Eat Better with E'LAN
It's chia, opened cold so your body can actually reach what's inside it. Here's what that does for you — and, further down, what's in a serving and why this bag isn't the one on the shelf.
10 reasons to
be eating it
There are so many great reasons to eat E'LAN. Here's a list of just the top 10. Which ones are important to you and your family?
Lose Weight the Healthy Way!
Add it to what you already eat and it adds bulk without changing the flavour of anything. Low in calories, high in nutrients, and it keeps you full for hours — which is the part most diets get wrong.
Save Money!
Diet pills are expensive and they carry risks nobody prices in. Ounce for ounce, E'LAN gives you more nutrition than almost anything else in your kitchen, and a good deal more than a commercial meal plan.
Reduce Food Cravings!
A lot of cravings are the body asking for something it is short of — short on calcium and suddenly it is cheese and ice cream you want. E'LAN carries the vitamins and minerals those gaps are made of, and the cravings quieten down.
Balanced Blood Sugar!
Modern eating is heavy on carbohydrate, and carbohydrate arrives as a spike and leaves as a crash — the reason three in the afternoon feels the way it does. Chia slows down how fast your body turns carbohydrates into simple sugars, so what you ate arrives gradually instead of all at once.
Eliminate Toxins and Stay Regular!
Health and vitality begin in the colon. Every serving carries 5 grams of fiber, and it is both kinds: the soluble fiber keeps the colon hydrated, and the insoluble fiber — the outside of the seed — keeps everything moving. If irregularity is the problem, this is the reason you will notice first, sometimes within a day.
Hydrate Your Body!
E'LAN absorbs around ten times its weight in water and turns into a gel. That gel is why athletes reach for it: it lubricates joints, shortens recovery, and takes the edge off both soreness and lactic acid after a hard effort.
Create More Energy!
You don't get energy — you create it, and you create it out of what you eat. That is the whole argument for eating better rather than eating more, and it is why we call this Mother Nature's ultimate super-food.
Get the Omega-3 You Need!
Omega-3 is an essential fatty acid: your body cannot make it and has to be given it. It matters for your heart, for cholesterol, and for inflammation — which is why anyone with arthritis has heard of it. E'LAN carries eight times more omega-3 than wild salmon, without the fishy taste.
Fight Free Radicals!
Healthy cells are what energy, a younger-looking face and a longer life are actually made of. As we age we make fewer of our own antioxidants, and the shortfall shows up as a weaker immune system and skin that ages faster than it should. E'LAN is loaded with the antioxidants that hold that line.
Bake with Less Lard and Cooking Oil!
Chia gel replaces fat in baking. Use half the oil or butter the recipe asks for and make up the difference with an equal amount of gel — it bakes the same and it tastes the same. The antioxidants help it keep, too.
What’s in E'LAN
- Omega-3
- An essential fatty acid, which means your body doesn't make it and has to be fed it. Chia is one of the richest plant sources there is, gram for gram. The form is ALA rather than the EPA and DHA in oily fish.
- Protein
- A complete plant protein. Cells use it to build and repair themselves, and it's part of what makes the seed read as food rather than as a supplement.
- Fiber
- Both soluble and insoluble, which is why the seed thickens what it sits in. Fiber is what makes the release sustained rather than spiked.
- Antioxidants
- Measured on the pack as Total ORAC. They're also why the seed keeps — an oil this unsaturated needs them to stay stable on a shelf.
- Phytonutrients
- Compounds that occur naturally in the plant. They're part of what a whole food carries and an isolated capsule doesn't.
