Food Enzymes -- Dr. Edward Howell's Secret

Research by this medical doctor dating from the 1920s-30s is still revolutionary. His findings point the way to a better and healthier life for all of us...

1. What's the Secret?
2. Anecdotes Supporting the Concept.
3. The Diabetes Link.
4. Robert's Personal Experiences.

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1. WHAT'S THE SECRET?

It may be hard to accept the fact that not one gastro-intestinal doctor in 1000 understands what is really going on with digestion of foods and how food enzymes relate to weight maintenance. Dr. Edward Howell, a medical doctor who began extensively researching this question nearly 70 years ago, discovered the true mechanism of action. He published his research in 1946 as a book titled The Status of Food Enzymes in Digestion and Metabolism. In 1980 it was slightly revised and reissued as Food Enzymes for Health and Longevity, and revised and reissued again in 1994. A popularized version of it was published in 1986 called Enzyme Nutrition which is still in print. Everyone should read Enzyme Nutrition to gain a fuller understanding of this concept. It is also a highly interesting book, and is filled many fascinating real life illustrations of how the concept works.

So, how can this be a "secret" if he published these books? Quite simply, it is a secret because people -- including medical doctors -- have not yet understood and accepted his message. We may be poised on the verge of an "food enzyme" revolution, a new birth of awareness which will radically change our dietary habits. Or we may not. Truth is immutable, however, and it is still your responsibility to design how you will live your life. Once you know the secret, then it is up to you...

The truth is simply this: our bodies were not designed for the food we give it. Well, everybody "knows" this, but they don't understand that our bodies are designed to function optimally only eating raw foods. Because people don't experience difficulty eating cooked food and because they haven't had enough experience eating raw food, their minds are simply unaware of the difference.

Now these questions must be asked: Why do we prefer cooked food? Why are raw foods so good for your body? How can we get the same benefits of raw foods while eating cooked foods? Can we use enzymes to lose weight?

Why do we prefer cooked food? Cooked food (and along with this category I am also including other processed foods, such as pickled, dried, fermented, etc.) in general tastes much better than raw food. That's the main reason why we prefer it. The process involved in making the food taste better also destroys the enzymes. They go hand in hand. I have noticed that even my cat prefers cooked food, so this illustrates that the taste improvement must actually be a pretty fundamental aspect of food chemistry.

Why are raw foods so good for your body? Raw foods are enzyme rich, and it is enzymes which actually do the "digesting" of food. Eating cooked food requires our bodies to make up for the lack of enzymes so that we can digest it. A doctor will tell you that our pancreas will manufacture the enzymes we need just fine. Unfortunately, they simply do not understand that the body actually handles raw foods (or foods which have been enzyme-supplemented) differently than our "normal" enzyme-depleted foods. The consequences of this extend to weight maintenance, energy levels, body tissue maintenance, immune system functioning, and even lifespan in general. The evidence for this is quite strong, but this is not taught in medical schools and so few doctors ever learn it. The lesson is clear: if you eat cooked food long-term, your body inevitably stores excessive amounts of fat, and you gain weight and develop degenerative diseases; if you eat raw food long-term, you stay sleek and slim and live a healthier life.

Food enzymes, in addition to actually doing food digestion, actually stabilize the metabolism of food by slowing digestion down and letting it proceed at a more "natural" pace. I should also point out that the popular misconception is that eating fat causes fat to be stored on the body, and that to loose weight fat intake should be reduced. This is a tremendous fallacy! All foods (fats, proteins, and carbohydrates) are converted into glucose. It is ONLY excess glucose (from ALL sources combined) that is stored as fat. Thus, the slower food processing caused by supplemental enzymes has a profound impact on weight maintenance because excess glucose levels can be avoided.

