The Food Enzymes for Health & Longevity [Paperback]

 

 

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I agree with this book when it says that digestive enzyme supplements improve digestive health, improve food intolerance and support the pancreas and the heart (by saving them the significant efforts needed to digest food) which improves general well being and physical functioning. Having lots of digestive enzymes available leaves your body with more energy and bodily resources free to do other jobs, such as healing the body from disease.

But I don't agree that the evidence (or simple logic) supports some of the other claims and recommendations in this book.

For example, this book talks about the importance of an enzyme rich diet. It then points out that foods which have a higher caloric value have a lot more enzymes in them; so foods such as meat, milk and eggs eaten raw (or lightly cooked in the case of meat and eggs) are high in enzymes and foods such as raw vegetables and fruits are very very low in enzymes.

Yet the book then goes on to talk about a diet very high in raw fruits and vegetables (75% is the figure quoted I think) being the most important thing for enzyme levels. How does that make any sense at all?

Wouldn't one wanting to follow this guideline do best making sure to eat the high enzyme foods raw such as meat, milk, honey and eggs eaten raw (or lightly cooked in the case of meat and eggs) and to make sure that intake of these high enzyme foods is adequate - as well as adding some extra high enzyme fermented foods to the diet too? Foods like fermented fish, kefir, yogurt, sauerkraut and so on. Eating lots of fruit and vegetables is important to health of course but these other foods are far more important when it comes to taking in enzymes, and should at the very least be given equal billing as the fruits and vegetables, surely.

A diet that is 75% or more made up of raw fruits and vegetables is in fact a low enzyme diet, compared to a diet made up of lots of high enzyme foods like raw milk, kefir, and so on, as well as just cooked or raw vegetables. The book also says that the enzymes in enzyme capsules are far stronger than food enzymes. This is yet another reason a 75% raw fruit and vegetable diet without enzyme capsules is in fact a very low enzyme diet.

This book says that pigs that eat cooked potatoes fatten faster than those fed raw potatoes and that this must be because the lack of enzymes in the cooked potato. But surely the fact that starchy foods are well known to have more of an impact on blood sugar levels etc. when they are cooked would be a far more likely explanation? Pasta cooked al dente has less of an impact on blood sugar levels than pasta that is cooked until it is really soft, for example. Perhaps this fact wasn't known in 1946, I am not sure. The book advocates a diet high in carbohydrates, despite the fact that so many of us do very poorly on such a diet.

The book points to a study that showed that rats lived longer where they ate raw foods as compared to a processed 'chow' and claims that the only reason for this must be the lack of enzymes in the non-raw diet. But again, of course a diet with real food in it will be far healthier than a diet of highly processed food with a few added synthetic vitamins and minerals. It doesn't at all follow that this must be due to lack of enzymes. Again, there are other far bigger variables at play here. It is also a bit weird comparing the effects of cooked foods on animals and then on humans when only in humans was this something done by them for a long time, starting a long time ago. Rats are not well known for enjoying barbecues and cooking.

The book points to a study that showed that raw food was superior to tinned food. It is claimed that this can't possibly be due to a lack of vitamins in the tinned food, which is ridiculous as tinned foods are well known to have far lower vitamin levels and also to contain toxic compounds which act as anti-nutrients and so further deplete our nutrient stores. Again, there are other far bigger variables at play here. The author seems to know nothing at all of the mountains research done on nutrition and the role of vitamins and minerals in preventing and treating diseases. He writes off this whole topic fairly superficially. Of course foods with synthetic vitamins and minerals added will not have the same effect as real food, we don't even know all the different helpful compounds that make up each food and all the cofactors of each vitamin and so on, but this doesn't mean some supplements aren't immensely helpful and necessary.

One part of the book talks about a study that compared cooked food to raw food and found that raw food is superior. The raw food was a sprouted food of some sort and the cooked food was ....bread! Of course sprouts - one of the healthiest and most high-nutrient foods there is and entirely unprocessed - is going to be healthier than a highly processed and low-nutrient food like bread. There are so many more variables at play in this study than just raw versus cooked foods.

This book claims that because Eskimos eating a traditional diet doesn't get scurvy, and those eating tinned foods and other highly processed foods do, that this must be primarily due to lack of enzymes in processed foods. But it could be just as easily to do with a lack of vitamin C. The traditional Eskimo diet is high in vitamin C (from eating the adrenal glands and some other high vitamin C parts of animals) and the more carbohydrate you eat, the more vitamin C you need. So of course eating a diet high in carbohydrates and low in vitamin C would give you scurvy.