The full panel
Per serving, 2 tbsp (13 g)
Copied from the back of the bag. These are the figures E'LAN prints, not measurements we've taken — nothing here has been independently verified.
| Calories | 70 | |
|---|---|---|
| Calories from fat | 36 | |
| Total fat | 4 g | 6% |
| Saturated fat | 0.5 g | 3% |
| Trans fat | 0 g | |
| Polyunsaturated fat | 3 g | |
| Cholesterol | 0 mg | 0% |
| Potassium | 110 mg | 3% |
| Sodium | 0 mg | 0% |
| Total carbohydrate | 5 g | 2% |
| Dietary fiber | 5 g | 19% |
| Insoluble fiber | 4 g | |
| Soluble fiber | 0.5 g | |
| Sugars | 0 g | |
| Protein | 3 g | 6% |
| Calcium | 89 mg | 9% |
| Iron | 1 mg | 7% |
| Magnesium | 55 mg | 13% |
| Phosphorus | 120 mg | 12% |
| Omega-3 (alpha-linolenic) | 3 g | |
| Omega-6 (linoleic) | 1 g | |
| Phenolic compounds | 18 mg | |
| Phytosterols | 24 mg |
Amino acids — essential
- L-Arginine
- 255 mg
- Histidine
- 65 mg
- Iso-Leucine
- 92 mg
- Leucine
- 159 mg
- Lysine
- 121 mg
- Methionine
- 75 mg
- Phenylalanine
- 121 mg
- Threonine
- 88 mg
- Tryptophan
- 23 mg
- Valine
- 113 mg
Amino acids — non-essential
- Alanine
- 123 mg
- Aspartic acid
- 199 mg
- Cystine
- 51 mg
- Glutamic acid
- 417 mg
- Glycine
- 113 mg
- Proline
- 94 mg
- Serine
- 128 mg
- Tyrosine
- 81 mg
- Percent daily values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.
- Not a significant source of vitamins A or C.
- Daily value not established for the fatty acids.
- Ingredients: 100% natural whole raw chia.
- Whole here means nothing added and nothing stripped — the seed is opened by cold fracture, not milled
gram for
gram
Chia is dense rather than big. Put it up against the foods people already reach for and a gram of E'LAN carries more of what those foods are eaten for. Which ones matter to you and your family? Every figure here is compared by weight.
| Nutrient | Compared with | Multiple by weight |
|---|---|---|
| Magnesium | broccoli | 15× |
| Phosphorus | milk | 9× |
| Omega-3 | wild salmon | 8× |
| Calcium | milk | 6× |
| Protein | kidney beans | 5× |
| Selenium | flax seed | 4× |
| Iron | spinach | 3× |
| Fiber | bran flakes | 2× |
| Potassium | bananas | 2× |
Tick marks 1× — the comparison food
Not the chia
on the shelf
There are over a hundred varieties of chia seed. Most of the brands on the market are mass produced and never tested for nutritional value, variety or potency — not thoroughly cleaned, and not all harvested at their peak of nutrition.
Whole
Whole seeds don't break down easily, so they move through your system without being absorbed — you paid for the omega-3 and it left with the seed. The coat is doing its job, and its job is to let a seed sit in soil and wait.
A randomised, double-blind trial put this to the test: women eating 25 g of whole chia a day for ten weeks showed no rise in blood omega-3 — no different from the group eating poppy seed. The same dose, opened, raised plasma ALA 58% and EPA 39%. The coat is the difference. The study.
Standard milling
Milling does open the coat, and that part works. What it also does is make heat — grinding in quantity always does — and heat is what starts the clock on the oils you're buying the seed for. It's not that the seed isn't open. It's what opening it that way costs, and it's the cost this whole process exists to avoid.
What happens
to the seed
Vital2Life uses a proprietary cold-fracture system: the shell opens, and no heat ever touches the seed. Standard milling is where the heat comes from. Four steps, in order — each one something done to the seed before it ever reaches a bag, and together they're the whole difference between this and the chia on the shelf.
The 4 powers of E'LAN
Perform. Endure.
Hydrate. Recover.
E'LAN goes to work at four points in your day — before the effort, through it, and long after you've stopped. Here's what each one does for you.
Performance …Redefined
E'LAN's perfect balance of Omega-3s and Omega-6s may increase flexibility of cell membranes, creating improved nutrient transport and nerve transmission. This super-food helps boost your brain's power and makes focusing on your end goal easier. You'll have an edge on the competition when your performance is optimized by E'LAN.
