misslinda
02-11-2006, 08:53 PM
I copied this from another vegan site--outlines the importance of raw foods and the enzymatic (3 kinds) roles in our bodies. As I asked myself today, "WHY STAY RAW???"
Enzymes
December 2002 Features
Liberate Your Energy
By Andrew Hurko
“Enzyme preservation is the secret to health.”
— Ann Wigmore
By understanding the “enzyme concept” it becomes clear how easy it is to boost vitality. That’s because enzymes possess special life energy transferring properties, unlike any other factor in our diet. The heat used by modern cooking and pasteurization or irradiation destroys virtually all enzymes in our food and this terminates the transfer of life energy. In fact, this produces a reverse flow which removes enzymes from the system to make up for their loss, insidiously undermining our health and steadily draining our reserves of energy. We may get away with this for a time, particularly when we are young and healthy, but years of this process slowly erodes our health and can open the door to a host of ‘mysterious’ ailments.
But first, what are enzymes and what do they do? Enzymes are biochemical catalysts which run the body. “They serve as the body’s labour force to perform every single function required for our daily activities and are required to keep us alive,” according to Enzymes: The Fountain of Life, by D.A. Lopez. They are a measure of our life and immunity. “The immune system depends heavily on enzymes to conduct its protective functions. When enzyme activity stops, life stops and the person or organism dies!” In other words, enzymes are our supply of the vital energy of life.
There are three classes of enzymes: metabolic, digestive and food, and they all interface keeping the body running smoothly. We have the most control over food enzymes, through diet.
Food enzymes can be divided into three categories: proteases (to break down protein), lipases (to break down fat) and amylases (to break down starch and sugar). Raw foods contain just the right amount of each for predigestion. “Researchers have conclusively shown that there are two distinctly different digestive sections of the stomach,” the upper and lower. The upper part is where food sits for 30-60 minutes as food enzymes do their work of predigestion. What happens when there are too few enzymes in the food due to processing, cooking or microwaving? The food starts to ferment, rot, and putrefy, according to Edward Howell, author of Food Enzymes for Health and Longevity. Then it gets passed down to the lower portion, where our digestive juices have to work harder to deal with it. No wonder so many people suffer from indigestion! In the process, some key amino acids are lost and can start to build up in the colon. Thus begins the downward spiral of ill health and loss of vitality.
Foods in the supermarket are stripped of their own natural enzymes by heat processing or irradiation to prolong their shelf life. When you eat these foods, your body has to make up for the missing enzymes by ‘borrowing’ from your reserves — and this can lead to disease. The Law of Adaptive Secretion of Digestive Enzymes, confirmed by many researchers, states “that the body calls for exactly the quantity and type of enzymes needed according to the character of each meal eaten.”(Enzyme Nutrition) Your body will not waste the production of enzymes, as they are a limited and precious resource. Unfortunately, we are not as conscientious with regards to our food intake.
In his incisive book Enzyme Nutrition, Dr. Edward Howell suggests that detrimental organ changes occur when we consume too many cooked and processed foods. The pancreas swells, the brain shrinks, and the pituitary and thyroid glands enlarge. It is my contention that as we continue to denature our food source, we are contributing to the degeneration of the human species.
We need to rebuild our enzyme reserves by greatly increasing the amount of enzymes we take into our system. This could be crucial in times of excessive personal and ecological stress. Enzyme reserves can be compared to the energy of your car battery. If the alternator does not feed the battery, it will wear out and you wonÂ’t be going anywhere. The same thing happens with your body. If you expend more energy than you take in, you will eventually become fatigued to the point of exhaustion, thereby shortening your life span and attracting chronic ailments. When you significantly increase your enzyme intake, your stamina and vitality are gradually restored.
“The enzyme activity of an organism is a way to measure the life force of the organism,” according to Conscious Eating by Gabriel Cousens.
Cooking can be marvellous if done well. It’s a kind of alchemy that stimulates the senses, titillates the taste buds and nourishes both body and soul. A shared meal can be an act of communion with friends, and this kind of pleasure is a virtual nutrient in itself — but what do we do about the loss of enzymes?
Since itÂ’s impossible to revert to the time before the invention of fire, use the natural inventiveness of humanity: supplement cooked meals with high quality digestive enzymes. It would be an enlightened development if at mealtimes we each had a bottle of enzymes on our table alongside the salt and pepper. Luckily, we have developed concentrated plant enzymes (from the non-toxic fungi aspergillus oryzae and aspergillus niger, as well pineapples, papayas, sprouts, and other plant sources) to make up for deficient foods. Thanks to modern production techniques, the enzymes are pure and powerful, with no trace of fungus or growing medium, making them safe for people who have sensitivities or allergies to fungi.*
The latest supplemental enzymes (which are comprehensive, multi-fold, and broad pH) are a tremendous breakthrough in technology. They complement digestion, purify the blood, benefit the immune system, and generally accelerate healing from illness or injury. Some researchers see enzymes as the “fountain of life,” containing the spark of life relative to the body’s chemistry and transmission of nerve impulses.
