Since our new Soul Salt Soak has warming and aromatic cardamom, we thought that a great pairing for showing some love would be these soft and chewy cookies full of warming spices! These cookies (which happen to also be gluten free and can be made vegan) also have an extra boost of magnesium from the almond flour, dates, and pecans, and even the blackstrap molasses adds some extra magnesium, calcium, potassium. Perfect to make for your sweetie, your kiddos… or for yourself!


Ingredients

• 1 ½ cups softened butter*
• 8 medjool dates*, blended in a food processor with 2-3 tblsp water to make a paste
• ½ cup sugar (optional - add if you find the dates to not be sweet enough) 
• 2 large eggs*
• ½ cup blackstrap molasses
  
• 4 ½ cups almond flour* 
• 4 tsp ground ginger
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 ½ tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground cloves
• 1 tblsp ground cardamom (if you can, grinding the cardamom seeds yourself makes them SO wonderfully aromatic!) 
• ¼ tsp salt
• ¼ cup chopped pecans (optional) 
• Coarse sugar (like turbinado) for topping

NOTE: If you love spices, feel free to add more ginger, cinnamon, and cardamom! 

Directions

Preheat oven to 350. In a large bowl, cream together butter, date paste, and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs and molasses. Combine the flour, ginger, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, pecans, and salt. Add to butter and sugar blend a little at a time and mix well.

Drop 2-inch balls of dough onto ungreased cookie sheet (If you have parchment paper to line your cookie sheet, it will help the cookies come off really easily) and sprinkle with turbinado sugar. Bake 12-13 minutes, watching to make sure they don’t begin to burn on the bottom. Remove carefully with a spatula - they will be soft and chewy! Cool on wire racks. Enjoy with people you love! 

Makes at least 2 dozen large cookies. 

* Ingredient Substitutions
​
This recipe can be made vegan. To replace the butter, we actually used Miyoko’s cultured vegan salted butter made from cashews. You can also replace the two eggs with 2 tbsp of ground flaxseed mixed into 6 tbsp of water and allowed to stand 10-15 minutes. (The flax eggs will work in this recipe; however, know that the cookies will be extra soft!)

To make this recipe nut free, all purpose flour or gluten free flour blends can be used instead of almond flour, and leave out pecans.

If you do not have dates, replace the 8 dates + 1/2 cup sugar with 2 cups of sugar. 

January often brings the surfacing of complex emotions. Some may love the fresh start after the holidays, the return of routines, and the promise of the coming year. Others may feel a bit bummed out that the holidays are over and go through a period of the “Winter Blues” as they get back into regular routines. 

Either way, though, the prospect of enduring the rest of the long cold winter, especially here in the Buffalo snow belt, has very real effects for a lot of people and can sometimes result in Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), which is a specific type of clinical depression.

According to Dr. Norman Rosenthal, as cited in the article “Seasonal Affective Disorder” (2018), SAD tends to show up as depression, increased appetite and cravings for carbohydrates, the need to sleep more, decreased activity, and social withdrawal. 

But did you know that magnesium deficiency may have a part to play in people developing SAD? This has to do with magnesium’s connection to the melatonin cycle, inflammation, neurotransmitters, and vitamin D.

MELATONIN: Melatonin is a hormone that is produced by the pineal gland in the brain in response to darkness. It regulates the cycle of sleeping and waking. When the sun sets earlier, the body naturally wants to fall asleep earlier as melatonin is giving those signals. And while we do want melatonin levels to rise in the evening to help us fall asleep, we don’t want them to rise TOO early and make us sluggish before we actually want to go to bed. Magnesium helps to naturally regulate the melatonin cycle. 

INFLAMMATION: On top of the melatonin cycle being out of sync, many people who experience SAD also have higher levels of inflammation (“Seasonal Affective Disorder,” 2018). Like the melatonin cycle, inflammation is a necessary process for the body... in the right situations. Inflammatory cytokines are necessary in the body to fight infection and promote healing. However, also like the melatonin cycle, the inflammatory process is the most beneficial when it is well regulated and not over- or under-functioning. Magnesium helps to regulate the immune system so it functions properly. 

NEUROTRANSMITTERS: People with SAD often have lower levels of some neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, which is a precursor to melatonin. 

VITAMIN D*: The decreased level of neurotransmitters, particularly serotonin, may be a result of lower levels of vitamin D, a hormone that works to regulate calcium in the blood (“Seasonal Affective Disorder,” 2018). Vitamin D is naturally produced when the body is exposed to sunlight, and magnesium is essential for the body to be able to convert vitamin D to its active form, making it more available for the body to absorb and use.

What may be able to help support all of these systems and ease the symptoms of SAD? There is not a single solution, but rather a combination of approaches that work well together! 

