Enzymes are used in all of our body functions. They are used to break down food, create chemical reactions for your nerves to speak to each other, to help your body create energy, and more. They are necessary for everything you do. Unfortunately we don't have an unlimited supply of them in any of the many forms they come in.
Digestive Enzymes
The most common, day-to-day use for enzymes is that of digestion. All living beings (including plants) have enzymes in their bodies. In fact, when you eat food what is supposed to happen is:
- Food is chewed up until it's watery (called mastication -- where your salivary glands create digestive enzymes)
- Masticated food then sits in your stomach while the enzymes created in your mouth and those that were native to the food begin to break the food down even more (that's why food rots -- or is supposed to)
- Hydrocholoric acid is added to the mix in your stomach to help create the right type of environment for digestion.
- Eventually, the mix in your stomach becomes a base rather than acidic.
- When this happens, the pyloric valve at the bottom of your stomach opens and lets the food move to the small intestine for absorbtion by the body.
Unfortunately, it seems that more and more the enzymes in food that we eat is being eliminated with irradiation. That way the food doesn't rot so quickly and it can be transported over longer and longer distances to get to your local grocer. It also means it lasts in your refrigerator longer before spoiling. [Read about my recent accidental experiment with how raw food doesn't spoil anymore in my blog.]
It's bad enough that we have a tendency to kill enzymes in our foods with microwaving them and with cooking them on too high a heat so that our bodies have to compensate for their loss, but now even raw foods have lost their enzymes which we vitally need as well. This causes our bodies to have to work even harder to function.
How do we digest without enzymes?
If your body needs enzymes to be able to digest food, the first place it typically looks is to the pancreas. By doing this it puts more strain on that critical organ and drains it faster of the necessary capability to create adequate amounts of insulin for our bodies. So let's look at what that might logically mean to us.
- Pancreas works too hard, and
- uses up its ability to create insulin adequately over an extended period of time which
- results in an inadequate amount of insulin when needed
- RESULT = DIABETES!
- WALLA! Our food providers have now indirectly caused us to contract a degenerative disease that can be deadly to us.
What do we do now?
- Grow your own food in your own garden.
- Buy food from your local farmer's market.
- Get involved with a local co-op.
- Increase mastication which increases enzyme production. [This means chew your food at least 40 times like you were told as a child because chewing until your food is liquid causes your salivary glands to produce digestive enzymes.]
- Buy and take digestive enzymes with all of your meals.
If you can't grow your own food because you don't know how, I recommend you check out the five minute gardening blog of a neighbor of mine, as well as other "how-to" gardening information that is available on the Internet.
If you don't think you have space to grow a garden or you aren't interested in growing your own food, then find a local farmer or co-op that has food which comes straight from the grower and doesn't go through the normal retail grocery process. Remember to buy organic as often as possible so that you get more nutritional value from your food, but understand that organic does not have anything to do with if the enzymes in the food have been killed.
You'll find my preferred digestive enzymes here in the right column of the page. Feel free to email me and ask any questions about them as I've been using them for many years.
More Resources
More information on enzymes and co-enzymes and digestion coming in future weeks.
Posted April 13, 2011