Enzymes make everything happen in your body. They are like little protein robots that take things apart and puts them back together in different ways. They manufacture everything in our body. They also disassemble foods we eat into basic building blocks, so we can build what we need to become us.
We are experiencing an explosion of disease on this planet different from any other in our history. We have had massive plagues that have wiped out huge percentages of the human population. We have had droughts and ice ages and cosmic impacts that have wiped us out. But never have we experienced the level of internal self-destruction we see today. A central player in this unfolding drama is the lowly enzyme.
You see, we are loosing our enzymes. And with their loss we lose the ability to be healthy. Everything about our health requires enzymes to do the daily work of tearing down and building up our bodies. Why are we losing our enzymes? We have overwhelmed them with our crappy diets. We inactivate them with food colorings, preservatives, and chemical agents of all sorts. And further, we deny them the building blocks they need to build and repair themselves.
What I am talking about here is digestion and how little is actually taking place. We are literally starving ourselves for nutrition, while we drown in a sea of worthless and toxic calories.
I have written about digestion in the past from the perspective of the stomach and its need for hydrochloric acid production to initiate the first stage of digestion. But today I am looking at the next stage carried by the pancreas and small intestine. The stomach has to produce enough acid to unfold protein foods so that the enzymes in the second stage of digestion can come in and clip apart the proteins into tiny pieces that we can absorb. We also have to have the acid to change our food minerals into a form that can be absorbed. So if you are taking antacids or acid blocker drugs, then you are destroying your ability to digest the foods you need to survive.
Now lets look at this second stage of digestion – the enzyme stage. Right after the food leaves your stomach it is supposed to be mixed with a big squirt of enzymes from the pancreas and a load of bile from the liver/gall bladder. If the stomach has been able to do its job properly, your food will be all unwound and ready to be chemically cut up by the enzymes. The bile from the liver serves to break down any fat in the food and make it into small particles that can be absorbed.
But what happens if you do not produce enough enzymes? (Most of you don’t.) Nothing happens, and that IS A VERY BIG PROBLEM. If nothing happens then your proteins and starches do not break down into a small enough form, into amino acids and sugars, to be absorbed. If that were all there was to it, you would just slowly starve to death. But instead you are full of bacteria that go to work on these foods themselves. The bacteria that can eat undigested proteins for food are usually pathogenic bad guys. What little enzymes you do produce try to do their job, but it is too little too late to produce health. You get enough nutrition to not die, but not enough to be healthy. Your gut gets full of bad bacteria and the gut lining gets all inflamed.
Why doesn’t our pancreas produce enough enzymes? Making enzymes is a very difficult, energy consuming process. It requires all sorts of interesting minerals, vitamin co-factors, and good fats. If the foods we are eating every day are devoid of these vital minerals, vitamin co-factors, and good fats, then we can’t form the enzymes we need. If our diet is full of sugars that damage the energy producing engines in our body, then we don’t have the energy to produce enzymes. If our food is full of toxic chemicals that bind to and inactivate our enzymes, then we do not have enough to do the job. If our lifestyle is so hurried and stressed that we don’t even signal our body to go into the relaxation and digestion phase of the day, we never even get the signals to release the enzymes to do their job.
If we lived the perfect, natural, organic relaxed life that our body likes best for health, this would not be an issue…but we don’t. We eat toxic convenience foods, sweets, over cooked and fried foods all made from nutrient depleted grains and grain fed animals. We are stressed and hurried without the time to stop and digest our food. We use sugar, alcohol, and drugs to cope, and all of these destroy our digestive tract. Even if we were super groovy and did all the right things, we can’t even buy healthy nutritious foods anymore. The nutrition has been hybridized out of them in favor of bigger yields, longer shelf life, and prettier appearance. Even the soil they are grown in has been depleted of the vital minerals we need to be healthy.
I don’t expect any of these realities to be changing anytime soon, so that leaves us little choice if we want to be healthier. We can do as much as we can to choose as healthy a food as possible using farmer’s markets and organic choices. We can make general food choices avoiding sugars, bad vegetable oils, fried foods, and pen fed meats. We can fill our plates up with good greens and veggies, with sides of nuts and healthy meats. But in spite of doing all this, modern life will still stress out our pancreas. To cope we eventually have to support our digestion with supplemental minerals, enzymes, and hydrochloric acid. These things naturally decrease as we age anyway, but these days we want more health and life as our years progress. We are no longer content to just wind down and die. Sixty is the new forty.
I am convinced that most modern health problems start years earlier as poor digestion. The body has the blueprints for health. The directions are there and work well in our youth. It is how we screw up our supply of building materials for the maintenance of health that slowly takes us down. We each have different weak spots in our genetic programming, so the shoddy nutritional upkeep will hit each of us differently.
Big picture – what I am saying here is that if you value your health you must stop eating toxic foods and supplement your digestive process to optimize your nutritional intake. A building is only as strong as the materials you make it with and the ability to get those materials to the job site. Do that and your body can do most of the rest.