Documentation that showed that products labeled as 'honey' were (in a widespread fashion) cut with other sweeteners would be plenty enough to trigger a controversy.
(I am quite ready to believe there are cheaters, but if it is more or less industry practice, it should be easy enough to document it)
That's all about pollen being removed. The only point it talks about cutting honey with other sweeteners is when it mentions that packers independently decided to start testing their suppliers honey.
The guy (in the reddit comment) probably has a point about the filtering and heating (and more broadly, the sourcing and purity of the honey). Tossing it in there with some rabble about other sugars being added makes me wonder if his agenda is one that I would like.
I think you kinda have to put the pieces together. On one part it says:
"By the time the FDA said it realized the Chinese honey was tainted, Smuckers had sold 12,040 cases of individually packed honey to Ritz-Carlton Hotels and Sara Lee said it may have been used in a half-million loaves of bread that were on store shelves.
Eventually, some honey packers became worried about what they were pumping into the plastic bears and jars they were selling. They began using in-house or private labs to test for honey diluted with inexpensive high fructose corn syrup or 13 other illegal sweeteners or for the presence of illegal antibiotics. But even the most sophisticated of these tests would not pinpoint the geographic source of the honey."
And then in several other parts of the article it mentions the tainted Chinese honey that has the pollen footprint removed.
It doesn't come out explicitly to say "Chinese honey is tainted and diluted with artificial sweeteners." Because Chinese honey as pointed out in many parts of the article is run through ultra-filtration techniques to eliminate the only foolproof way of eliminating origin, which is the pollen footprint.
So, it could very well be that some of the honey with sweeteners comes from other places, and not from China. But there seems to be a strong link between Chinese practices and the tainted honey, as the article seems to allude to.
(I readily admit to babysitting this thread a bit)
Anyway, the paragraph just prior to the two you quote makes it pretty clear that the first paragraph you quote is specifically about antibiotics. And, repeating myself, the notion that packers are testing suppliers is not particularly an impeachment of the honey industry.
I replied to Anigbrowl because their reply was rather terse and this article is not the sort of smoking gun I talked about in my first post.
I replied to lilsunnybee because they imply that I was lazy in my reply, and I wasn't.
Vague allusions to the idea that Chinese honey is sketchy is hardly what I had in mind in my original post. That it doesn't come right out and say anything sort of suggests that they don't really have any documentation that it is happening.
(I am quite ready to believe there are cheaters, but if it is more or less industry practice, it should be easy enough to document it)