You may have noticed that flax seed has been hitting the market shelves lately. Many products are using it as an ingredient as they jump on the healthy and super-foods bandwagon. Last year more than 250 foods containing flax were put on the market. Nutritionally, flax is a great source of omega-3 without the possibility of mercury contamination like you may have with fish. One thing about it is that the seed has to be ground to be nutritionally available to the body as the whole seeds can't really be digested well. Flax is also a great source of dietary fiber.

Just yesterday I tried some pocket bread that had ground flax seed in it and the slightly nutty taste vastly improved what I normally think of as a boring bread. Expect to see more flax laced foods than ever before as many companies start adding it to their line ups. Jamba Juice will have it in smoothies, breads of all kinds will have it, and it's even making it to the snack aisle in tortilla chips. Just remember that flax seed should be eaten in moderation with no more than 1-2 tablespoons a day. More than that and the oils and fiber can be a bit more effective on cleansing the digestive system than one would like.

There are two things I have been trying like the Dickens to change about my diet: 1) drinking more water, and 2) eating food with more fiber. The water part is hard for me because I don't like how plain water tastes (yes, water does have a taste, you know), and I have an unholy addiction to Diet Coke and energy drinks.

The fiber part is even harder. I love fresh fruits and vegetables, but that's not the issue. The issue is my lifestyle. I don't just have a full-time job. I have the fullest-time job possible, I blog, and I live alone. This combination makes it near impossible to cook proper meals that include fresh produce and grains with fiber. For a while, I was taking fiber supplements in the form of, you know, those "drink" things, but that stopped as soon as I realized how bloated I was getting from it.

FiberOne is a candidate in my quest for quick sources of fiber. FiberOne is a line from cereal and food company General Mills that has a few products, all focusing on high fiber. The basic cereal looks like any other fiber cereal - little "noodles" or "branches" - that definitely look too healthy to enjoy. General Mills has expanded the line with two more family friendly cereals, meaning that in the bowl, they look a lot less clinical.

I tried FiberOne Raisn Bran Clusters, which is FiberOne's entrant in the raisin bran cereal playing field, which is dominated by Kellog's Raisin Bran. However, if the marketing on the cereal box is accurate, FiberOne beats all other raisin brans with 40% of the recommended daily intake of fiber. Supposedly, that makes FiberOne's Raisin Bran Clusters the leader.

Are you a regular drinker? Let me rephrase that. Are you a "regular" drinker?

Here's a drink from The Food Monkey, which I found in Boston Now, a new free daily in the Hub. Sort of like Metro, but with better content. This drink combines booze with something you might not have thought of adding to your cocktail.

I've done an extensive survey of all of the information about weight loss that you can find on the shelves of Border's and Barnes & Noble, and here are the results.

It seems as if the best way to lose weight and get in shape is a combo of the following: eating a lot of carbs, eating a lot of fat, cutting carbs out completely, drinking a lot of water, not eating any "white" foods at night like bread, rice, and pasta, eating just grapefruit, eating your meals in a mixed-up fashion (lunch for dinner, breakfast for lunch, etc), not eating after 8pm, eating a lot of soups, cutting out all candy, cakes, and processed foods, avoiding diet drinks, eating a Subway sub a couple of times a week, eating foods according to your blood type, eating foods according to color, eating a lot of fiber, training your brain to think like a thin person, eating like they do in France, eating like they do in China, not counting calories, making sure you count calories, taking vitamins and supplements, become a vegan, eating more meat, eat a lot of apples, eating only raw foods, and joining one of the weight loss organizations such as Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig.

If you follow the above rules, you should get in shape very quickly. You're welcome.

A new study gives a good reason for young women to switch to whole grain bread and to generally increase the amount of whole grains in their diets. Conducted at the University of Leeds, the study showed that women who ate at least 30 grams of fiber each day cut their breast cancer risk by half.

The average fiber intake in the UK is 12 grams per day for adults and 15 g per day in the US. Since the results of the study suggest that benefits will not occur when women eat less than 20g per day, it is worth noting that there are a couple of easy ways to eat more fiber. A medium apple, for example, has 4g of fiber. An artichoke, cooked, has 4.5 grams. Beans vary in their fiber content, but tend to have around 16gper cup. 1/2 cup of corn has 5g. There are many other vegetables and fruits that provide low calorie ways to add fiber to the diet, as well.

The benefits of eating more fiber could be overridden by other factors, including weight, but a generally healthy lifestyle that includes the recommended amount of fiber should decrease the risk enough to make dietary changes worth the effort for young women.

Not all appetite suppressants come in pill form. After all, food itself is an appetite suppressant. The trick is not to used hamburgers and macaroni and cheese, but to opt for more filling and less fattening alternatives. Fortunately, it is actually easy to incorporate some of these filling foods into your regular diet without totally changing the way you eat and without giving in to temptation too often.

