Better Nutrition Article:
What on Earth is an Enzyme?
Enzymes are the workers in our body that make everything function, by enabling chemical reactions. All living cells contain enzymes. They are hard to visualize, since they are not something tangible, but they are essential to our bodies and our lives depend on them.
There are many kinds of enzymes, and they do everything from helping us breath to helping begin life at conception. Eighty percent of our DNA code relates to enzymes. But the kind of enzymes discussed here relate to our digestion and the food we eat.
In the process of digestion, the digestive enzymes in our bodies break down food into tiny microscopic parts that the body can use for fuel, growth and repair. One food may take hundreds of different types of enzymes for the body to digest.
Food is naturally filled with enzymes, called ?food enzymes?, that help us to digest that food. The problem is that when we cook or process it, we kill those enzymes. Temperatures over 118 degrees will destroy the enzymes. A good example of this is pineapple, which has some very powerful digestive enzymes in it. These enzymes work so well that when added to gelatin (like Jello), the enzymes won't allow the gelatin to thicken. So they only kind of pineapple you can add to gelatin is canned pineapple, which has been cooked and processed so that all the enzymes have been destroyed. It is now safe to add to gelatin, but not as good for your body.
Our body can manufacture enzymes, called digestive enzymes, in the pancreas. But when we eat a diet that is filled with mostly cooked and processed foods, depleted of enzymes, the pancreas is forced to work much harder than it was meant to, manufacturing the enzymes the body needs to digest these foods.
So the pancreas ends up overworking, and the body spends much needed energy and resources on digestion instead of important things like boosting the immune system, growth, repairs in the body and fighting disease. Even worse, if the pancreas becomes so overworked that it shuts down, then bits of undigested food start floating around the body in the bloodstream, causing all kinds of trouble.
The pancreas can be healed in time, with a diet of raw foods filled with enzymes. This same kind of diet, filled with raw fruits, vegetables, seeds and nuts, will keep the pancreas from getting that bad to begin with, and will enable the body to spend it?s energy on more important processes like boosting the immune system and fighting disease.
This is why it is so vital that we eat a diet containing lots of fresh enzyme filled raw foods. Especially in the world we live in today, where we are surrounded by poisons and things that cause cancer. We need these wholesome foods now more than humans ever have in the past, to help our bodies stay disease free and functioning properly.
By Dianne Ronnow, � 2005 Mohave Publishing. All rights reserved. This article can be found at the Enzyme Health web site at Enzyme-Health.com.
Dianne Ronnow's best selling book reveals how thousands of people are losing weight and getting healthier adding coconut oil to their diets. To find out what the secrets of coconut oil are, Check out her site at: Coconut-Oil-Diet.com. Get the book now and start losing weight today!
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