Raw Food: Enzymes For Health

In these times of fad diets, quick fixes, pills, and medicines, it’s sometimes hard to separate the facts from the hype. One thing for sure is fresh raw fruits and vegetables are great for building and maintaining good health.

What Is an Enzyme?
Enzymes are active and present during all metabolic processes in the body. Enzymes digest the food we eat and break it down into the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and other components, to make them available in our blood. Enzymes in the blood-stream will then break down those materials when our bodies need them. Enzymes break up toxins and other destructive matter in our bodies and keep our immune system working well. We are able to create these enzymes, but our system becomes fatigued unless we supply them from outside sources as well.

Enzymes and Health
The American diet (high in protein, fats, and carbohydrates, and low in nutrition) is difficult to digest, and our bodies work extra hard to produce the necessary enzymes to do this work. After years of a diet like this, our bodies become less and less able to digest effectively, allowing undigested proteins to accumulate in the blood, fatty tissue, and colon. Disease is usually not far behind. In a healthy system, the body will produce enzymes to fight these problems, but an over-worked system will eventually fail.

This problem is compounded by the fact that the body wants to provide enzymes to battle the host of evils that invade us every day: pesticides, air pollution, bruises, viruses… the list goes on. Instead, we burden our system to produce enzymes for digestion, and our white blood cells (our own super infection fighters) go without. The energy used to digest dead foods could be used to maintain a higher metabolism, or increase immune function, or help get more oxy-gen to your brain. “Live” or raw foods contain these enzymes already and are able to digest themselves!

Here’s an example we can all relate to… beans. Beans are known for causing gas. Beans are a food high in protein. When we eat them, our bodies have to produce lots of protein-digesting enzymes. Adults with compromised systems rarely can digest them entirely, and undigested proteins travel through the diges-tive tract where they start to rot. The rotting produces gas in the intestines and its antisocial effects. However, there is a way to prevent this from happening… simply sprout your beans! Sprouting activates enzymes that actually begin the digestion pro-cess, and is a form of predigestion.

Enzymes and Predigestion
Predigestion refers to sprout-ing, fermenting, juicing, or soak-ing raw foods (although cooking is technically a form of predigestion, my raw foods focus keeps me from including it here). Two major changes take place in the predigestion process. First, the enzyme content can increase up to ten times. Second, the food is broken down into simpler com-ponents. Proteins are broken down into amino acids, starches into simple sugars, and fats into fatty acids. This process relieves the body of this task, conserving energy and enzymes for other uses.

When undigested fat, pro-tein, and starch molecules are absorbed into the bloodstream, they can result in allergies and disease. This is usually overcome by the enzyme activity in the blood, but if your enzymes have been used in the digestion process, it is likely that the blood will be less able to deal with these substances. Undigested foods also end up in the colon where they will putrefy, producing byproducts that are reabsorbed through the intestinal tract and deposited throughout the body. It has been estimated that 80% of all disease originates in the large bowel.

While few people have the energy or impetus to convert to a totally raw food diet, a gradual increase of these salubrious deli-cacies can only improve our well being. Look for raw food and vegetable-based recipes in this issue of the Co-op Connection to start on the road to eating well.

If you are looking for more information about raw foods and enzymes, check the Co-op book-shelves or the library for the following titles:

• Food Enzymes by Humbart Santillo
• Raw Fruit and Vegetable Juices and Drinks by William H. Lee
• Food Enzymes for Health by Dr. Edward Howell
• Enzyme Nutrition by Dr. Edward Howell
• Survival Into the 21st Century by Max Wolf and Karl Ransbagero