People & Media...

I knew marrying a woman who was pursuing her PhD in the nutrition field spelled trouble for my late-night Waffle House runs. Nevertheless, I wisely overruled that notion emerging from my stomach and married her anyway. While I have learned many things from her since we got married, I have learned more about food and its nutritional value that makes me think twice about eating at greasy spoons.

These days, everyone is talking about food and nutrition, particularly how we can make our own healthy food and reduce our grocery bills. Who wants to get caught in the impending food crisis, right? We want to eat and eat well.

Well, Victoria Boutenko to the rescue in her book Green for Life. This Russian-born author takes a look at raw food, its nutritional value and how to implement it into our diets. This book has some great tips on how to do this--and how to make sure this raw green food still tastes good.

Here are some of her ideas on why flaxseed is important and tips on how to incorporate it into your diet:

"Flaxseed is a perfect addition to the human diet. Flaxseed is very high in both soluble fiber and insoluble fiber. It contains 26% fiber (14% soluble, 12% insoluble). Just 1/8 cup of flaxseed contains 6 grams of fiber.

"I recommend adding flaxseed to your diet regularly. Flaxseeds have a tougher outer coating and should be freshly ground in order to receive the most nutritional benefit. You can grind whole seeds with a coffee grinder or into a Vita Mix dry container. I recommend adding one or two tablespoons of ground flaxseeds to your salads, soups or smoothies. Flaxseed is also a good source of omega-3 fatty acids, and it is by far nature's richest source of plant lignin, an important anti-cancer phytonutrient.

"My family has been intuitively adding flaxseed to our meals every day either in the form of crackers or as flax meal. Igor has perfected a method of dehydrating flax crackers to such a degree that he knows how to make his crackers taste like pumpernickel, or sourdough toast, or everyone's favorite Russian caraway bread. If you learn to make crackers like Igor, you will never be lonely and you will have plenty of fiber, nature's sponge, in your diet."