Enzymes: How Vital in One's Diet?

The following article came to us recently in two parts. Both come from the teachings of Dr. Francis Pottinger, Dr. Weston Price and Dr. Edward Howell.  I think you will find the insights in the role of whole, unadulterated foods in creating optimum health more relevent today given the steadily declining state 
of health in our society over the last sixty years due to the nearly universal popularity of cooked food and processed/refined foods.

WHY ENZYMES? 

If you were to take only one thing to supplement your diet, Lifestar believes that due to the prevalence of cooked and processed foods, enzymes may be the single most important support for your health and well being. The following will provide you with sufficient information to gain your own understanding and make up your own mind.

The Missing Link to Health 

There is convincing evidence derived from the works of Drs. Francis Pottinger, Jr.,1 Weston Price2 and Edward Howell3 that the destruction of enzymes in the cooking and processing of food is, perhaps, the most significant factor in chronic and degenerative diseases in both humans and animals. It begins with a phenomenon known as digestive leukocytosis.

"Leukocytosis" is a pathological condition defined in Dorlands Illustrated Medical Dictionary as "a transient increase in the number of leukocytes in the blood, resulting from various causes, such as hemorrhage, fever, infection, inflammation, etc."

Leukocytosis was first discovered in 1846. At first, it was considered normal because everyone who was tested had it. Paul Kautchakoff, M.D.4 later found that leukocytosis was not normal. In fact, the major cause of leukocytosis was discovered to be the eating of cooked food. An entire category of leukocytosis was classified as "digestive leukocytosis," that is, the elevation of the white blood cell level in response to the lack of enzymes in the cooked food in the intestine. It is
pathological because the pancreas was never intended to provide 100% of the digestive enzymes needed.

Dr. Kautchakoff divided his findings into four classifications according to the severity of the pathological reaction in the blood:

1.. Raw food produced no increase in the white blood cell count. 
2.. Commonly cooked food caused leukocytosis. 
3.. Pressure cooked food caused even greater leukocytosis. 
4.. Man-made, processed and refined foods, such as carbonated beverages, alcohol, vinegar, white sugar, flour, and other foods, caused severe leukocytosis. Cooked, smoked and salted
animal flesh brought on violent leukocytosis consistent with ingesting poison. This phenomenon occurs after eating cooked food, since prolonged heat above 118 degrees Fahrenheit destroys enzymes in food. Three minutes in boiling water destroys the enzymes; pasteurization destroys 80% to 95%; and baking, frying, broiling, stewing and canning destroys
100%. Nature designed food with sufficient enzymes within it to digest that food when it is ingested. When enzymes are destroyed by cooking or other processing, ingesting that food
triggers the body's immune system, and it responds with leukocytosis.

Many health professionals are coming to the conclusion that this syndrome is an abusive scenario that puts significant stress on the pancreas, accounting for the enlarged pancreases of people in industrialized societies, and contributing to blood sugar problems such as diabetes and hypoglycemia, as well as the proliferation of chronic degenerative disease.

What Is An Enzyme? 

The medical dictionary defines an enzyme as "a protein produced in a cell capable of greatly accelerating, by its catalytic action, the chemical reaction of a substance (the substrate) for which it is specific." 

This is the standard definition taught in medical school. But more significantly, enzymes are the body's workers. Enzymes operate on a biological and chemical level, perhaps even the
radiological level, and although vitamins, minerals, hormones, proteins and other substances are essential to life, it is enzymes that perform the work and utilize these substances in restoring,
repairing and maintaining health and life. Enzymes are the closest thing to what can be described as a "life force." Without them, life would not exist. In fact, when enzyme levels fall below a given level in any living system, life ceases.

Attempts to produce synthetic enzymes have failed. Science has identified over 80,000 different enzyme systems, and it is suspected that there may be hundreds of thousands, even millions of different types of enzymes. Yet although science endeavors to know what certain types of enzymes are made of, no one has yet been able to directly measure or take a picture of one.

What Do Enzymes Do?

