Flaxseed - The Best Way to Buy It & Eat It
Flaxseed has great levels of omega-3 for an improved diet. The thing is, there is more than one way to buy it and more than one way to eat it. There is one BEST way to buy it and one BEST way to eat it.
Flaxseed is available for purchase as either the whole seed or already ground up.
Once flaxseed is ground up, it starts to lose its potency. After it’s ground, it needs to be refrigerated and used within a few days. So it needs to be purchased as the whole seed.
Secondly, you can purchase whole flaxseed as roasted or unroasted (also known as “raw”). When flaxseed is roasted, it forms carcinogenic acrylamides as they cook. Roasting decreases the protein content and creates more ash. As the flaxseeds roast, some of the amino acids are destroyed and the levels of calcium, iron, and selenium are lowered, too.
So, you need to purchase the whole flaxseed as raw seeds. Aldi recently started selling raw flaxseed again after selling only roasted whole seeds for a few years. I emailed them and asked many other people to appeal to them to start selling raw whole flaxseed again!
If you eat the flaxseed whole, it will likely pass through you whole and you won’t get the benefit from eating it.
Therefore, you need to grind it yourself and eat it all ground up!
I use a coffee bean grinder to grind the flaxseeds. Then I store the ground up seed in a sealed container in the refrigerator.
Check out this coffee bean grinder or this one.
To eat the ground up raw flaxseed, you can add 1 tablespoon to a 16 ounce smoothie or add 1 tablespoon to oatmeal. I like it on overnight oats. (Click here to see a recipe for overnight oats!)