A friend who is interested in increasing the omega 3 fatty acids in his diet just asked how I use flax. When I explained that I love to fortify my smoothies with flax, he asked me for my smoothie recipe. That’s a little difficult to explain because its not an exact science.
Basically its just a frozen fruit smoothie, and I put in a mix of fruit that taste good to me. My wife purchased a few smoothie glasses that fit our blender, so all I have to do is add my ingredients to the glass, put it on the blender, mix it up, and then take out my straw to drink it.
What fruit to use really is dependent on individual taste. I start with a 4-8 slices of banana (depending on their thickness), dump in some frozen blueberries & strawberries, add a container of yogurt, and a mix in a few table spoons of flax. After those ingredients are all in the glass, I fill it up with milk. If I want to sweeten the mix, I add a touch of locally produced honey (local honey should help with allergies).
That’s basically it. Not too tough and not an exact science. There really are a lot of variables that affect the taste of the smoothie, and a person can find a ton of healthy smoothie recipes through a quick internet search. And all you have to do is just add a little flax to make them even healthier.
I hate television commercials with a passion! I consider them a waste of my time because they seldom share any information of real value to me. Except in the instance of the Super Bowl, I’ve learned to set our DVR to record most every show I watch, enabling me to fast forward through commercials. The other day, I had to watch a show live, however, and must admit that one of the commercials was informative.
What caught my eye was a Shedd’s Spread Country Crock margerine commercial. Apparently, they have developed a product with higher omega 3 content. I took a quick gander at their website and learned that one serving of their Omega Plus spread provides the consumer with 1300 mg of the ALA omega 3 fatty acid. The site suggests this is 38% of an individuals ALA requirements. Good for them. Sounds like a step in the right direction.
I’m interested in learning more about how the omega 3’s in this product are higher, and hope to share more in the future. Who knows; maybe the information I learn will cause me to reconsider my opposition to commercials — but I doubt it.
Guess what folks–The 10 inch snow storm was another gift from God in more then one way. We have most of the flax planted, so now when it warms up it should all get a good start. Plus I had an opportunity to catch up on some reading.
Bottom Line has featured the Wilen Sisters. As Martin Edelson, publisher of Bottom Line, says Joan and Lydia Wilen are America’s most beloved health researchers. As they proclaim on CBS This Morning and NBC Today Show, there are natural remedies for arthritis-high blood pressure-gout-leg cramps -insomnia -cold feet and other complaints. Guess what — they also know that flaxseed has a list of good remedies. One we haven’t covered on this blog is menopause.
The Wilen Sisters believe flaxseed may be the most miraculous female food in history. Flax contains lignans which mimic hormones without the harmful side effects. Don’t want to forget those lignans can also help or prevent breast and colon cancer. Remember the only way we are going to get the health benefits out of that little seed, is to grind it and get it in your every day routine. A teaspoon is a start, but try to get at least 2 tablespoons. May everyday be better then the last.
But if you are still looking for ideas on how to increase flax in your kid’s diet, I’d suggest you consider making a “sprinkle” that your kids could add to their cereal. I found the following recipe in the Cincinatti Enquirer’s website.
Flax is good for your hair, skin, eyes, nails and, since it contains Omega-3s, your brain. This is delicious sprinkled on cereal instead of just plain sugar.
1 cup ground flaxseed (also called flaxseed meal)
3/4 cup raw/turbinado/natural sugar
Mix the two together. Store in fridge.
I think a couple comments are in order: First, I know there are “healthier” ways to eat flax, but sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to get more omega-3’s in your kid’s diet. Second, I’d caution people to remember that ground flax will go rancid within a couple weeks of grinding, so don’t make a month’s supply of the sprinkle. But overall, I think its another good on how to get your kids to eat some flax.
My grandfather use to eat bacon and eggs for breakfast every day, and was fit as a fiddle well into his 80s. I’d always site my grandfather’s “unhealthy” eating habits whenever someone would get on my case about my eating poor habits.
Thanks to Susan Allport, author of The Queen of Fats, I’m beginning to understand that my grandfather’s diet of bacon and eggs was probably healthy – but I was wrong to think it was a justification for my diet.
How can eating bacon and eggs be healthy? Well first, we have to keep in mind Allport’s argument that our diets need a balance between omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. Second, we need to understand that the foods we eat today have seen a drop in omega-3 fatty acids. Let me explain this second point further.
If we look to nature, we learn that omega-3 fatty acids are concentrated in grasses, while omega-6 fatty acids are highest in seeds. (Oddly, flax does not fit this pattern.) Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma makes this point as he describes why corn-fed beef (of modern farming practices) have higher levels of omega-6’s compared to the grass-fed beef (of days gone by).
The change from grass-fed to corn-fed beef is but one example of how omega-6 fatty acids have come to dominate our diet. As Allport explains in her interview with Acres Magazine, the increased consumption of vegetable oils in products like margarine, at the expense of real butter and lard, have led to high diets high in omega-6’s. That’s right contrary to popular belief, butter and lard are probably healthier for us than margarine. Allport explains thoroughly in her interview.
Eggs and bacon fit into this same category because pigs and chickens, when they were allowed to forage their food in the farmyard, ate diets higher in omega-3’s – passing along those benefits to humans. Today’s factory style agriculture, although more efficient, does not allow this to happen and our health is paying for it.
Allport and Pollan both describe these complexities of food more eloquently and in greater detail than I do, thus I hope you will read their writings. I intend to, and hopefully, someday I’ll learn more about how flax fits into this equation.