Enzymes build, orchestrate and unify the physical expression we call "life." They seem to know precisely what to do and when to do it. They "assemble" molecules during their formative growth and they take molecules apart when individual cells are fractured. Enzymes create and modulate
every system in the body. Enzymes help assemble a human body from a one-cell organism into a 50 to 70 trillion-cell life form. Enzymes are involved in repairing the body when it is damaged; they transport, use, and transform oxygen molecules and every other nutrient the body needs; they break down metabolic waste and the by-products of cells; they quench free radicals, and they split off unwanted molecules from nutrients, adding necessary ones. The physical existence of every human being and the existence of all other living organisms is totally dependent upon the ability of enzymes to do their job. 

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Part 2

Food Enzymes, 
Doctor Francis Pottinger, Doctor Weston Price #2 

Cells can even create "customized" enzymes for specific purposes. For example, prior to 1947 cyanocobalamin, the commercial form of vitamin B-12, did not exist, yet the body is usually able to custom manufacture an enzyme to split off the cyanide molecule from the cobalamin which was added in the manufacturing process to stabilize the product and increase shelf-life. Unless the appropriate enzyme is created and removes the cyanide, cyanocobalamin is biologically inert in
the body. There have been documented cases where infants have been harmed or worse from receiving B-12 (cyanocobalamin) shots because the infants body lacked the ability to make the appropriate enzyme to split the cyanide molecule off. The result was cyanide poisoning. 

Enzymes do things that in a laboratory require up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit to duplicate. They are present in raw food in direct proportion to the proteins, complex carbohydrates, lipids and other food constituents that exist there. Food enzymes break food down so its constituents are small enough to pass into the blood or lymph system, enabling the body to effectively utilize them.

Eating cooked or manufactured food forces the body to call upon the immune system to donate enzymes in the digestive process, a process nature did not intend the immune system to
participate in habitually. It was meant to function as a back up. But when it is chronically called upon to fulfill this roll, it creates a stress upon the body that contributes to premature aging and a pathological enlargement of the pancreas, with chronic depletion of metabolic enzymes from white blood cells. The immune systems primary defense mechanism in the blood is the secretion of appropriate enzymes by specialized blood cells that disassemble foreign substances that threaten the local ecology. When food is eaten that does not have sufficient enzyme levels within it to accomplish digestion, the condition such an insufficiency creates triggers the immune response. The sleepy, lethargic feeling many people get after eating is a symptom of the depletion the body suffers in this process. There are simply not enough metabolic enzymes left in the blood after eating to run the body at pre-meal levels. The depletion results in a loss of energy taken from operating the body to digest what was ingested.

How Does the Body Get Its Enzymes?

We are born with the ability to produce our own metabolic enzymes, an ability that appears to be limited. Dr. Edward Howell equated it to being born with an enzyme bank account that is finite. We have an enzyme capability designed to last our entire lifetime. How often we make withdrawals and how big they are determines our enzyme "balance," and that balance affects the level of health we enjoy. It may also affect the length of our life span. Constantly writing checks out of our enzyme account without making deposits ends up running our body on deficits. These deficits inevitably show up as problems in the body. Those who write lots of checks and make
few deposits, sooner or later are likely to end up with enerative and other disease.

Of course, we also get enzymes from outside sources other than food, such as those made by a variety of intestinal bacteria. Lactose intolerance, is a deficiency in ß-galactosidase, a lactose
digesting enzyme made by certain strains of acidophilus bacteria living in the intestine. If the bacteria in the intestine does not exist in sufficient numbers to produce enough ß-galactosidase, an intolerance to dairy products may result.

Due to modern food processing, packaging, and preparations that make longer shelf-life possible, prepared food is essentially dead relative to human and animal nutritional needs. Over
90% of the average American diet today is comprised of processed and cooked food. Food is even irradiated without being labeled to give consumers an informed choice, thereby destroying enzymes without cooking. 

e-mail: healthfree@healthfree.com

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Note: I received this Newsletter as an e-mail with links to this information, but since the links didn't work I decided that the data was important enough to post it on my own Website.
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