by Tim O’Shea, Comments by Tony
“The joy of life depends on a sound stomach whereas bad digestion inclines one to skepticism, incredulity, breeds black fancies, and thoughts of death.” - Joseph Conrad
Why do we die? Why do we age? Why do things wear out? Do we just live our lives and then all of a sudden out of the blue a disease bug comes floating in from who knows where and causes an illness that kills us? Unless of course the right drug can be found to “kill the bug.”
Do you believe this? The majority of people in America actually do, but their numbers are shrinking steadily. People are now becoming aware that lifestyle has everything to do with susceptibility to disease. Lifestyle: you know – diet, stress level, mental outlook, daily physical movement, or lack thereof. Non-bug issues.
Many of us today are becoming disconsolate about seeing our parents die of the same diseases our grandparents died of. Despite all the “breakthroughs” we’re constantly reading about in the popular press, our health as a nation is not improving in the least.
The 10 major killers of Americans:
Heart Disease ……… 652,000
Cancer ……………….. 553,000
Stroke …………….. 150,000
Pulmonary disease ….. 121,000
Accidents …………… 112,000
Diabetes …………… 73,000
Alzheimer’s disease…… 65,000
Pneumonia/Flu …….. 59,000
Kidney Disease ……. 42,000
Suicide ……. 32,000
- National Vital Statistics, 2004
These figures are extremely difficult to find, since most epidemiological literature seeks to cover up the true figures by endless categories for age, sex, etc. and pretend that we’re making progress with some drug protocol or other.
The point is, except for accidents and suicide, these illnesses are largely preventable, in the sense that they are caused or aggravated by years of bad dietary habits. These diseases don’t just fly in on the night air and invade our pure, innocent bodies. Loading up on indigestible, devitalized foods slowly kills the body’s cells and tissues, week by week, month by month. Whichever particular organ gives out first – that’s what we say someone died of: he had a bad heart, he had a bad liver, he had a bad stomach, he was a lung-er, etc.
NAME YER POISON
Incontrovertible evidence that has been around for 75 years is now being brought forth and substantiated that the determining factor of health and long life may correspond to one simple condition: blood toxicity. Toxicity means poison.
You may think of poisons as things like arsenic, or cyanide, or rat poison, or things that secret agents in James Bond movies bite in capsules just before they’re captured. As every good ninja knows, there are many levels and types of poisons. The best ones kill you the slowest and are
undetectable. So let’s consider the slowest poisons of all: the food we eat.
Most modern food which the American diet comprises, is poison. Why do I say that? A good poison will:
block the flow of blood,
decrease the amount of oxygen to the tissues
interfere with one or more major systems of the body,
actually cause addiction to the poison itself
eventually kill the subject without ever being detected
No poison in history has achieved these goals on the scale that processed food has.
ACTION OF ENZYMES
So what are enzymes? We are surrounded by examples of enzyme activity every day. Take a banana. A green one. Put it on a windowsill for a couple days. It turns yellow and ripens. That’s enzymes working.
An alligator kills you in a swamp. But he doesn’t eat you right away. Instead he drags you off to some pile of brush and lets you rot for a few weeks. Then when you’re seasoned enough, you become an entree. What made the change? Enzymes.
A dog buries a bone. It was too hard. Two weeks later he digs it up. Nice and soft. Yum-yum. That’s enzymes at work.
“Without enzymes, seeds would not sprout, fruit would not ripen, leaves would not change color, and you would not exist.”
- d’Raye, p.3
Very simply, enzymes are properties of all living cells that bring about changes. Enzymes are specific proteins that are active in every cell of your body every second. Enzymes change things into usable forms.
As Dr. Royal Lee said long ago, enzymes
“… are the most important unit in the human body, because every chemical change that takes place to repair tissue or to assimilate food involves the activity of enzymes. Without enzyme activity there is no life. No plant or animal can live without the activity of its enzymes.”
- Conversations, 1955
Biologically, we are nothing more than collections of living cells. What happens to our cells happens to us. Life functions of cells are mediated by enzymes.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ENZYMES AND ENZYME ACTIVITY
The car sitting in your garage is useless till you put some gas in it and start driving. Same with enzymes. By themselves enzymes are just pieces to the puzzle. For enzymes to actually perform the thousands of tasks they do, helpers are necessary. Doctors call these helpers co-factors. Most co-factors are vitamins and minerals. The enzyme and the co-factors orchestrate themselves in an ultrasophisticated biochemical symphony called a complex. It is the enzyme complex that brings about enzyme activity – without all the players, the game doesn’t happen.
“Nutrients cannot work in isolation ….Absence of any one of these essential nutrients is enough to destroy our health.” – Erasmus, p 73
An enzyme supplement should contain these co-factors. If it doesn’t, the body itself must provide the missing nutrients. If the patient is vitamin or mineral deficient, taking an isolated enzyme supplement won’t have much beneficial effect. Enzyme activity is a major team effort.
“An enzyme is a functioning mechanism, not a chemical…. an enzyme itself is a living principle.”
- Conversations in Nutrition
The vitamins we’re talking about here are not the synthetic ones you usually see in the grocery store. Only natural whole food vitamins can collaborate with enzymes. As Dr. Lee wrote almost 50 years ago:
“When you take a vitamin out of this group and crystallize it and put it in a bottle, it becomes a … chemical. It is no longer part of the living substance. It is no longer a part of the living mechanism we call an enzyme.”
For more on whole food vs. synthetic vitamins, see the chapter Ascorbic Acid Is Not Vitamin C.
The big idea here is that vitamins, minerals, and enzymes need each other, like the three legs of a stool. In the wacky marketplace of today’s food supplements, it’s like we’re assaulted on all sides by people screaming Vitamins!, others yelling Minerals!, and others hollering Enzymes! as though each one alone were the Magic Bullet that can cure anything. The real ideas are cooperation, synergy, and co-factoring. Nothing exists in isolation in the body. An enzyme without co-factors has no enzyme activity.
- Things are starting to heat up. Check out Part 2 for the continuation!
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