What are Digestive Enzymes?

Enzymes are all complex molecules that support every chemical reaction that happens in the human body. Digestive and Metabolic are the 2 major groups of enzymes. The Metabolic enzymes support you body functions and digestive enzymes reduce big food molecules into small, more easily useable components. Food originally has all the enzymes needed to aid the digestive process so that your body doesn’t need to do all the work. But when we cook, refine or process food, all of the enzymes are destroyed.

Our digestive system’s role is to extract and absorb the necessary nutrients contained in our food. However, a diet of cooked food means that we need to get enzymes from the pancreas, liver and other organs to manage our digestion and as the years go by this can result in a weakened immune response and it can slow down our metabolism.

Enzyme-deficient food sits in the upper part of your stomach rotting rather than starting to digest. Not a pretty picture. That’s what the enzymes are created to do. When that happens your white blood cell count will increase because your immune system responds to your undigested food as an alien substance. What’s more, it strains our systems to produce extra digestive enzymes at the expense of making metabolic enzymes for cellular activity. If stomach acids do not complete their job before the food moves into the small intestine, it’s difficult to extract the nutrients from your food.

This rotten material can adhere to the intestinal walls, hurting your ability to absorb needed nutrients and interfering with the ejection of toxins through the intestinal wall. In this environment, bacteria and viruses can thrive and easily multiply out of control leaving you susceptible to infection, fatigue, and degenerative disease.

Not many people will ever live on a raw food diet so we’re living on enzyme deficient food, but you can supplement with digestive enzymes like Protease (for proteins), Lipase (for fats) or Amylase (for carbohydrates).