Enzymes are our bodies own magical fireworks celebration. These tiny sparks may just be the key to enhancing your wellness. Enzymes are little sparks of proteins that ignite every chemical reaction in your body and without them your cells would not divide, your immune system would not function, you would not heal, repair, think, digest food, detoxify and/or produce energy. Theses powerful enzyme catalyst are your own powerful team of energizer bunnies responsible for all vital biological processes necessary for you to live.
Enzymes And Your Wellness
There are two different types of enzymes in our bodies to consider, metabolic enzymes and digestive enzymes. Metabolic enzymes make your body work by stimulating responses within the cells, tissues and organs. Digestive enzymes are in charge of breaking down, assimilating and eliminating the foods you eat.
There is a third key enzyme that plays a major role in the benefit of your health known as food enzymes. These nifty enzymes piggyback onto the foods you eat and are neatly pre-packaged (courtesy of nature) with the perfect mix of digestive enzymes needed to break down your food. Food enzymes make sure that all food whether vegetable, fruit or flesh is decomposed and returned to earth, kind of like their own private built in recycling plant. You benefit from their company by not having to utilize your own enzyme stores to start the break down of the foods you consume.
Food enzymes are heat sensitive and are destroyed and rendered useless with temperatures above 118 F. When you eat foods that are cooked over 118 F., highly processed, refined and/ or pasteurized all enzymes in the food have been destroyed and your body will need to rob from your own enzymes stores to carry out the task of digestion.
Man happens to be the only animal that cooks his food and for most of us the food entering our stomachs is seriously enzyme inadequate. When you consume food devoid of enzymes you create two unhealthy events in your body. First, your body can’t produce the perfect enzyme mix that nature intended for the complete metabolizing of that food. Hence, the food just sits in your stomach for an hour or so with very little pre-digestion taking place. This leaves you with only partially digested starches, proteins and fats and an inability to assimilate the full spectrum of nutrients from your food.
Second, when you call upon your own body to manufacture the enzymes needed to digest your foods you put a tremendous amount of stress and load on your digestive and endocrine system. This ends up depleting your body of essential energy which would much better be put to use supporting other important functions like cell reproduction, tissue regeneration and immune system support. Unfortunately, your body ends up being in constant overdrive trying to keep up with the demand to produce both metabolic and digestive enzymes.
You and I may be able to get away with this enzyme deprivation when we are younger but as we start to age the continued insult begins to take its toll in the form of digestive complaints and other chronic health deteriorating issues. Dr. Edward Howell, a physician and researcher who brought to light how nature has supplied us with the perfect key to healthy digestion, states in his book on enzyme nutrition, that a person’s life span is directly related to the exhaustion of their enzyme potential.
I know it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to give up cooked foods after reading this, but you can start to make a difference to enhance your enzyme potential by incorporating more raw living fruits and vegetable daily into your diet.
To maximize my own enzyme potential I regularly include nutritional enzymes supplementation with every meal. This is my safety net to booster up “Team Digestion” and the rest of the players. When looking to add digestive enzyme supplementation look for a good vegetarian base supplement that contains at minimum proteases to aid in the digestion of proteins, lipase for fats, cellulose for fiber and amylase for starches and carbohydrates.
Eating raw fruits and vegetables are your best defense in optimum digestion because they are considered “live foods” with house active enzymes that are able to support the digestive process. Remember, the more enzymes you get, the healthier you are. The more life giving raw foods you eat, the more enzymes you get…………no brainer.