Registered dietitians recommend high fiber, low fat foods as the best ways to fill up without filling out. Some top choices are:

• Pine nuts -- fatty acids in pine nuts trigger the release cholecystokinin (CKK), a hormone that could help suppress appetite.
• Spicy foods -- can boost your metabolism and "dull your taste buds so you're apt to eat less." On the positive side, the spices will taste great even if whatever you're tempted to eat after doesn't.
• Apples -- high fiber, low calorie. They have more fiber per bite than other fruits and one before a meal can help speed satiety.
• Milk -- the research is still up in the air, but some scientists think that the calcium in dairy can help break down fat.
• Light greens -- cabbage, celery and lettuce (as well as cucumbers) are very low in calories and can be added to most meals or salads to bulk them up.

A study done by the USDA has shown that increasing the amount of whole grains in your diet can have multiple health benefits, including lowering the blood pressure of individuals who have slightly elevated cholesterol. The participants went on a controlled diet for a few weeks, then the refined carbohydrates they ate were all replaced with whole grains that had both soluble and insoluble fiber (barley, whole wheat and brown rice). Some diets had an equal amount of the two types of fiber, while others had more insoluble fiber. The blood pressure for all the study participants decreased on the whole grain diets, though women did better on the diet higher in soluble fiber (more barley).

One other interesting result of the study was that once whole grains were added to the diets from the controlled baseline diet, the number of calories that study participants also increased. Even so, they lost an average of 1 kg each (2.2 lbs) during the several-week program.

I know that there were more than a few people who found the labels "good source of whole grains" and "excellent source of whole gains" to be confusing and that the FDA has been working on developing a better definition of the term for some time now. The FDA has worked out a new system of classification based on the number of grams of whole grains in a food and has eliminated any good/excellent designations. The new labels are an eye-catching black and gold and clearly state the number of grams of whole grains per serving, as well as the recommended daily amount of 48grams, as suggested by MyPyramid. This eliminates any guess work - though it does call for a little bit of math - on the part of the consumer.

Products must be authorized to use the stamp, getting approval from the FDA or the UDSA, depending on what type of food the item is, since the two groups regulate different commodities. The USDA covers meat, dairy and eggs and the stamp is approved for use on those products, as well as the grains and other foods that the FDA regulates, if they contain whole grains.

So far, more than 800 products are approved. You can see a full list here or, of course, keep an eye out for the labels while you shop.

The interesting thing about LightFull Smoothies is that they're designed to be filling, while other smoothie drinks are usually designed to deliver a few servings of fruit, or a richer alternative to juice - not to fill you up. As a result, you can drink an ordinary smoothie, still be hungry, and oftentimes, worse off than before because of all the sugar. This is not likely to happen with LightFull. All of the smoothies are made with natural ingredients. They are sweetened with fruit purees and a tiny amount of sugar, as well as other natural sweeteners like erythritol, which is naturally found in grapes, pears, melons. Each smoothie has 6 grams of protein and 5 or 6 grams of fiber, which is at least 20% of your recommended daily intake. They also only have 90-100 calories each, and almost no fat (0-1g, depending on flavor), so you can indulge in each delicious flavor without any guilt - just the fact that you're doing something good for your body that happens to taste better than you expected.

Cafe Latte - Two thumbs up!

• Nicole: This was my favorite flavor. It had a very smooth, creamy coffee taste that was slightly sweet and had none of the bitterness that coffee-flavored drinks often have. I had to drink it slowly, though, because it was much more filling than any blended coffee drink I can remember.
• Sarah: Of the four flavors, I liked this one the most as well, but that might also be a personal bias toward all things coffee.

Fiber is often cited as being a crucial part of a healthy diet. "Fiber" refers to carbohydrates that cannot be digested and comes primarily from plant sources. A high fiber diet can help lower cholesterol, prevent heart disease and manage weight. Fiber reduces the risk of developing many digestive disorders and diabetes. Fiber is found in foods such as oatmeal, nuts, legumes, apples, blueberries, whole grains, brown rice, barley, zucchini celery and tomatoes.

It seems that many people, though they know that fiber is important, do not know precisely why. In a study last month done by the National Fiber Council (NFC), half of respondents could identify that fiber could help lower cholesterol, but 19%believed that it contributed to strong bones and 10% thought that fiber could improve vision. Neither of the latter is true, but this shows that fiber is a misunderstood part of the diet. Most study participants did not know how much fiber they should be consuming daily (32 grams or more, according to the NFC), nor did they know what types of food fiber could be found in. Foods like berries, nuts and whole grain breads were frequently listed as not being a significant source of dietary fiber, while more than half of all the respondents in the study said that steak was a good source of fiber. In reality, meat is very low in fiber.

On a less serious note, the participants were also asked what celebrities looked as though they consumed a high fiber diet. 34% of people said that Oprah looks most like she has a high fiber diet, followed by Brad Pitt at 21%.

A healthy lunch can be one of the hardest meals to achieve because most people eat lunch out. Most restaurants offer potato chips, French fries or other fattening sides with their lunch offerings, even if the main dishes are fairly healthy, not to mention that the portion sizes will most likely be larger than anything you would prepare yourself. The best thing you can do to make sure you have a healthy lunch is to bring one from home.

A home-packed lunch can include the same sandwich and chips that you could have purchased, but with you controlling the portion sizes. If you find that you either don’t have time to prepare a lunch or forget to do so on a regular basis, make sure to pack up some dinner leftovers in small containers to bring in to the office with you.

Here are som tips for a healthier, sandwich-including lunch: