ENZYMES The key to longevity

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ENZYMES: THE KEY TO LONGEVITY

- Tim O'Shea

 

 

 

 

 

 

"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.

In Chapter One (www.thedoctorwithin.com)

we saw the 10 major killers of

Americans:

 

Heart Disease ......... 726,000

Cancer .................... 539,000

Stroke ................. 159,000

COPD .................... 109,000

Accidents ............... 95,000

Pneumonia/Flu ........ 24,000

Diabetes ............... 62,000

Suicide ................ 30,000

Kidney Disease ....... 25,000

Liver Disease ....... 25,000

 

 

 

- National Vital Statistics, 1999

 

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:

 

 

 

1. block the flow of blood,

2. decrease the amount of oxygen to the tissues

3. interfere with one or more major systems of the body,

4. actually cause addiction to the poison itself

5. 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 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.

 

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 Chapter 11 - 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. That's hype. The real ideas

are cooperation, synergy, and co-factoring. Nothing exists in isolation

in the body.

SPECIFIC SHAPES

 

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. 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 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 do 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 class authority on

enzymes and human nutrition, talks about how enzymes are denatured

above 118ºF. Since water boils at 212º, 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 to complete digestion.

SAVINGS ACCOUNT

 

We have two main types of enzymes in our

bodies. Dr. Edward Howell,

probably the leading world authority on enzymes, 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 (cell

functions, body systems)

- 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 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, get the idea? 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 without placing a burden on the body's

own enzyme reserves. 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