Enzymes are critical to the body's ability to repair and maintain itself. Enzymes are in fact like little "tools" which are required in every chemical reaction in the body. The pancreas is the body's primary enzyme and hormone factory, but it has a limited production potential. When the body's ability to produce enzymes declines to insufficiency, the body breaks down for good. The pancreas has a lot of demands on it, and it prioritizes its production of enzymes. Food enzymes are the highest priority, because the body has to very quickly dispose of what was put into it. By providing supplements of these enzymes, now other enzymes can be produced. Thus, for example, tissue repair will achieve higher priority, resulting in better skin tone over the long term. Even more interesting, lifespan itself has been experimentally correlated with enzyme potential in some species. Thus, it appears your body can actually live longer as well as be more active and healtier simply by providing supplemental food enzymes.

How can we get the same benefits of raw foods while eating cooked foods? Dr. Howell investigated this question and found that the right kind of enzyme supplements provided the same type of functioning as if the foods were enzyme rich. (It is critical to note, however, that very few places today sell the right kind of enzyme supplements.) Thousands of people now use this information in their lives every day. It benefits them in ways which are clearly visible to them in how their bodies work and how well they feel. Many of them also feed their cats and dogs enzyme-rich foods as well. The solution to the problem is to find the right kind of enzyme supplements to take with cooked and processed food to compensate for the ones removed.

Can we use enzymes to lose weight? Experience has shown that adding supplemental enzymes to a diet will not be a significant tool in losing weight. Additional lipase will assist to some degree, but there are other, more effective regimens which should be used to lose weight. (See the other pages referenced on the Alternative Health contents page.) However, supplemental enzymes should definitely be taken along with any other weight loss regimen, since they will prove invaluable in processing current food intake optimally and in getting the body onto a good weight maintenance track.

2. ANECDOTES SUPPORTING THE CONCEPT.

Even just a few anecdotes should make the point, but Howell's books are full of examples.

Example 1: When hog farmers used to feed hogs potatoes, they found out from experience that the potatoes needed to be cooked. They found out that hogs just did not get fat eating raw potatoes, however much they fed them.

Example 2: Experiments have been done in labs where they've taken wild mice and rats, fed them, and observed the results. If they are kept on a diet of raw foods (like they have in the wild) they stay sleek and trim, have more energy, are healthier, live longer, and look better than if they are fed the ordinary animal kibbled food (a cooked diet like dog food or our ever-present crackers or breads). When the wild animals are fed the same diet as our domestic animals, also become similarly overweight and develop the same kinds of degenerative diseases and cardiovascular that we people suffer as we age. It's the enzymes in the diet that makes the difference! When these animals are "sacrificed" so that their internal organs can be examined, the animals on the cooked food diet have significantly enlarged pancreases. This is an indication of physiological stress, and shows the pancreas has been enlarged by the body because of the continual, increased demand for enzymes.

Example 3: Early in the Twentieth Century there was a significant amount of medical research done into the lives of the Inuit (or "Eskimo") people who lived in the far north of Canada and Alaska. These people had for generations eaten a diet which was primarily composed of raw foods. In contrast to the image we have of them today of being fat, in fact they were a very attractive and naturally slim people who wore very thick fur coats. As trading posts began to infiltrate their area their lifestyles changed. Rather than being nomaic, they established settlements around the trading posts. Their diet changed and became our diet by buying food from the trading posts. As this occurred, the incidence of our typical cardiovascular diseases and problems of obesity also began to occur in parallel. In short, as they adopted our lifestyle and foods, they also adopted our diseases. Overweight people are now common among them as well.

Example 4: To illustrate the value of enzymes within food from a simple energy standpoint, enzymes can save a body a lot of extra work. Dog sled teams in the far north provide a perfect example. The Inuit always fed their dog teams with raw food that they had buried and let sit for a day or two. This allowed the enzymes to begin to predigest the food. A comparision of this traditional technique versus feeding the dogs fresh raw food was conducted in a field trial. The teams fed fresh raw food lost a significant amount of weight and were noticeably less capable. Thus, the traditional dogs were able to obtain more energy from their enzyme-enhanced raw food.

3. THE DIABETES LINK.

Of the three basic types of food (carbohydrates, proteins, and fats) "carbos" are by far the worst in terms of their impact on metabolism, and things like table sugar (sucrose) and white bread and cooked potatoes are by far the worst of those. This is because the carbos are very concentrated sources of glucose, and they are very rapidly converted into glucose in the blood stream. Gradual conversion of food into glucose is the ideal, so that the energy can be used up gradually in the body. However, when glucose levels rise too high in the blood stream, the body struggles to filter it out, and it has only three normal ways of doing so. The role of insulin is that of a "glucose carrier." Without insulin the glucose cannot be moved into body tissues.

