The Great Enzyme Bank Robbery

Dr. Pottenger and his cats shed some light on how we rob ourselves of the enzymes in our enzyme bank accout.

In his great nutritional experiment, Dr. Pottenger fed 3 generations of cats either raw food (enzymes intact) or cooked food (no enzymes left). The second and third generation of kitties on the cooked food developed more and more degenerative problems with each succeeding generation. They finally could not reproduce by the fourth generation. Their bank account of enzymes was depleted.

So did your parents eat a lot of cooked and nutritionally deficient food? Then you started with a smaller bank account of enzymes. Are you still eating enzyme-depleted food? Then what’s left in your bank account has a big leak.

How do we deplete our enzymes?

 By eating mostly cooked food.

Cooking destroys all of the enzymes in the food. Any temperature over 118 degrees F destroys all the food enzymes. 118 degrees is just a hot summer day in some places. No wonder those hot days wipe out our energy. That heat must affect our enzymes.

So food enzymes are easily destroyed. When you eat a cooked food your body has to supply all of the digestive enzymes. If your diet is primarily cooked food your body’s ability to produce digestive enzymes is always taxed because now the body has to supply 100 percent of the enzymes instead of just 25% when digesting raw foods.

Eventually the digestive tract becomes so exhausted from trying to produce enzymes that it robs the metabolic enzymes from the tissues. Eventually the metabolic enzymes also become exhausted and then the chemical processes cannot proceed fast enough to provide adequate cellular energy. That translates to chronic fatigue. Have you ever noticed how tired and sleepy everyone gets after a big Thanksgiving dinner with all that heavy cooked food.

The body in its wisdom secretes just enough enzymes to digest the amount of food eaten. Therefore if some enzymes are in the food, it secretes smaller amounts to finish the job. By eating raw food we can preserve our digestive and metabolic enzymes which allows the metabolic enzymes to heal our bodies.

Healing comes from the metabolic enzymes.

Wild animals that have to eat all raw foods take full advantage of the enzymes in the food they eat. A killer whale was once found with 32 seals in its stomach. That whale takes possession of the enzymes in the seals. It allows the seals to digest themselves in the whale’s food enzyme stomach.

Chickens take advantage of the enzymes in seeds by digesting them in their crop where moisture and heat allow the seeds to germinate. This germination inactivates the enzyme inhibitors and increases the enzyme activity. Pretty smart chicken, now it only has to add a few of its own enzymes to finish digestion.

The upper part of the human stomach acts like the food enzyme stomach of animals in that raw food will begin to digest there. Hey, maybe we could be as smart as those chickens. How about learning to sprout (germinate) our own nuts, seeds and grains.

High calorie foods have many more food enzymes than low-calorie foods. Therefore the enzymes in an a raw vegetable salad will not be adequate to help digest cooked steak and potatoes, which in their raw state would have contained a far greater amount of food enzymes than the amount in the raw salad. However, I am not advocating eating raw animal protein because of the parasite and bacteria problems in raw meat.

You may want to gradually decrease the amount of cooked food in your diet and increase the raw food, especially those high in food enzymes.

Read on for more insight into what adds to the Enzyme Leak.

Enzyme articles in this series, including this one:

1 Enzymes the Spark of Life
http://dr-jo-md.com/bewise/enzymes-the-spark-of-life

2 The Great Enzyme Bank Robbery
http://dr-jo-md.com/bewise/the-great-enzyme-bank-robbery

3 Big Enzyme Leak
http://dr-jo-md.com/bewise/big-enzyme-leak

Blessings,

Dr. Jo