Benefits of Chia Seeds: Five Reasons to Incorporate them Into Your Diet

Chia seeds are a super food that can provide many benefits to those who consume them on a regular basis. In fact, the peoples of South America (where chia seeds originate) have known the benefits of consuming chia seeds for hundreds of years, and they were even a staple in Mayan and Aztec diets. Today, they draw the attention of many health food junkies due to the benefits they can provide, as well as the various ways in which they can be used in cooking. While there are numerous benefits of consuming chia seeds, here are the top five reasons to eat them.

1. Great Source of Fiber: Consuming the proper amount of fiber is vital to one’s health, as fiber is associated with lowering cholesterol and regulating bowel function. Chia seeds are an excellent source of fiber, containing 10 grams in only 2 tablespoons, which is about one-third of the recommended daily fiber intake. Eating chia is thusly an easy way to incorporate more fiber into your diet.
2. Rich in Omega-3 Fatty Acids: Chia seeds are rich in unsaturated fats, especially omega-3 fatty acids. In fact, chia seeds are one of the richest plant based sources of omega-3s. Why is consuming omega-3 fatty acids important? Consuming these unsaturated fats can help to reduce cholesterol and can even help to enhance cognitive function.
3. Chia Seeds are Filling: Eating chia seeds helps one to feel full and satisfied after a meal. This helps to cut down on cravings and snacking in between meals. This can help with weight management, and can help to improve one’s overall health as it helps to prevent overindulging in unnecessary food.
4. They are Full of Minerals and Nutrients: Two tablespoons of chia seeds contains roughly 18 percent of the daily recommended intake of calcium, 24 percent for magnesium, and roughly fifty percent of the daily recommended intake of manganese. These nutrients can help to prevent high blood pressure (hypertension), and can help you to maintain a healthy weight by improving your metabolism.
5. Chia Seeds Help with Blood Sugar Regulation: Chia seeds can help those with diabetes by helping to regulate the insulin levels in their body. They do this by helping to decrease abnormally high levels of insulin in the blood.

Chia seeds truly are a super food that can provide many benefits to those who incorporate them into their diet. Contact us to find out about more of the amazing benefits of consuming chia seeds, as well as to find out ways you can incorporate them into your diet.

Help Whales Without Even Having to Put Down Your Gourmet Chips and Dips

You’ve probably wanted to do more to help whales, but maybe you found it difficult to find something you could do with your mouth full of gourmet chips and dips. Eating Whale Tail Tortilla chips is a good start, and the Whale Song Project at Scientific American will be like music to your ears, which is a lucky thing because your mouth is full and it couldn’t hear anyway.
All you have to do is visit Whale FM. They have more than 15,000 recordings of Killer Whales and Pilot Whales. You listen to a clip at the top of the page and look at a visual image of the pitch changes. Then, you click to match it with one of the samples listed at the bottom of the page.
For conservation purposes, it’s important for scientists to learn more about why and when animals make certain sounds. There is growing evidence that the increase in noise made by human activities is harming marine life. Findings from crowd sourced studies can help promote better regulations on activities like oil and gas exploration.
All this may even help you with getting a good job. You’ve probably seen headlines about robots replacing people at some companies. As it turns out, projects like this prove that humans are a lot better than robots at making visual comparisons. And we probably select better snack foods. Take that robots.
While you’re at it, fill in any pesky gaps on your resume by saying you worked with scientists to study whale communications and throw in fancy terms like spectrogram. Before you know it the interviewer will be asking you when you can start and wanting to know if you’re available so they can introduce you to their single friends.
Whale Tail Tortilla Chips makes healthy snacking and helping the environment taste so good. Contact us to try all three flavors.