The three paths are: First, glucose is moved into cells because they need the energy now (because of current physical and mental demands for more energy). Second, a small amount of glucose can be stored in the liver as a reserve for immediate, emergency use. This is only done if this reserve is low. Clearly the first two cannot handle a continual flood of excess glucose, so the third path ends up being the norm. That is, storing the glucose as fat in fat cells.

A fourth process may also occur when extremely high glucose levels exist in the blood, so this is abnormal: spilling glucose into the urine, which is a typical yet significant diabetic physiological problem. The complications of persistent high levels of blood glucose levels are the destruction of the capillaries. This occurs first in the retina of the eyes (causing blindness) and then next the kidney (causing kidney dysfunction). More complications include loss of circulation in the extremities, with amputation being the ultimate solution.

Sucrose is so fast in its conversion into glucose that it produces an almost panic response in the body, causing the pancreas to go into emergency enzyme and hormone production to balance the whipsaw effects on glucose levels as they shoot up and then down. The body first moves excess glucose out of the blood, and then because the glucose levels rapidly drop below their starting values, the body goes the other way and has the liver release more glucose to bring them back up to a normal level.

Excessive consumption of diets too rich in carbos, and sucrose in particular, is responsible for virtually all type II diabetes in our country. Eating too many rich carbos eventually produces a condition which can be described loosely as "insulin intolerance." With so much insulin floating around in the blood stream, the body's cell walls develop a resistance to insulin. So, the body loses the ability to filter out gluose when its levels are too high.

Supplemental food enzymes reduce all these problems. Note, however, that they cannot entirely compensate for such a bad diet.

4. ROBERT'S PERSONAL EXPERIENCES.

Now let me report my experience in using supplemental enzymes. After a couple years of taking an enzyme supplement with every meal my body has grown used to them. If I forget to take them with a meal of cooked food, my body definitely knows the difference and tells me via a very mild stomach discomfort which is more like a sensation than a stomach ache, "I'm having a stress reaction, I need enzymes!" I do not view this as being bad -- quite the contrary, it shows that I am adapted to normal digestive functioning. Essentially I have learned that anything more than just a handfull of cooked food should be supplemented with an enzyme capsule. In contrast, if I eat a large salad and other raw food, no supplements are necessary.

Another thing is that it is readily apparent to me that my body itself needs less food (only one-half to two-thirds of my "pre-enzyme normal" levels) because it takes a lot of energy to manufacture food enzymes inside the body. Providing external enzymes with my meals actually means that I save wear-and-tear on my pancreas (which can now produce more enzymes for my overall health) as well as saving money (it costs me less per month for the enzymes than the food I don't have to eat).

Two more consequences should be noted. It is hard to discuss these objectively, since the effects are gradual or minor. However, I do believe they are real. One is that my sense of physical energy and well-being has picked up a bit from taking the enzymes. The other is that my apparent aging has slowed down a bit. I am at an age where deterioration should be increasingly rapid, and it is not. In fact, people routinely think I am significantly younger than my true age.

After over five year of taking supplemental enzymes I am extremely pleased with them. Apart from the minor inconvenience of always carrying a little vial of capsules with me all the time -- and remembering to take them -- I can find no disadvantages, and I am very satisfied with the results. I even now sprinkle enzymes over my cat's food, and the cat has no problems and appears to be doing quite well on the supplement.

Unfortunately, very few health food stores carry the right kinds of enzymes, and they cost more than if you buy them mail-order. The essential enzymes are amylase (for carbohydrates), protease (for proteins), and lipase (for fats). Oftentimes cellulase (for cellulose) will be added to help process vegetable matter which is not fully digested. These should be derived from vegetable sources and must be contained in a capsule which dissolves in the stomach (i.e., NOT "enteric coated," since this is for passing into the intestine before dissolving).

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