taken form the Swedish work that has already been mentioned as has Table 3, which show, by combining the original paper with some subsequent work, that important quantities of vitamins are also to be found in pollen.

In addition to the vitamins shown in the table other work has demonstrated the presence of pro-vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin B1 (thiamin), choline, vitamin C (ascorbic acid), vitamin K and rutin.

Many authorities believe that it is much more important to have a balanced and widely spread supplementation of vitamins than to take large quantities of a single one, except when there is a good fundamental vitamin supplementation when used in addition to normal healthy diet.

The minerals identified in pollen include sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, aluminum, iron, copper, zinc, manganese, lead, silica, phosphorus, chlorine and sulfur. Enzymes already discovered in pollen include amylase, catalase, cozymase, cytochrome systems, diaphorase, diastase, latic dehydrogenase, pectase, phosphatase, saccharase, and succinic dehydrogenase.

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