Watching the Whales Go 'Round

Whale watching season is underway in San Diego! Each year, 20,000 eastern gray whales embark on the world's longest mammal migration, a 10,000 mile round trip from their summer home in the Bering Sea to their Baja California calving and mating grounds.
From late December through mid-April, naturists from the Birch Aquarium, home of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, and proud vendors of Whale Tails Tortilla Chips, invite the public to join them on daily excursions to locate the magnificent gray whales. Ocean experts are on board to answer your questions about marine life as they point out not only whales, but seals, dolphins and sea lions.
On the Scripps blog, whale watching coordinator Audrey Evens calls the migration a parade:

...our passengers and naturalists observed gray whale mating behavior, females traveling with calves, breaching (leaping with much of the body out of the water) and spyhopping (raising the head above water to peek around).

and Birch Aquarium naturist Elizabeth Argyle explains the gray whales' diving pattern:

During their approximate 5,000-mile southward journey, gray whales demonstrate a unique behavior of 3-5 surface dives followed by a single deeper dive known as a sounding dive. Following each subsequent shallow dive, the whale surfaces and exhales.

Daily Flagship–San Diego Harbor Excursions depart at 9:45 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., lasting three and a half hours. Printable $5 discount coupons for the 2013-2014 season are available here.
If you love whale watching as much as we do, contact us and share your stories!

We benefit from our wonderful relationship with whales

We benefit from our wonderful relationship with whales

To call whale poop wonderful might sound like an oxymoron, but in fact, whale poop is actually pretty darn great.

Releasing fecal matter is not only a necessary part of a whale’s
health, but excrement from whales does wonders for the ecosystem too. Whale poop helps to keep the carbon emissions that occur both naturally and unnaturally under control. Here’s how.

The release of carbon into the atmosphere happens all the time. Carbon is an element that can be found in many things both living and nonliving. In living things carbon is released upon death. Decomposing bodies release the carbon that has been stored inside. But not all carbon emissions occur naturally. While some carbon is a good thing, excessive levels of carbon are not. Man-made, modern conveniences like cars, planes, trucks, and trains, release excessive levels of carbon into the atmosphere. When released carbon exceeds the level of carbon that nature is capable of removing from the atmosphere, then HOUSTON we have a problem. This is where the whales come in.

Whale poop is light in weight and varies in color from a cloudy brown liquid excrement in some whales to a white cluster resembling floating cotton in other whale types. Sometimes the fecal matter is released in a small quantity, but at other times whales can release quite a large load. Once expelled into the environment it goes to work. Living on the ocean’s surface is phytoplankton that pull carbon from the atmosphere. Phytoplankton are tiny, little water plants. Like all living things, they feed off substances existing in their surroundings, which means that their food must therefore come from food sources that linger on the water’s surface too. This is where the poop comes in to play. The whales release poop and phytoplankton consume it. The whales' waste gives them energy to not only give off oxygen, but to also drag carbon from the atmosphere. Voila! We have a healthier balanced ecosystem! And since we breathe oxygen too , we also benefit from this wonderful relationship between whales and phytoplankton. Thank you, marine friends!

Live in harmony with the environment! Contact us today.

We benefit from our wonderful relationship with whales

We benefit from our wonderful relationship with whales

To call whale poop wonderful might sound like an oxymoron, but in fact, whale poop is actually pretty darn great.

Releasing fecal matter is not only a necessary part of a whale’s
health, but excrement from whales does wonders for the ecosystem too. Whale poop helps to keep the carbon emissions that occur both naturally and unnaturally under control. Here’s how.

The release of carbon into the atmosphere happens all the time. Carbon is an element that can be found in many things both living and nonliving. In living things carbon is released upon death. Decomposing bodies release the carbon that has been stored inside. But not all carbon emissions occur naturally. While some carbon is a good thing, excessive levels of carbon are not. Man-made, modern conveniences like cars, planes, trucks, and trains, release excessive levels of carbon into the atmosphere. When released carbon exceeds the level of carbon that nature is capable of removing from the atmosphere, then HOUSTON we have a problem. This is where the whales come in.

Whale poop is light in weight and varies in color from a cloudy brown liquid excrement in some whales to a white cluster resembling floating cotton in other whale types. Sometimes the fecal matter is released in a small quantity, but at other times whales can release quite a large load. Once expelled into the environment it goes to work. Living on the ocean’s surface is phytoplankton that pull carbon from the atmosphere. Phytoplankton are tiny, little water plants. Like all living things, they feed off substances existing in their surroundings, which means that their food must therefore come from food sources that linger on the water’s surface too. This is where the poop comes in to play. The whales release poop and phytoplankton consume it. The whales' waste gives them energy to not only give off oxygen, but to also drag carbon from the atmosphere. Voila! We have a healthier balanced ecosystem! And since we breathe oxygen too , we also benefit from this wonderful relationship between whales and phytoplankton. Thank you, marine friends!

