Ad meah ve’esrim – until 120! With this bracha, we wish each other long life. It’s amazing to think that in a lifetime of 120 years, the average heart would beat 4,541,184,000 times and transport about 315,500,000 liters of blood throughout the body.

The heart is amazingly dependable – if we take care of it. Unfortunately, the typical American diet and lifestyle are not always conducive to heart health. Consider these sobering statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Every year in the U.S., about 715,000 Americans have a heart attack and 600,000 people die from heart disease. Heart disease accounts for one in four deaths in the U.S., making it the leading cause of death among men and women.

There are three fantastic reasons to eat some type of flax food every day: favorable types of fiber, good-quality fats, and a high concentration of unique, immune-boosting phyto-nutrients. Let me elaborate on why I am I so excited about this blue-flowered plant that grows best in the cool northern climates. Canada is the world’s leader in flax production, while North Dakota is where 96 percent of flax seeds are grown in the U.S.
Flax appeared on the North American continent over 400 years ago, but humans have been eating flax for thousands of years. Flax researcher Dr. Diane Morris writes

Walk into any supermarket today, and you will find a dazzling array of fruits from around the world, regardless of what grows in our own region and is in season. Back in the shtetl, things were not quite that way. Yet even when Eretz Yisrael was still a distant dream for most of Jewry, many of our grandparents and great-grandparents would eat bokser (Yiddish for carob) on Tu B’Shevat, along with other fruits when they were available. Fruits from among the special Seven Species of Eretz Yisrael – grapes, dates, figs, pomegranates, and olives – were especially prized. This 15th

The deeper spiritual meaning of the holiday notwithstanding, Purim is a day when we indulge the body with food and drink. Good nutrition may be the last thing on your mind as you prepare your shalach manos and Yom Tov seuda. Well, I’m here to tell you that Purim observance and healthy eating needn’t be mutually exclusive. You can “have your cake and eat it too” – literally! In fact, one of the unsung heroes of the day – no, not one of the characters in the Megilla – is a humble fruit commonly used in hamantaschen that is a

For many centuries, Jews have partaken of pomegranate seeds on Rosh Hashanah night, as one of the significant omens. “May our merits increase like the seeds of the pomegranate,” we say prior to enjoying the tart, crimson-colored seeds. (Just watch those white shirts and tablecloths – have you ever tried to get out a stain from pomegranate juice?)

  The question on everyone’s mind, of course, is, are there really 613 seeds in a pomegranate? It’s an intriguing folkloric notion, which stems perhaps from the well-known Talmudic statement that “even the empty ones among the Jews are full of mitzvos

Can I offer you a glezele tey (Yiddish for a little glass of tea)? In days gone by, tea was a way of life among Eastern European Jews. As Jewish food historian Rabbi Gil Marks writes in his Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, families would laugh and chat over glasses of tea, and rabbinic scholars would discuss points of law. Tea was so ingrained into the fabric of life that Eastern Europeans typically drank five to six cups per day, and frequently more.

  In the past few decades, nutritional science has been catching up to the innate wisdom of yesteryear’s