This book seems to be confusing the raw food issue with issues about unprocessed foods being healthier. Of course whole real foods are better for you than anything highly processed, but it doesn't follow that the sole or even main reason for this is lack of enzymes. There are many reasons why this is so.

I also disagree that raw vegetables are easier to digest than cooked ones. Some groups claim that the more foods we eat raw the healthier we will be, while other dispute this, and explain that humans have been heating for a very long time and that in fact cooking food makes many of the vitamins etc. more available to the body, lets us eat far more vegetables as cooking makes vegetables more compact and take less time to chew and so all vegetables we eat should be cooked. Healing expert Dr Lawrence Wilson writes:

"Many people advocate eating raw foods to obtain the "food enzymes" they contain. My experience is that this is not important. It is true that all foods contain certain enzymes that are damaged or destroyed by most cooking. Gentle steaming preserves a few of them. However, food enzymes are not the same as the digestive enzymes that are required to digest your food. It is not true that foods contain the enzymes needed to digest the food. Your body, not the food, must supply the bulk of the enzymes needed to digest the food. This is the important point. The only foods that I suggest people eat raw is certified or good quality raw dairy products and some other oils such as olive, flaxseed, and hempseed oils."

This tallies with my own experience. It is also backed up by books on gut health and digestion such as the GAPS diet and others. The book 'Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human' also has some good evidence on cooked vegetables being easier to digest than raw ones in the healthy stomach.

For me and for many other ill friends, eating raw vegetables is agony. They don't digest and just sit in the stomach like a rock, while cooked vegetables digest very easily. The idea that vegetables eaten raw are easier to digest is a myth that seems to never die. For many of us with severe digestion problems the difference between raw and cooked foods is like night and day.

Raw vegetables will often be very difficult for ill people to digest and may need to be avoided completely or almost completely until and unless digestion improves. Juices are usually an exception and easy to digest in a raw form due to the lack of fibre. Sometimes just lightly steaming vegetables will be enough, while others may need more moderate cooking to be digested well. Fruit may also be better tolerated if it is lightly cooked or even stewed first. Eating foods that you can digest easily, as opposed to foods that your stomach has problems with, means that your body has to expend less energy digesting your meals. Cooked foods may be digested more easily than raw foods, soaked and dried nuts and seeds are digested more easily than raw nuts, meats that are not overcooked are easier to digest than overcooked meats that have become tough, and so on.

I persevered for ages trying to eat a few of my vegetables raw, because I kept reading that the enzymes in these foods were important. When I started reading about how this information was wrong and switching almost entirely to cooked vegetables and even fruit...I felt such a big difference right away! So I really want to let others know about this if I can. The idea of raw vegetables being easier to digest is sadly written about as if it is a set in stone fact in dozens of otherwise very good health books I have been reading lately.

Eating cooked vegetables is also much more pleasant! They are easier to eat and taste far better too. Cooked strawberries are delicious and cooking stone fruit makes them taste amazing, even if the fruit wasn't the tastiest to begin with. Adding enzyme capsules and delicious homemade fermented foods such as sauerkraut made my stomach feel so much better too! Sauerkraut is easier to digest than a salad any day! You can feel the difference.

I agree with the author that cooking at very high heats isn't the best way to cook vegetables though, or anything else. Primitive man cooked food far less... Read more ›

This book has a lot of good information, but it reads like a research paper (which it was origionally, I think). Unless you're doing a research paper, there might me more helpful books to buy.

This book takes the view that the human body is totally dependant on Enzymes for health and longevity. Whilst not rejecting orthodox nutritional principles it concludes that the body utilises food enzymes for digestion and converts spare enzymes for the 1001 other metabolic processes our body undergoes each day. Dr Howell establishes through copious(!) references tot he literature that our body has a limited capacity to store and produce enzymes and that cooking food effectively destroys the enzyme content of foods. He reaches the conclusion that the Western Diet of cooked and processed food substains us for only so long and begins to poison us from a fairly early age. Being a non-medical person I couldn't challenge any part of this book and would recommend it unreservedly to anyone looking to research the area of natural nutritition and medicine.

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