• Get more vitamin D! Getting outdoors with some skin exposed will help you to increase your levels naturally. At the same time, getting daylight exposure in the morning helps to decrease melatonin production and signal to your body that it’s time to wake up. A morning walk or even just opening the shades to sit by a window (or using a SAD light for light therapy) can be a key part of helping to keep your melatonin cycle on track during the winter! Finally, you can talk to your doctor about testing your vitamin D level and possibly supplementing with vitamin D3, which is the form that tends to be the most bioavailable for your body. (It is, however,  important to check vitamin D levels to ensure that you’re not over-supplementing.)

 

• Use magnesium to help! The article “Seasonal Affective Disorder” (2018) mentions that “Insufficient levels of magnesium can inhibit the conversion of tryptophan to 5-HTP, which can affect the production of serotonin and melatonin (Birdsall TC 1998). Research suggests that magnesium depletion may be associated with the dysregulation of the biological clock, resulting from either an increase or a decrease in melatonin, as is evident in SAD (Durlach J et al 2002)” (2006). 

 

• Be sure to eat foods that are high in omega-3 fatty acids. Fish such as salmon, mackerel, herring, anchovies, and sardines are all very high in omega-3s and also very high in vitamin D and magnesium as well! 

 

• For some people, antidepressants may be necessary, and we would never recommend anyone to not take them when they are truly needed! The suggestions we have given here can be utilized by anyone - for some people, they may be enough to keep SAD at bay; for others, these suggestions can be extra support for medication therapy.

* NOTE: Very interestingly, recent research suggests a near-zero death rate from COVID-19 among people with vitamin D levels over 50. (Under 20 is generally considered deficient, and under 30 is generally considered insufficient.) The article “COVID-19 Mortality Risk Correlates Inversely with Vitamin D3 Status“ (Borsche, L., Glauner, B., & von Mendel, J., 2021) claims that “The datasets provide strong evidence that low D3 is a predictor rather than just a side effect of the infection. Despite ongoing vaccinations, we recommend raising serum 25(OH)D levels to above 50 ng/mL to prevent or mitigate new outbreaks due to escape mutations or decreasing antibody activity.” In other words, along with being vaccinated and masking, talking to your doctor about supplementing with vitamin D might be a great way to keep yourself healthy (or make viral infection less severe) during the current COVID surge! 


​Disclaimer: The purpose of this blog post is to share information about our products as well as research-based information on magnesium that we have found useful. We are NOT medical professionals and do not intend this newsletter to be taken as medical advice. Our products are not FDA approved or approved for medical use, nor are they intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any disease. Please be sure to consult a medical professional with any questions about utilizing our products along with your current health regimen! ​

As November is Native American Heritage Month, we will be donating to support the Haudenosaunee Indigenous Values Initiative to raise awareness about Indigenous history and the ongoing struggle of Indigenous people. We acknowledge that we as a business and as individuals are on Haudenosaunee land here in Western New York and recognize the need for us to learn about, and redistribute wealth to, the Indigenous communities that have experienced land theft and genocide. 

The Haudenosaunee Indigenous Values Initiative website offers this information about their organization and mission:

NYA•WEÑHA SKÄ•NOÑH: Thank you for being well
The Indigenous Values Initiative is dedicated to articulating, disseminating and promoting values expressed by the leadership of the Onondaga Nation, the Central Fire (or Capital) of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (made up of the Seneca, Tuscarora, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and Mohawk nations).  Haudenosaunee means “People of the Longhouse,” and are most often mistakenly referred to as the “Iroquois”). The Onondaga Nation is unique to the world, in that they are the only Native Nation recognized by the United States, and the United Nations, that still operates according to their pre-colonial clan form of government. The Haudenosaunee organize themselves in a matrilineal clan system of extended families.  Their ceremonies are aligned to phases of the moon, and are based on thanksgivings to the natural world.  As we all face climatic changes, it is urgent that human beings reorient themselves to the rhythms of the earth.  Indigenous value systems need to be heeded in these troubled times.  Intercultural understanding, however, must be based on healing generations from colonization, missionization, genocide and assimilation.  The Haudenosaunee understand the need for collaboration with individuals, institutions, communities, governments and businesses to articulate, disseminate and promote the ancient and enduring values of Indigenous Peoples traditions to the world. The Indigenous Values Initiative (IVI) raises funds to support educational projects which will disperse information through conferences, classes, exhibitions, publications, speakers, expositions, etc. (https://indigenousvalues.org/about/)

As November is Native American Heritage Month and we are located on Haudenosaunee land, we will be donating to the Indigenous Values Initiative to support this organization's crucial work in advocacy and education.

We also encourage you to read about the Landback Movement which states that "To truly dismantle white supremacy and systems of oppression, we have to go back to the roots. Which, for us, is putting Indigneous Lands back in Indigenous hands." (https://landback.org/)