Enzymes are known to have very specific jobs to do. Their activity is compared to keys that must fit certain locks. Enzymes are long-chain proteins held together in very specific shapes by hydrogen bonds. Think of a ball of string which is held in a very weird shape by tiny strips of Velcro. If anything happens to the Velcro-like bonds, the enzyme protein unravels, losing its shape. Without the shape, the key can no longer fit the lock. Then it’s no longer an enzyme – just another foreign protein. And what do foreign proteins cause in our body? Right – inflammation. Immune response. And that’s exactly the meaning of auto-immune. The body now attacks itself because it senses there’s an alien on board. Self has become not-self.
If the bonds are broken, the enzyme collapses, and can no longer do its specific job. Such a collapsed enzyme is said to be denatured. Several things cause an enzyme to become denatured:
- heating above 118 F (cooking)
- drugs
- alcohol
- fluoride
- free radicals
- food processing
- canning
- irradiation
- genetic engineering
COOKED VS. RAW
Edward Howell MD, world authority on enzymes and human nutrition, talks about how enzymes are denatured above 118F. Since water boils at 212F, you can see how cooking is detrimental to most foods. That’s why when it comes to vegetables, steaming is much better than overcooking. Overcooking destroys enzymes and vitamins.
Another expert in this area was Dr. Francis Pottenger. His famous experiments with cats in the 1930s are just as relevant today as ever. He took two groups of cats and for years personally supervised their feeding. One group was given exclusively raw, uncooked food. The other was given only cooked food. Results were overwhelmingly clear: the raw food cats all lived a long, disease-free life. Cooked food cats became sick and died much younger. (Bieler, p 192)
Also notable was that cats who became sick on a long-term all-cooked diet could not regain their health even when placed on a raw foods diet. Irreversible damage. Cooked food cats produced only two sickly generations, the second of which was invariably sterile. Natural selection.
Fad diet recommendations that ignore this basic premise are all the more flawed. Raw foods before cooked, steamed veggies before boiled, poached before hard-boiled, rare meats before well-done: the more intact enzymes still in the food, the less we tax the body’s own enzyme stores.
SAVINGS ACCOUNT
We have two main types of enzymes in our bodies. Dr. Edward Howell, in his masterwork Enzyme Nutrition, tells us it’s as though we are given a bank account of enzyme energy at the beginning of our lives. The bank account contains two types of enzyme currency:
- metabolic enzymes
- digestive enzymes
The more of that bank account we have to use for digestion, the less is left over for the thousands of other tasks which the metabolic enzymes have to perform in our bodies. Minor details like thinking, breathing, walking, seeing, cell life, etc. – all depend on enzymes. So think of people grossly overweight. Do they perform all these other functions well, or do they seem impaired? Obvious. Reason: they have to expend too much of their enzyme bank account trying to digest all the heaps of indigestible food that keeps coming down the hatch. So there’s not much left over for basic life functions.
METABOLIC ENZYMES
Metabolic means having to do with operating the body’s specific systems. Cell life, nerve transmission, brain signals, hormone distribution, oxygen exchange, liver function, acid-base balance in the blood, stuff like that. All these jobs require specific enzymes in order to happen, on a second-by-second basis. Metabolic enzymes are the worker protein molecules that keep this whole biochemical circus going all day long.
Metabolic enzymes are what actually utilizes the nutrients that have been broken down by the digestive enzymes, provided that normal digestion has taken place. So the direct interrelationship between the two types of enzymes – digestive and metabolic – is not really a big subject for debate.
DIGESTIVE ENZYMES
The class of enzymes you’re probably most familiar with is the one that involves digestion. The mouth, the stomach, the pancreas, the liver, and the intestine produce various enzymes whose job is to break down any food we eat into usable components. No matter how greasy, no matter how much extra cheese, or how much white sugar, how many chemicals, no matter how indigestible a food is, your body will try to break it down by means of enzymes. Now some foods are very easy on the body. Turns out, those are the ones which contain within them all the enzymes necessary for complete digestion. Examples: apples, corn, watermelon, green peppers, pears, celery, etc. Raw fruits and vegetables. These foods don’t require
that the body waste energy producing a lot of powerful digestive juices in order to change them into a usable form.
THREE FOODS
We all know that human food comes in three varieties:
fats
protein
carbohydrates
Each is a large molecule made of smaller units. Since the body prefers the smaller units, these large fat, protein, and carbohydrate chains must be broken down. Fats are broken down to fatty acids; proteins are broken down to amino acids; carbohydrates are broken down to glucose molecules. The process of breakdown is called digestion.
Each food type has a special enzyme to make this breakdown happen:
Lipase - is the enzyme that breaks down fat.
Protease - breaks down protein.
Amylase - breaks down carbohydrates.
Now many doctors and others with no background in nutrition will say that we can eat anything we want because the body’s digestive enzymes are designed to break the food down. This would be true if we were eating an 80% natural diet. By that I mean a diet in which most foods contain within them the enzymes necessary for complete breakdown. The natural diet leaves behind no residue from the digestive activity. That is normal digestion.
But we don’t have a natural diet. Most of us have a SAD diet – the Standard American Diet. You know – burgers, fries, pizza, beer, chips, donuts, coke, etc. These are non-foods, new to the human species in the past century. Our digestive systems were never designed to break these
chemical bizzarros down. So the stuff doesn’t get digested – it just sits there, rotting. Abnormal diet = abnormal digestion.
