While not made with honey, they evoke a gourmet version of those sesame-honey candies—but they’re soft and pose no harm to dental work. They’re flat bars, the size of a chocolate bar, and you can devour one whole or break off a piece at a time. The sesame seeds and flax seeds provide much more than texture, flavor, lots of fiber and heart-healthy linolenic acid and omega-3s;* they require a lot of chewing, so the snack lasts longer. And, in the summer heat, the bars don’t melt like chocolate or go gooey like caramel.

While Bumble Bars call themselves energy bars, they don’t stack up nutritionally the way a Balance Bar, Clif Bar or Lara Bar will. Those bars have twice the protein and half the fat, and are formulated for energy. We’d call it a confection—a healthy candy. In fact, the world’s first candies were seeds, nuts and fruits mixed with honey. Bumble Bars are descendants of those simple, whole foods. They’re gluten-free, wheat- and dairy-free and vegan, made of certified organic good stuff and sweetened with brown rice syrup and evaporated cane juice. And it’s not easy to tire of them, given 12 delicious flavors: Awesome Apricot, Chai With Almonds, Chocolate Cherry, Chocolate Crisp, Chunky Cherry, Lushus Lemon, Original (peanut and cinnamon), Original with Almond, Original With Cashew, Original With Hazelnut, Original With Mixed Nuts and Tasty Tropical.  
These sesame and flax seed bars are
our new favorite guilt-free candy. Chunky
Cherry and Original With Almonds,
above, are two of the 12 flavors.
Read the buzz in the full review, and stock up for camp, car trips, the gym—and healthy workplace snacks instead of what’s in the lobby concession or that infernal candy machine.

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The question is: How much coffee do you have to drink to get the benefits? The answer: a lot. That’s why we said it’s “good for guzzlers.” Here are some examples:

-A cup of Spava Clarity provides 20mg of ginkgo biloba and 25mg of white tea extract. One of the country’s most prominent neurologists, who specializes in memory, prescribes 120 mg of ginkgo twice a day for normal maintenance of clarity.

-Spava Flexibility contains 30mg of chondroitin sulfate, and 20mg of MSM. Anyone who is concerned with prophylaxis—much less healing and pain—is taking a minimum of 500mg of chondroitin sulfate daily, and similar amounts of glucosamine sulfate. So, this is a drop in the bucket.

-Spava Immunity has 25mg of rosehips per cup, which contain vitamin C, plus 35mg of echinacea; but anyone who takes vitamin C pills for immunity aims for 500mg a day.

However, little bits can add up, and for people who don’t like to swallow pills, 20mg or 30mg is better than nothing at all. While the coffee won’t pass muster with the coffee connoisseur klatsch, it tastes as good as what most people enjoy. And the attractive package is a nice idea. So, if all this makes it worth it to you to pay double the amount for a bag…tear one open and start brewing!

Read the full review of Spava Fortified Coffee and find more about organic, natural & wellness foods in the Nutrinibbles section of THE NIBBLE online magazine.

America’s specialty food stores are packed with gourmet condiments. Yet, as good as we would like them all to be, different brands vary in the degree of excitement they present to the demanding palate. That’s why it’s especially rewarding to discover a line that should be on the shelves everywhere: True Natural Taste Organic White Mustard. The Honey Mustard alone is the best we’ve ever tasted, and proves that you can find sophistication and layers of flavor in a product that is generally pleasant, with a one-dimensional sweetness. The rest of the mustards are so well crafted, you can taste the quality of the ingredients (where can we buy apple cider vinegar that’s this good?).

Here is an artisan at work, preparing small batches of mustard with the very best ingredients available. You’ll know it the minute you taste it, and may start eating the mustard from a spoon (as we’ve enjoyed doing over the past few weeks).

There’s also an organic Atomic Horseradish, marrying horseradish root with parsnip to create a very different and earthier, more flavorful style than the prepared horseradish in the refrigerator case (or our grandmother’s own eye-opening recipe of horseradish and beets). The line is certified kosher and (like all mustard) is gluten free.Mustard is a terrific condiment. Low calorie, no fat or sugar (no cholesterol, no carbs), it has a spate of health benefits that are discussed in the main review. When you find a line this good, it’s worth clearing the shelf of your current inventory and trading up to a truly terrific taste. The Dijon flavor won the “best organic mustard” gold medal at this year’s Napa Valley Mustard Festival; but read about our favorites in the full review at THE NIBBLE.

- The corn planted today in the corn belt is genetically modified for high yields and herbicide tolerance. It’s meant to be made into high fructose corn syrup or livestock feed. It’s not “corn on the cob,” edible by humans. (That’s a different variety.)   King Korn: Buy the DVD. - In fact, all of the nutrition has been bred out of the corn. The original protein-rich Mexican strains have been modified into mostly starch. Yes, the farmers can’t even eat the corn they grow—at least, not as a vegetable.

- But we all eat it—in the meat that our livestock has been fed with, in the HFCS that’s in our bread products, in the corn oil that the fries are cooked in, and of course, in all that soda.

While the production values of “King Korn” are homespun, the message is not. The corn that pervades our diet—which is killing us through higher rates of obesity and diabetes—is also killing the cattle. You’ll see up-close and personal how cattle that have grazed free range on grass for thousands of years are now feedlot cattle, fed a corn that their digestive system is not evolved to deal with, so that they reach market weight in half the time. If they weren’t slaughtered for beef at 12 to 18 months, they’d be dead in a few months from acidosis caused by their diet. Yes, you’ll never look at a burger the same way, either.

While you’re at it, pick up a copy of Al Gore’s Academy Award-winning film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” about climate change.

If you want to do something for the Earth every week of the year, take our Gourmet Giveaway Quiz: It will give you lots of ideas of the things you can do to lessen your carbon foodprint (yes, foodprint). You don’t have to answer the questions correctly in order to win; but if you eat more organics, you and our planet will win. Find some of our favorite organic products in the NutriNibbles section of THE NIBBLE online magazine.