Handling Linefeeds in MySQL/PHP

I am creating a content management page that uses a textarea box to enter a chunk of text which then is sent into the database into a text-type field. I am finding that when the data is retrieved to be shown in the browser that the line feeds are lost. I don't want users to have to know HTML to put tags in themselves. What's the best way to handle this? Can I read from the database and insert br's and p's to be put into the displayed HTML? Or, instead, is there a way to put the br's and p's immediately into the database when the record is inserted? How can I do this? How would the string be manipulated? Thanks for your help, -Casey