Endurance …Elevated
When E'LAN is mixed with liquid, a gel forms in the stomach that acts as a physical barrier, blocking digestive enzymes from breaking down carbohydrates. This slows the conversion of carbohydrates into sugars, fueling your body longer, and may prevent dizziness and fatigue brought on by a crash in your blood glucose level.
Hydration …Advanced
By absorbing at least 10x its weight in water, E'LAN holds on to moisture and may prolong your system's hydration. This regulates electrolyte balance and nutrient absorption, which is especially important for runners. Prepare to endure during times of extreme exertion by mixing E'LAN with water, juice or foods rich in moisture.
Recovery …Refined
With its anti-inflammatory properties, E'LAN may aid in your body's fight against muscle swelling. Omega-3s lubricate tissue, antioxidants prevent tissue destruction and amino acids support tissue repair. For marathon runners, bodybuilders and other athletes undergoing intense conditioning, this is an absolute must.
Fuel with
E'LAN
Performance, endurance, hydration, recovery — E'LAN fuels the whole of it, start to finish. Athletes tell us it pushes them to new levels, helps them hold a hard effort for longer, and makes the day after much easier.
And if you're
training on it
- Train Harder
- Run Faster
- Get Stronger
- Go Longer
- Lift More
- Make it Farther
- Reach Higher
- Push Through
- Release Stress
- Ache Less
… then get fueled by E'LAN. How it fits a training week.
Chia Seed Supplementation
and Disease Risk Factors in Overweight Women
- OBJECTIVE/SETTING:
- This study assessed the effectiveness of milled and whole chia seed in altering disease risk factors in overweight, postmenopausal women using a metabolomics approach.
- DESIGN/INTERVENTION:
- Subjects were randomized to chia seed (whole or milled) and placebo (poppy seed) groups, and under double-blinded procedures ingested 25 g chia seed or placebo supplements each day for 10 weeks.
- SUBJECTS:
- Subjects included 62 overweight (body-mass index 25 kg/m(2) and higher), non diseased, nonsmoking, postmenopausal women, ages 49-75 years, with analysis based on the 56 subjects who completed all phases of the study.
- OUTCOME MEASURES:
- Pre- and post-study measures included body mass and composition, blood pressure and augmentation index, serum lipid profile, inflammation markers from fasting blood samples, plasma fatty acids, and metabolic profiling using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry with multivariate statistical methods including principal component analysis and partial least-square discriminant analysis (PLS-DA).
- RESULTS:
- Plasma α-linolenic acid (N=ALA) increased 58% (interaction effect, p=0.002) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) 39% (p=0.016) in the milled chia seed group (N=14) compared to nonsignificant changes in the whole chia seed (N=16) and placebo (N=26) groups. Pre-to-post measures of body composition, inflammation, blood pressure, augmentation index, and lipoproteins did not differ between chia seed (whole or milled) and placebo groups (all interaction effects, p>0.05). Global metabolic difference scores for each group calculated through PLS-DA models were nonsignificant (Q(2)Y<0.40), and fold-changes for 28 targeted metabolites associated with inflammation and disease risk factors did not differ between groups.
- CONCLUSIONS:
- Ingestion of 25 g/day milled chia seed compared to whole chia seed or placebo for 10 weeks by overweight women increased plasma ALA and EPA, but had no influence on inflammation or disease risk factors using both traditional and metabolomics-based measures
Sources
- Nieman DC, Gillitt N, Jin F, Henson DA, Kennerly K, Shanely RA, Ore B, Su M, Schwartz S. Chia seed supplementation and disease risk factors in overweight women: a metabolomics investigation. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 2012;18(7):700–8. doi:10.1089/acm.2011.0443 PMID 22830971
E'LAN vs
the rest
Both open the seed. Standard milling does it with heat. E'LAN is cold-fractured, so no heat ever touches it. That's the difference you're paying for — and everything above is what it gets you.