In addition, it is wise to eat as much raw organic food as possible — in particular sprouted seeds, bananas, avocados, mangoes, aged garlic, green barley, algae, kefir, unpasteurized honey, and olive oil, for they are high in beneficial enzymes. If you are having trouble digesting raw foods, this may be an indication that your enzyme reserves are extremely low and supplemental enzymes would help you catch up. You may also be needing sea vegetables or celtic sea salt to help you create hydrochloric acid as well as to supply you with balanced minerals.
A word of caution on raw nuts, seeds and legumes, including soya beans: they contain “enzyme inhibitors” and so are best used sprouted, which actually multiplies their store of enzymes. Make sure your olive oil is as crude, thick and dense as you can get; it is a great source of lipase, good for the heart system. Honey, a good source of amylase (helpful in controlling blood sugar and allergies) and other enzymes, should be solid and opaque, because that ensures it has not been heat-treated and so retains its beneficial qualities.
WhatÂ’s most devious about having low reserves is that your body may end up craving enzymes so badly that it will even attract yeast, fungi and bacteria to use their enzymes. But with a well-stocked enzyme reserve, your body could be spared this unpleasant detour.
When you do not consume enzymes with your food, you are causing havoc in your system. There have been startling findings by Paul Kouchakoff, a Swiss physician, which have been regularly repeated by Dr. Howard Loomis on hundreds of patients. “In 1930, Kouchakoff showed that the eating of cooked foods caused leucocytosis, which is an increase in white blood cells.” That’s astounding because it’s as if your immune system is reacting to a foreign substance, i.e. the cooked food you are eating. But if you add more than 50% raw enzyme-rich food to the meal, then your body calms down and there is no increase in white blood cells.
Many people feel tired after eating, to the point of falling asleep. It’s strange that eating would make you want to sleep, for this resembles hibernation — a way to help some animals conserve energy in an attempt to keep weight on! Having more enzymes in your tissues along with increasing your activity is the best way I know of acquiring the perfect body weight, including fat/muscle ratio. As Dr. Gabriel Cousens says in his masterful book Conscious Eating: “...eating raw foods liberates enzymes for use in other parts of the body.”
Enzymes
December 2002 Features
Liberate Your Energy
By Andrew Hurko
“Enzyme preservation is the secret to health.”
— Ann Wigmore
By understanding the “enzyme concept” it becomes clear how easy it is to boost vitality. That’s because enzymes possess special life energy transferring properties, unlike any other factor in our diet. The heat used by modern cooking and pasteurization or irradiation destroys virtually all enzymes in our food and this terminates the transfer of life energy. In fact, this produces a reverse flow which removes enzymes from the system to make up for their loss, insidiously undermining our health and steadily draining our reserves of energy. We may get away with this for a time, particularly when we are young and healthy, but years of this process slowly erodes our health and can open the door to a host of ‘mysterious’ ailments.
But first, what are enzymes and what do they do? Enzymes are biochemical catalysts which run the body. “They serve as the body’s labour force to perform every single function required for our daily activities and are required to keep us alive,” according to Enzymes: The Fountain of Life, by D.A. Lopez. They are a measure of our life and immunity. “The immune system depends heavily on enzymes to conduct its protective functions. When enzyme activity stops, life stops and the person or organism dies!” In other words, enzymes are our supply of the vital energy of life.
There are three classes of enzymes: metabolic, digestive and food, and they all interface keeping the body running smoothly. We have the most control over food enzymes, through diet.
Food enzymes can be divided into three categories: proteases (to break down protein), lipases (to break down fat) and amylases (to break down starch and sugar). Raw foods contain just the right amount of each for predigestion. “Researchers have conclusively shown that there are two distinctly different digestive sections of the stomach,” the upper and lower. The upper part is where food sits for 30-60 minutes as food enzymes do their work of predigestion. What happens when there are too few enzymes in the food due to processing, cooking or microwaving? The food starts to ferment, rot, and putrefy, according to Edward Howell, author of Food Enzymes for Health and Longevity. Then it gets passed down to the lower portion, where our digestive juices have to work harder to deal with it. No wonder so many people suffer from indigestion! In the process, some key amino acids are lost and can start to build up in the colon. Thus begins the downward spiral of ill health and loss of vitality.
