Susan's Books and Gifts

After years of trying out home remedies, prescription drugs, and fad diets in our efforts to improve our health, isn’t it time we all learned the simple truth that “we are what we eat”? As a physician, I like to encourage my patients to take charge of their health by giving them choices based on science, not fads, and backed up by ongoing research. Flax represents one such option. Flax an old food source that is currently being rediscovered by scientists in the lab, by the medical community, and by nutritionists. As Jane Reinhardt-Martin explains in this book, choosing to add flax to your diet is one way to help improve your heart’s health, and it has benefits for fighting cancer, renal disease and other health problems as well. As Reinhardt-Martin makes clear, a big part—but by no means all— of the benefit from flax comes from its oil. In these “anti-fat” times, recommending the addition of a food that is high in oils may seem counterintuitive, but it’s not. The use of oils can actually be healthy. Monounsaturated cooking oils such as canola and olive oils have established their reputations as heart healthy alternatives to corn and other vegetable oils. Now research attention is being directed to grapeseed and flax oils to discover their benefits as well. And benefits there are. Flaxseed and its oils have been shown to help raise HDL-cholesterol (the “good” cholesterol) while lowering LDL-cholesterol. This is good news for your heart, and it can contribute to your healthy longevity. In this book, Reinhardt-Martin provides you with a solid grounding in the current state of research knowledge about the benefits of flax, but she doesn’t stop there. She knows that, for all our best intentions, most of us are unlikely to incorporate a new food in our daily diet unless we can do it conveniently, so she’s tracked down a host of sources where you can get the product. She also knows that we generally don’t make a particular food a regular part of our meals if we don’t know how to make it taste good. With that in mind, she has taken the trouble to put together some tempting recipes, all of which incorporate flaxseed. Think of them as “the proof in the pudding.”So read on, and remember you are learning to make better choices. Robert A. Flowers, M.D. Internal Medicine