 Flaxseed is one of the original health foods, treasured for its healing properties throughout the Roman Empire, and one of the original medicines used by Hippocrates, Mahatma Gandhi himself was right when he said, quote, wherever flaxseeds become a regular food item among the people there will be better health, unquote. Dr. Andrew Weil, one of the more reputable alternative medicine physicians, says that if we can only make a single dietary change, it should be to add flaxseeds to our diet. Okay, but where do we find them and how should we eat them? Flaxseeds are almost always in the bulk section of any natural food store, and for about a dollar a pound, you've got like a two-month supply. There are brown ones and golden ones. They're the same nutritionally, so pick your favorite color, I guess. They come with nature's own finest packaging, a hard natural whole that keeps them fresh for up to a year in an airtight container. Unfortunately, nature's packaging is actually a little too good. If we eat flaxseeds whole, they're likely to pass right through us, come out the other end and not do us much good. So chew them really well or grind them up in a coffee or spice grinder, a mini food processor, or a good blender. After they're ground, store them in the refrigerator in the last few months. An easy way to get our daily intake is with a morning smoothie. Just put two tablespoons of flaxseeds in a blender, grind them to powder, throw in some frozen berries, maybe half a frozen banana, some soy milk or almond milk, any of the so-called motherless milks. Flaxseeds have this binding quality that makes for these thick, rich, kind of milkshake-y type smoothies. In fact, you can use ground flaxseed to replace eggs in baking. Just blend one tablespoon of ground flax with three tablespoons of water until it gets all kind of gooey for each egg in the recipe. And ground flax is better than the flaxseed oil. The seeds are little nutrition powerhouses, and we lose much of the nutrition when we just press out the oil. Not only are flaxseeds the richest source of lignins, they're a great source of iron, zinc, copper, calcium, protein, potassium, magnesium, folate, cybofiber, which can lower our cholesterol and triglycerides, even boron, a trace mineral important for optimum bone health. We don't get any of those, though, with just the flaxseed oil. Another example of the importance of eating whole plant foods. Flaxseeds are incredibly powerful at dampening the effects of estrogen. Eating just a single tablespoon of ground flaxseed a day extends the length of a woman's menstrual cycle. Not the menses itself, but the whole month-long cycle, by an average of about one day. So you have fewer periods throughout your life, which means less estrogen exposure and lower breast cancer risk. There's an interesting story behind this. We've known for a long time that young women who have frequent bladder infections were at an increased risk for breast cancer. Frequent bladder infections tied to breast cancer? It seems strange. It used to be a big mystery, but now we think that repeated antibiotic treatments for the bladder infections were probably wiping out all the good bacteria from the colon that take the lignins in our diet and turn them into these powerful anti-cancer compounds. So eating flax, the world's best source of lignins, may indeed help prevent breast cancer. It's good for men, too. Flax seeds were recently compared to a leading pharmacological treatment for enlarged prostates. The standard drug costs about $300 a year, versus only about $10 perhaps for daily flax. This new study found that they both work just as well as each other, but what about the side effects? Well, the drug can cause headaches, dizziness, diarrhea, and all sorts of abnormalities. Flax has some side effects, too, though. It improves our cholesterol and blood sugar, controls our blood pressure, and helps control hot flashes. That's not usually a big problem in sufferers of enlarged prostates.