Foods in the supermarket are stripped of their own natural enzymes by heat processing or irradiation to prolong their shelf life. When you eat these foods, your body has to make up for the missing enzymes by ‘borrowing’ from your reserves — and this can lead to disease. The Law of Adaptive Secretion of Digestive Enzymes, confirmed by many researchers, states “that the body calls for exactly the quantity and type of enzymes needed according to the character of each meal eaten.”(Enzyme Nutrition) Your body will not waste the production of enzymes, as they are a limited and precious resource. Unfortunately, we are not as conscientious with regards to our food intake.
In his incisive book Enzyme Nutrition, Dr. Edward Howell suggests that detrimental organ changes occur when we consume too many cooked and processed foods. The pancreas swells, the brain shrinks, and the pituitary and thyroid glands enlarge. It is my contention that as we continue to denature our food source, we are contributing to the degeneration of the human species.
We need to rebuild our enzyme reserves by greatly increasing the amount of enzymes we take into our system. This could be crucial in times of excessive personal and ecological stress. Enzyme reserves can be compared to the energy of your car battery. If the alternator does not feed the battery, it will wear out and you wonÂ’t be going anywhere. The same thing happens with your body. If you expend more energy than you take in, you will eventually become fatigued to the point of exhaustion, thereby shortening your life span and attracting chronic ailments. When you significantly increase your enzyme intake, your stamina and vitality are gradually restored.
“The enzyme activity of an organism is a way to measure the life force of the organism,” according to Conscious Eating by Gabriel Cousens.
Cooking can be marvellous if done well. It’s a kind of alchemy that stimulates the senses, titillates the taste buds and nourishes both body and soul. A shared meal can be an act of communion with friends, and this kind of pleasure is a virtual nutrient in itself — but what do we do about the loss of enzymes?
Since itÂ’s impossible to revert to the time before the invention of fire, use the natural inventiveness of humanity: supplement cooked meals with high quality digestive enzymes. It would be an enlightened development if at mealtimes we each had a bottle of enzymes on our table alongside the salt and pepper. Luckily, we have developed concentrated plant enzymes (from the non-toxic fungi aspergillus oryzae and aspergillus niger, as well pineapples, papayas, sprouts, and other plant sources) to make up for deficient foods. Thanks to modern production techniques, the enzymes are pure and powerful, with no trace of fungus or growing medium, making them safe for people who have sensitivities or allergies to fungi.*
The latest supplemental enzymes (which are comprehensive, multi-fold, and broad pH) are a tremendous breakthrough in technology. They complement digestion, purify the blood, benefit the immune system, and generally accelerate healing from illness or injury. Some researchers see enzymes as the “fountain of life,” containing the spark of life relative to the body’s chemistry and transmission of nerve impulses.
In addition, it is wise to eat as much raw organic food as possible — in particular sprouted seeds, bananas, avocados, mangoes, aged garlic, green barley, algae, kefir, unpasteurized honey, and olive oil, for they are high in beneficial enzymes. If you are having trouble digesting raw foods, this may be an indication that your enzyme reserves are extremely low and supplemental enzymes would help you catch up. You may also be needing sea vegetables or celtic sea salt to help you create hydrochloric acid as well as to supply you with balanced minerals.
A word of caution on raw nuts, seeds and legumes, including soya beans: they contain “enzyme inhibitors” and so are best used sprouted, which actually multiplies their store of enzymes. Make sure your olive oil is as crude, thick and dense as you can get; it is a great source of lipase, good for the heart system. Honey, a good source of amylase (helpful in controlling blood sugar and allergies) and other enzymes, should be solid and opaque, because that ensures it has not been heat-treated and so retains its beneficial qualities.
WhatÂ’s most devious about having low reserves is that your body may end up craving enzymes so badly that it will even attract yeast, fungi and bacteria to use their enzymes. But with a well-stocked enzyme reserve, your body could be spared this unpleasant detour.
When you do not consume enzymes with your food, you are causing havoc in your system. There have been startling findings by Paul Kouchakoff, a Swiss physician, which have been regularly repeated by Dr. Howard Loomis on hundreds of patients. “In 1930, Kouchakoff showed that the eating of cooked foods caused leucocytosis, which is an increase in white blood cells.” That’s astounding because it’s as if your immune system is reacting to a foreign substance, i.e. the cooked food you are eating. But if you add more than 50% raw enzyme-rich food to the meal, then your body calms down and there is no increase in white blood cells.
Many people feel tired after eating, to the point of falling asleep. It’s strange that eating would make you want to sleep, for this resembles hibernation — a way to help some animals conserve energy in an attempt to keep weight on! Having more enzymes in your tissues along with increasing your activity is the best way I know of acquiring the perfect body weight, including fat/muscle ratio. As Dr. Gabriel Cousens says in his masterful book Conscious Eating: “...eating raw foods liberates enzymes for use in other parts of the body.”