TOXEMIA AND VICARIOUS ELIMINATION
Toxemia means blood poisoning. Way back in 1926, a famous Colorado healer, JH Tilden MD, wrote a book which was the culmination of a lifetime of
clinical experience, Toxemia Explained. Dr. Tilden was radical. He didn’t believe drugs cured disease. He had one simple thesis:
“… every so-called disease is a crisis of toxemia, which means that toxin has accumulated in the blood above the toleration point. … the crisis, the so-called disease – call it cold, flu, pneumonia, headache, or typhoid fever – is a vicarious elimination. Nature is endeavoring to rid the body of toxin.” Toxemia Explained p. 49
A disease is named for where the toxins accumulate so much that that body part starts failing.
This concept of disease, known as vicarious elimination, has never been disproven. What happens is, the normal avenues for expelling waste – liver, kidneys, colon – are overwhelmed by the amount of poisons being accumulated. As a survival instinct, various other organs of the body which were not designed for elimination of toxins become enlisted to help get rid of wastes. They try desperate measures to expel the indigestible, rotting poisons, often becoming inflamed or diseased themselves in the attempt.
One obvious example of this idea is acne. Acne is not a skin problem. It is a vicarious elimination: the blood and the colon are so backed up with poisons that are accumulating faster than they can escape that the body tries an extreme solution: expel the poisons through the body’s largest organ: the skin. An alternative escape route. As the poisons leave, they irritate the normal skin and cause rash, redness, or pustulated eruptions, like pimples or boils. This is why skin creams and lotions don’t work in such a scenario. It’s not a skin problem. It’s a problem of chronic blood poisoning by means of an indigestible diet. Third World people rarely get acne. Acne is a disease of excess, a consequence of the fast food lifestyle.
Chronic “incurable” eczema and psoriasis often fall into the same category. People suffer needlessly for years with these diseases, under the direction of their well-intentioned but clueless dermatologist who has convinced them that their only hope is to find the right medication for their “skin disease.”
Same with the kidneys. Their original job was simply to maintain water and electrolyte balance within the blood. But with the advent of modern foods of commerce, suddenly the kidneys find themselves spending all their energy trying to filter out these new manmade chemicals from the blood – a function for which they were never designed. Result: kidney disease today is the #9 cause of death in the US. (Historical Statistics)
Dr. Henry Bieler offers another example of vicarious elimination: the lungs take over for the kidneys. When the level of toxins in the blood exceeds the kidneys’ capacity to eliminate them via the urine, the lungs try to take up some of the slack. The lungs secrete some of the blood’s toxins through their mucous membranes. Such toxicity irritates and inflames the delicate lung membranes, and can be the initial cause of pneumonia, bronchitis, asthma, edema or virtually any other lung problem. (p 164)
Same with a cold. A cold is simply the body’s way of saying that the level of toxicity has now surpassed the body’s ability to get rid of wastes through the normal avenues: colon, kidneys, and liver. So it will try alternative or vicarious routes: nose, mouth, throat, eyes, lungs.
Bieler uses this same model to explain dysmenorrhea and pelvic inflammatory disease: irritation of female organs when they are used as alternate routes of toxin removal from the blood, every month. At menopause, when this avenue of detox falls into disuse, various new problems may occur as a result. ( p. 172) Vicarious elimination: an organ of reproduction being used as an emergency organ of detoxification.
Again, Tilden’s theory of vicarious elimination is that many diseases are really just an organ’s emergency attempt to discharge excess poisons because the primary avenues are overloaded. If that body part is overwhelmed in the process, it becomes diseased and we pretend that that organ, in isolation from the rest of the body, is the problem.
Such thinking is more than just simplistic and disingenuous; if medical decisions are based on false perceptions characterizing the diseased organ as the disease, the results can range from ineffective to fatal.
Dr. Tilden felt that undigested food in the intestines and in the blood was the primary cause of all disease. His ideas are now being substantiated in most gastroenterology journals, which explore in great detail the ‘modern’ phenomenon of
LEAKY GUT SYNDROME
The reason the food remains undigested is lack of enzymes.
Here’s what happens: We eat trashy food. We can’t digest it. It remains in our intestines in a rotting form for weeks on end. Eventually the protective intestinal lining weakens and allows some of the rotting, undigested food to enter the bloodstream. Once in the blood, the toxic debris can settle just about anywhere. As a foreign protein, the debris can then initiate an inflammatory reaction at the particular location where it happens to end up. The snap diagnosis is that we have a problem at the site of the inflammation: the joints, the muscles, the liver, the kidneys, the intestines, the stomach, whatever.
Then we are given drugs to cover up the symptoms. Doctors pretend they can treat that single ‘problem’ part in isolation from the rest of the body. That’s why it doesn’t work. According to Dr. Tilden, these types of chronic, mysterious illnesses almost always have toxemia as the underlying cause.
Dr. Tilden was ahead of his time. His ideas are far superior to modern drug remedies. In most chronic disease situations, especially one that has baffled all the medical geniuses, Tilden’s approach should be tried first, if one is to have any hope at all of a complete, permanent recovery.
Thomas Sydenham, the most famous English physician of the 17th century, long ago supported Tilden:
“Disease is nothing else than an attempt on the part of the body to rid itself of morbific matter.”
- Bieler , p 40
Morbific – that means dead and rotting.
- That's it for Part 2, Part 3 will discuss more on Shelf Life of food products.
No comments:
Post a Comment