Foods For Energy, Digestion and Healing - The FINAL Chapter!

The four categories of enzymes found in the body and in raw foods (especially sprouts) each have a very different specific function:
· Lipase breaks down fat
· Protease breaks down protein
· Cellulase breaks down cellulose (fiber)
· Amylase breaks down starch

Eating raw foods daily helps supply digestive enzymes to prevent the body from having to use its own enzymes to break down fat in the food you eat. Enzymes also help break down any excess body fat that's just "hangin' around." Raw foods containing lipase are the ones that have naturally-occurring "good" fat like avocados, nuts, and cold-pressed vegetable oils. Eat small amounts often.

Many people have been taught never to combine fruits and vegetables at the same meal. Adding fresh fruit to a vegetable salad, or juicing carrots, peaches and pears together would have been considered digestive suicide only a few short years ago. New enzyme research, however, shows that RAW fruits and vegetables perform perfectly together.

Sprouting nuts, seeds, legumes and grains activates essential enzymes and makes them as easy to digest as raw fruits and vegetables, even if they are then cooked. Soaked almonds, even though they are high in protein, digest well even when combined with a starchy food such as bananas.

What about the warning never to combine starchy grains with fruits? Forty years ago, my mother started serving sprouted wheat with banana slices at demonstrations to teach people how to eat simple, basic foods. Seminar participants noticed that this pleasant combination failed to produce the normal stomach upset they would normally have had from combining fruits and grains, such as bread with jam, cereal with fruit and/or sugar, etc.

The reason is now crystal clear: RAW foods have no combining limitations! In addition, sprouting converts the starch in grains to a sugar and breaks down the sugars and proteins in legumes. (Personally, knowing that I could add bean sprouts to a fruit salad doesn't fill me with anticipation, so I will still continue to eat my sprouted beans separately or add them to sandwiches or vegetable salads.)

A whole wheat pita, spread with almond butter and stuffed with clover sprouts, is a fantastic meal! Even though the whole grain bread and the almonds are cooked, rendering their enzymes inactive, the fresh sprouts do a great job of ensuring that the starches and fats will be broken down so they can be properly utilized without digestive chaos!

Is this all too weird for you? Consider the option of living without enzymes to heal. Why would anyone want to be stuck with an immune system that can't fight off disease; a mind that can't think clearly or process information effectively; a body that must have drugs in order to relax muscles, or to be calm, peppy, thin, digest food, relieve constipation, or stop diarrhea; a heart that can no longer pump sufficient blood; cancer that destroys body parts and most often life itself; kidneys that fail to purify the blood or a liver that can no longer filter body wastes and manufacture amino acids to create protein?

These problems are considered normal, and it would be weird NOT to be plagued by them. That's my kind of weird, and I promise that you'll learn to like weird as much as I do when you see the results of following these few, simple guidelines.

If you do, however, you will always be in the minority, as evidenced by a recent survey, where nearly half of the respondents ate NO fruits and vegetables that day. Only about a fourth had three or more vegetables and slightly more than a fourth had two or more fruits. Less than ten percent of the people surveyed actually ate the recommended 5 fruits and veggies. In similar studies, NO respondents ate their fruits and veggies RAW so they had good enzyme activity! Is it any wonder that we're a nation plagued with disease when we are surrounded by an abundance of the very foods to CURE disease?

Enzyme Supplements
You can purchase enzymes in pill and liquid form that aid in digestion, but there is no perfect substitute for REAL foods, especially raw foods. An enzyme supplement should contain at least three of the essential enzymes: protease, amylase, and lipase, to digest protein, starch, and fat. The missing enzyme, cellulase, breaks down fiber, and since we traditionally eat such small amounts of fiber, this is the one enzyme manufacturers often leave out.

I know of only ONE complete, active enzyme supplement source (with ALL the vitamins and minerals God put into whole foods!) and it is a whole food supplement, not just enzymes alone. Remember, our bodies are designed to do the picking and choosing as to what they need and don't need, so why should we trust a manufacturer to do that FOR us?

Thousands of "forward thinking" doctors are now prescribing whole food supplements for their patients rather than traditional medicines, because they now recognize that it is the phytonutrients and active enzymes in whole foods that will get their patients on the road to better health-NOT the drugs that have been relied on for so many years. These doctors recognize that drugs only suppress symptoms. Enzymes MUST be present in large quantities for the body to heal.

These physicians, along with many thousands who belong to or are affiliated with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), and the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR), are finally able to watch true healing take place as the body receives the essential raw materials to heal itself as it was designed to do.

For a FREE audiotape on enzymes, phytonutrients, and whole foods nutrition, click HERE.