A few days ago, John posted about an interview with Susain Allport that he had found in the Acres USA magazine. John was impressed by the research she presented on how the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids in our diets affects our brain functions.
I was thrilled when Susan posted a comment to our blog, complete with a link to a video demonstrating this point. Since I consider the video too valuable to languish in the comments section of a post, I’ve embedded the link below.
What the video doesn’t demonstrate, but is explained in the Acres interview, is that the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids is actually the key. In other words, just adding some omega-3’s to our diets is not enough if we are still consuming an overabundance of omega-6’s.
As I watched the video and pondered this point, my mind wandered back to my days as a teacher. The imagry of students pounding down Mountain Dews and Cokes in the student lounge hit me hard. These soft drinks, laiden with omega-6 fatty acids from the corn-based sweatners, were most likely throwing their omega-3 to omega-6 ratios way out of wack. To think that these drinking habits might have had an impact on their ability to learn is frightening!
In sum, this research suggests we need a major effort to educate teachers, school administrators, and most importantly parents. I can only hope that this blog can play a small role in this effort.
There have been several comments and questions about how omega fats really work in our diets. It is pretty well known that omega 3, will retard, slow down or even prevent different types of cancer. Now it is also a known fact that too much omega 6 [trans fat] can be the culprit that causes heart disease, diabetes along with other health problems in our society today.
What really causes the whole mess is the ratio of how much we have in our daily diet. If we could gather all the data since 1980, when scientists found out omega 3 was an essential fat that our body needs for every cell of the body, it could have slowed down the margarines and the other butter substitutes which flooded our diets with omega 6.
In the past couple years there have been charts for every kind of food, how much 3 or 6 they contain. How much we have in our daily diet is up to the individual. We already know what to much omega 6 will do, now we have to use a diet that is about 60 percent omega 6, and 40 percent omega 3.
I ran a cross one of best articles ever written on omega 3 and omega6 in Acres usa magazine.
THE QUEEN OF FATS by SUSAN ALLPORT her web site www.susanallport.com. Hope you check it out , it really is spelled out so we can understand what these 2 fats really do . ol john wunder
My wife wanted to stop in at the local health food store the other day, so I wandered over to a section dedicated to omega-3 fatty acids while she did her shopping. There was an impressive mix of flax products on the shelf, and I picked up a nicely packaged bag of flax meal . What I found on its nutritional label was rather surprising.
I anticipated seeing a few non-flax ingredients on the list because I know freshly flax will go rancid within several weeks. Since this stuff had a shelf life of several months, I figured some other ingredients probably helped preserve it.
What I didn’t anticipate was that the ingredient list would remind me of that found on a package of store bought cake mix. There must have been twenty other ingredients listed there.
Now, I must admit that some of those ingredients were healthy, so I don’t want to leave you with the idea that this stuff is bad for you. It still provided lots of omega-3 fatty acids.
But I couldn’t help wonder how many people buy the flax meal without realizing that this other stuff is in there.
Could three blind mice lead people to better eyesight? That’s what The Gateway, the University of Alberta’s official student newspaper is reporting. After reminding their readers of that old nursery tale, the paper announced the findings of university professor Dr. Yves Sauve, who just completed a study on how omega-3 fatty acids affect age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in mice.
I must admit that I was more surprised that mice faced the possibility of blindness just like humans than I of the study’s claims that omega-3 fatty acids help fend off AMD. After all, American and Austrialian studies have previously presented similar findings tauting the benefits of omega-3’s in the fight against AMD. But its always nice to see more proof.
Besides offering support to these earlier studies, I would like to pass alogn a few points from the article.
First, the professor did not feed flax to his study group of mice; rather he gave them supplements of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which is the type of omega-3 fatty acid found in fish. Flax contains a different type called alpha-linolenic acid (LNA), which the human body has to convert into DHA. Some people would have us think we should only eat fish to get our omega-3 fatty acids, but then we would lose out on the benefits flax has to offer like the lignans. My recommendation is eat both.
Second, the professor recognizes that just eating flax isn’t good enough. Our whole diet must be healthier if we are going to receive the benefits of those omega-3’s. The Gateway quotes Professor Sauve saying:
“The problem is that if you are going to have a nice vinaigrette of DHA on the same day that you go to McDonald’s, you’ve screwed everything up, because the saturated fatty acids will prevent the production of DHA from linolenic acid [in the flax seed]. So it’s common sense. Don’t eat saturated fats. Eat flax seed,” he advised.
That’s right. Skip the Big Mac and have a fruit smoothy with flax in it. Your body will appreciate it.
Can flax make milk healthier? That’s what a group of Canadian farmers with the help of the Canadian government hope to find out.
According to the Daily Gleaner of New Brunswick, Canada:
On Friday, Tobique-Mactaquac Tory MP Mike Allen, on behalf of Agriculture and Agri-Food Minister Gerry Ritz, announced a grant of $1.1 million for research into flax as a supplement for dairy feed and ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on farms.
The grant is interesting to me for several reasons. First, no matter how you look at it, $1.1 million is a lot of money, and this sounds like research that can help both farmer and consumer. My guess is the research will help some entrepreneurial farmers create “omega-3 fortified milk” products for which they can be duly compensated and health conscious consumers can benefit by eating healthier foods .
Second, I’m impressed that the grant will also help farmers ”develop a greenhouse gas emissions calculator for farms.” This last goal may help address some of the concerns that have been expressed in recent years that farms and farm animals are more of an environmental threat than the automobiles we drive.
While I’m not sure what we can do about the greenhouse gases produced by cattle, I congratulate the Canadians for helping farmers look at house they can take better care of the environment. That is something we all should be doing.
