Enzymes are definately one of the most important topics with regards to your food in relation to your health, vitality and longevity.

Enzymes are absolutely fascinating. They are the sparks of life. Although our scientists can synthesise and replicate the protein structure of an enzyme, they cannot activate it. And why is that? Simply because they cannot give it that spark of life. Only nature can do that. As emphasised by Dr. Robert Denkewalter, a prominant scientist who was the first to synthesize an enzyme protein, enzymes are actually quite an embarrassment to modern science because:

Enzymes can do at body temperatures and in simple solution what we chemists can do only with corrosive agents and at high temperatures and with laborious processes.

Enzymes are living, biochemical factors that activate and carry out all the biological processes in the body, such as digestion, nerve impulses, detoxification, RNA & DNA function, repairing and healing the body, you even need them to think! So they are absolutely essential for life!

All the food that Mother Nature provides for us contains loads of enzymes. Now this is great news for us, because our capacity as an organism to make enzymes is exhaustible. Therefore, on a biological level, how we use and replenish our enzyme resources will be a measure of our overall health and longevity. So does anyone want to guess what happens when we cook food? We kill the enzymes! Now it's not like the vitamins and minerals, where we destroy perhaps 50%, 70%, maybe even 90%. No, when it comes to enzymes, we kill them all, 100%. It's like a nuclear wipe-out.

So the next logical question would be, what impact does destroying the enzymes in our food have on our health? It is estimated that there are about 50,000 enzymes that are busily working in our bodies. We've actually only identified 3000 of these enzymes, 24 of which are the digestive enzymes. Although we do need some digestive enzymes, each natural raw food actually contains the exact mix and proportion of enzymes needed to break down that particular food. For instance an apple would contain a lot of amylase, the enzymes that break down carbohydrate, but it would probably not contain a lot of protease and lipase, ie the enzymes that break down protein and fat.

The point is that when you eat raw foods your body doesn't have to produce as many digestive enzymes, as these are already provided in the food. This is known as the Law of Adaptive Secretion, which was first put forth by research at Northwestern University and thereafter confirmed by many other researchers and universities. The Law of Adaptive Secretion states that "the living organism will secrete no more enzymes than are needed for digestion of a particular food."; So, if you eat cooked food which contains no enzymes then the burden of digestion rests solely on your body which has to produce all the digestive enzymes needed, hence depleting your overall enzyme potential. By eating raw foods you conserve the body's enzymes for use towards non-digestive, metabolic processes such as detoxification, repair, proper endocrine function, proper immune function, basically proper function of all your vital organs and systems.

This becomes particularly clear when we see how much our enzyme level is linked to chronological age and disease. Research has shown that older people have a much lower level of enzymes. And this is not surprising when you think about how many enzymes we waste in order to digest these masses of cooked food that we keep putting in our mouths day in and day out. But what's also really interesting to note is that lower levels of enzymes are found in people who are ill and have chronic diseases. For instance lower levels of amylase in people with liver disease.

To help demonstrate this point lets consider some research done in Sweden at the Karolinska Hospital. They found that when they put animals on a diet of cooked and processed foods similar to the regular western diet, the animals initially appeared to be as healthy as the animals on raw foods. As the animals reached adulthood, those on the cooked and processed foods began to age more quickly. They also developed chronic degenerative diseases at an early age. And these degenerative diseases resembled the very human diseases that are so common in our society, such as arthritis, osteoporosis, constipation, diabetes, heart disease and so on. Those animals raised on raw foods did not suffer from these problems.

Now I don't know what's running through your mind, but I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I'm eating cooked food practically my whole life, what's going on in my body that I might not be aware of?" Well don't worry, there's good news too. The ill health of those animals that had been fed cooked food could be reversed. It couldn't be done with mega doses of vitamin and mineral supplements however. The only thing that worked to reverse the aging process and bring the animals back to a normal state of health was to give them raw foods.

Eating raw food is the number one activity, which preserves enzymes and maximises health!