Live in harmony with the environment! Contact us today.

A Whale of a Surprise!

A Whale of a Surprise!

We all know that whales are amazing creatures. Their size coupled with their grace and beauty make them incredible animals to behold. But for all that you do know about whales, there are probably a few things that you don’t. Check out some of these surprising facts about our mammalian marine counterparts.
Surprising Fact #1: Just because it looks like a whale does not mean it is a whale. Yes, the orca, which is more commonly known as the killer whale, actually is not a whale at all- it is a dolphin. The orca is one of the largest species of dolphins measuring 25 feet in length and weighing over 12,000 pounds. Like its more widely known dolphin relatives, the orca is extremely intelligent. Orcas have been observed teaching very sophisticated hunting maneuvers to one another – much to the disappointment of the hunted, of course. And like dolphins, orcas crave social interaction and travel in groups called pods.   In fact, orcas form tight knit intergenerational family units where three or four generations may live together in a traveling pack.
Surprising Fact #2: Whales have big bodies and therefore they must eat big things. Not quite. Though some whales dine on other marine mammals, blue whale eat teeny tiny krill. Yes, krill. Try to picture feeding pieces of tic-tac sized morsels of meat to a 280 pound linebacker. Get the picture? Krill measures a measly 1 to 2 centimeters in length. The blue whale dines at the bottom of the ocean floor. They use a method known as filter feeding to gather its prey. Filter feeding means that the whale opens its mouth very wide and then swims about. Water flows into the whale’s mouth along with the krill. The whale then pushes the water out but the krill gets stuck in the comb-like teeth called baleen.  The whale is left with a mouth full of delicious krill to eat.
Surprising Fact #3: All whales are not gigantic. There is a species of whale known as the dwarf sperm whale that only measures 8.5 in length and weights a mere 550 whale pounds. Comparatively speaking, this is miniscule; the blue whale can grow to a massive 100 feet and weigh 300,000 pounds (150 tons). So this is like comparing a Mack truck to toy car. This petite whale can be found in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
Now you know! We are proud to manufacture a product that celebrates the full-blooded whales and those whales who happen to be a distant cousin.   We hope you continue to share our love and admiration for these incredible creatures. Contact us to learn about our delicious non gmo project verified products.

Turn a Gourmet Snack into a Gourmet Dinner!

Whale Tails Tortilla Chips are not just healthy and delicious snacks. They can also be transformed into healthy and delicious dinners. Here's a couple ideas for turning our gourmet snacks into gourmet dinners with ease.
Nachos
This one may seem a bit obvious, but have you tried your favorite nacho recipe with our Whale Tails Tortilla Chips? With flavors ranging from original yellow corn to blue corn to plenty of others, you can spice up those bland, same old-same old recipes for nachos in your house. Plus, Whale Tails Tortilla Chips aren't just delicious and different; they are healthy as well. They are non-gmo project verified and made from organically grown corn. This means you can feel a little less bad about adding that extra cheese or salsa to your nacho dinner.
Tortilla Chip Casserole
Here's an easy idea for when you have that last third of the bag of chips just laying around or maybe just the crumbs at the very bottom of the bag. There are plenty of recipes for this online that go into more detail, but let's run it down real quick here. You start by putting a can of sliced tomatoes into a baking sheet. You then spice it up with whatever flavors your prefer and then add black beans. Next you mix a variety of liquids like milk and sour cream and add it in with the tortilla chips on top of the tomatoes and beans. Cook at 350 degrees for 25 minutes, take it out, add a layer of cheese, let it melt and presto! You just made yourself a tasty dinner that's even better with the yummy and fun Whale Tails Tortilla Chips.
These are just a few of the ideas for dinner recipes involving Whale Tails Tortilla Chips. If you'd like to try these or come up with your own dinner concoction then contact us today.