Live enzymes in food play a crucial role in our health because we have a limited supply of digestive enzymes in our system.

When we are young, we have a natural abundance of enzymes. By the time we are elderly, we have lost over half of our enzymes. When our enzymes are gone, we die.

Making new ones becomes more and more difficult, if not impossible.

Eating certain foods like meats, not properly chewing our food, exposure to pathogenic microbes, and chewing gum all make our body utilize more of our digestive enzymes and deplete the amount we have to use.

(Do you chew gum? Why would this matter? Well, chewing gum is a waste of your precious enzymes, because you are not consuming and not needing to digest any food and you are using up your limited number of enzymes!) 

According to Dr. Howell, our digestive system is only able to digest about half of the food we eat.[1] A raw apple that has not been irradiated (which destroys the enzymes) contains enough live enzymes to break down about 40–60 percent of the apple when it is consumed. Our body has to produce the enzymes or acid to complete the digestion process.

Cooked food, on the other hand, has no living enzymes in it to help the body digest it. Therefore, the body is forced to use its precious supply of digestive enzymes to break down the food and utilize the nutrients. This causes stress on the digestive system, the pancreas, and the immune system.

In his book Enzyme Nutrition, Dr. Howell said, “We know that decreased enzyme levels are found in a number of chronic ailments, such as allergies, skin disease, and even serious diseases like diabetes and other severe diseases.”[2]

An interesting observation I made, when I was in Brazil, at John of God’s Casa last month, was that I met many people with cancer, who had gone there seeking to be healed. Not from nutrition.

What I found interesting is that there was a very high number of the people who had cancer,  also chewed gum. This gum chewing depleted their precious enzymes.

In his studies, Dr. Howell found that rats fed a raw, living food diet lived about 50 percent longer than rats that ate cooked food.

His studies with people in a sanitarium led him to conclude it was “impossible to get people fat on raw foods. . . regardless of the calorie intake.”[3] Along with that conclusion, Dr. Anthony Cheung, FRCP, noted:

Dr. Howell’s use of food enzymes suggests that the supply of human enzymes is limited at birth. The faster we consume our enzymes, the shorter our life span will be.

Raw food and/or living food (which is food that is not processed and/or cooked over 115 -118 degrees) is a good source of food enzymes. Ingestion of raw food or enzyme supplements will lessen the work of our digestive system, so that more energy is reserved for other metabolic activities.[4]

Raw and/or Living Food has live enzymes in it.

This study that follows, using cats as the subject of the study,  is quite interesting:

The Pottinger Cat Study was an extensive, 10-year study of approximately 900 cats. Conducted by Dr. Francis Pottinger, the study examined the effects of raw food versus cooked food on the health and well-being of two groups of cats.

One group was fed a diet of raw meat and milk (which naturally contained live enzymes and probiotics), and the other group was given cooked meat and pasteurized milk (whose enzymes and probiotic nature had been destroyed with heat). 

Dr. Pottinger found the cats eating raw food remained healthy and disease-free for generation after generation. But the cats on the cooked food diet started to get lazy and have degenerative diseases. The second generation of cats on the cooked food diet developed mid-life degenerative diseases.

Cats in the third generation of the cooked-food diet developed diseases, blindness, shorter lifespans, and infertility.

That’s Food For Thought!

Please leave a comment and join the conversation!

resources:

[1 & 2] Howell, Edward. (1985). Enzyme Nutrition. Avery Publishing Group Inc.

[3 & 4) Cheung, Anthony. “Digestive Enzymes.” Enerex. Retrieved from http://www.enerexusa.com/articles/digestive_enzymes.htm

I have lots of delicious, healthy, raw and living food recipes in my books!

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