You can't have good health if you're not digesting properly. And enzymes are the key to it all! Still, many people are confused about what enzymes are and why we need them, so we decided to take some time to explain it — so that you can explain it to others, too!
What Are Enzymes?
Enzymes are special proteins that are the life-force of everything that is living. Some enzymes deal with metabolism while others help your body digest foods. We're going to focus on the enzymes that deal with digestion - "food enzymes" are found in raw food.
Digestive enzymes are produced in your pancreas. Both help your body digest food. As important as they are, the enzymes in raw foods are also the most fragile nutrient, as they are the first nutrients to be lost in the cooking process. Enzymes begin to die at 107ºF, and are completely destroyed at 122ºF — which is far below the temperature of boiling or even steaming, meaning that even steamed vegetables, though still nutritious in many respects, are technically a dead food with no living enzymes.
Why Take A Digestive Enzyme Supplement?
If you eat cooked or processed foods of any kind — which have no enzymes to help with digestion — it is especially important for you to take a supplement of living enzymes to maintain proper digestion and improve nutrient absorption. Why? Because foods that are difficult to digest stress the digestive tract. Digestive stress can create a traffic jam in your gut, causing gas, bloating, loss of energy, and sluggish elimination. If you don't relieve that stress with a digestive enzyme supplement, your body cannot concentrate on providing energy for other activities.
Food without enzymes forces the pancreas to secrete enzymes for digestion. Too much cooked food will overtax the pancreas, which then summons help from your immune system, distracting it from keeping you well. In other words, too much cooked food can literally make you sick. Furthermore, studies have shown that supplemental enzymes are beneficial even with raw foods because the concentration of enzymes is higher in a supplement than in a raw food that may not have been grown in ideal conditions.
Enzymes in Cooked Food vs Raw Food
When you lose all the enzymes in a food that has been cooked, you are losing more than just enzymes. Enzymes are involved in a synergistic sort of way in helping all vitamins, minerals and amino acids (protein) to be absorbed into the body. Loss of enzymes in food will have an impact on the vitality and absorbability of all other major nutrients in that food. Raw foods, on the other hand, do contain enzymes that help them auto-digest. This is part of the reason why raw foods are beneficial; because they have their own enzymes, they require less energy to digest because they don't require your body to supply the enzymes. However, even in raw foods, these enzymes are not always abundant.
What Makes Hallelujah Diet Digestive Enzymes Unique?
Multiple enzymes in combination often produce the best results. Several different types of enzymes are actually required to break down carbohydrates, and several more for proteins, and another set of enzymes for fats. Getting the right combination of enzymes is key to successfully improving digestion—this is exactly why Hallelujah Diet Digestive Enzymes contains a special blend of enzymes that are specially selected to absorb foods recommended on The Hallelujah Diet.So there you go; pretty simple, really. Once you understand what enzymes do and how they help you get the most from your food, it's easy to see why so many people rave about how they help.
Do you take digestive enzymes or rely on raw food enzymes? Comment below!
