According to  foodsafetynews.com  which broke the story in the first place:

> The U.S. consumes about 400 million pounds of honey a year - about 1.3 pounds a person. About 35 percent is consumed in homes, restaurants and institutions. The remaining 65 percent is bought by industry for use in cereals, baked goods, sauces, beverages and hundreds of different processed foods.

> However, the USDA says U.S. beekeepers can only supply about a 48 percent of what's needed here.  The remaining 52 percent comes from 41 other countries.   

> - The U.S. imported 208 million pounds of honey over the past 18 months.

> - About 48 million pounds came from trusted and usually reliable suppliers in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Uruguay and Mexico.

> - Almost 60 percent of what was imported - 123 million pounds - came from Asian countries - traditional laundering points for Chinese honey. This included 45 million pounds from India alone.

Comment:  They said that 123 million pounds came from Asia, so something like 70% did NOT come from suspect sources. So from the top, he's got the percentage wrong. Further, if only 35% gets to the supermarket shelf, and even if 30% of that is bogus, that would make 90% of the supermarket honey sold NOT from suspect sources. However, most of the imported honey goes into manufacturing where quality is not an issue, which would push the percentage of good honey on the supermarket shelf high above 90%.

> Another favorite con among Chinese brokers was to mix sugar water, malt sweeteners, corn or rice syrup, jaggery, barley malt sweetener or other additives with a bit of actual honey.

Comment: The article mentions this as a "favorite con". Nowhere does it give a percentage of how often this is used, whereas Mercola claims that "More than 75 percent of the honey on American supermarket shelves is not honey at all, but rather an ultra-processed mixture of sugar-water, malt sweeteners, corn or rice syrup, jaggery, barley malt sweetener and other additives".  He has clearly lifted the exact wording from the article and prefaced it with the figure 75%, insinuating that 75% of the honey sold on the shelf contains these ingredients. This is an outright fabrication and deserves to be rejected outright, regardless of the actual percentage, which nobody knows.

PLB

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