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Don't fool yourself - crash dieting and "marathon" gym sessions simply don't work. Your body was never meant to be fat. And getting it back in shape is easier than you think... |
Enzymes Are Your Fat Burning Work Horses
By Yuri Elkaim
Enzymes are truly the key to long-lasting weight loss, health, and vitality. They are not spoken about and are tucked away out of sight when it comes to the nutritional sciences.
But food enzymes are an integral component of the Eating for Energy program, and I’m here to tell you that enzymes are of the utmost importance to your ability to lose weight, and to your health, energy, lifespan, and overall function.
What exactly are enzymes?
Enzymes are proteins that accelerate metabolic reactions in the body. They are involved in every single bodily function from digestion to heart function and even thinking. The 3 main categories of enzymes are:
1. Digestive enzymes – these are enzymes that are secreted by the pancreas and work on food digestion. They include proteases (which digest protein), lipases (which digest fat), and amylases (which digest carbohydrates).
2. Metabolic enzymes – these enzymes are mainly produced in the liver and are involved in every other bodily process outside of digestion.
3. Food enzymes – these are the enzymes that are inherent in living foods.
Why are enzymes important?
Well, it's quite simple. Unfortunately, as scientific literature as illustrated, each of us is born with a finite number of enzymes. Contrary to popular belief, enzymes are actually used up after completing their functions. Therefore, if you run out of enzymes, you run out of life, not to mention fat burning potential.
Dr. Edward Howell, in his classic book, Enzyme Nutrition, coined the term "enzyme bank account," referring to the body’s natural store of digestive and metabolic enzymes. Howell explained that, as with a money bank account, if you make too many "withdrawals" you will eventually exhaust your enzyme supply. This ultimately leads to an inability to burn fat properly, premature aging, disease, and death.
This notion is supported by the fact that the elderly have lower levels of enzymes than those who are younger. Dr. Howell makes reference to Dr. Meyer and his colleagues at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, who found that the enzyme of the saliva in young adults was 30 times stronger than in persons over 69 years of age.
The rating of enzyme potential determines not only the length of life, but how effectively the organism can maintain a high state of health and deal with disease. Think about that for a moment. If you are sick, your body has to do extra work to fend off whichever microorganism is causing the problem. To do this work, your body requires its enzymes to work overtime to get rid of the problem and bring you back to balance. The more enzymes your body has available, the more effectively it can do its job at burning fat (and other fuels) and keep you healthy.
In the following depiction you'll notice the enzyme lipase, which acts at various "active sites" on fat molecules to break them down into 3 fatty acids and 1 glycerol molecule. If lipase is not present (or in lesser amounts), what do you think will happen?
If you said improper fat breakdown, you're right.
How do you drain your "enzyme bank account"?
Consuming foods that are void of enzymes such as cooked foods, refined foods, and non-foods all place high demands on our pancreas to secrete more digestive enzymes. According to the Law of Adaptive Secretion of Digestive Enzymes, the pancreas will produce/secrete only the necessary amount and type of enzymes required for digesting a particular meal.
Therefore, consuming large amounts of enzyme-void dead foods forces your body to spend more energy on devoting its enzymes to digestion and less energy on producing metabolic enzymes for other bodily functions. This is important to understand and is also supported by evidence that consuming less food can actually help you live longer and healthier. This occurs because less food means fewer digestive enzymes are required. Therefore, more energy can be spent on allowing the body’s metabolic enzymes to fend off disease and breakdown unneeded fat reserves for energy.
In fact, for a good part of the 20th century, European oncologists have included enzyme therapy as a natural, non-toxic therapy against cancer. Almost all of the leading alternative cancer specialists prescribe both food enzymes and concentrated enzyme supplements as primary or adjunct cancer therapies.
One might assume that if pancreatic enzymes are efficacious in treating existing cancers, that maintaining a large pool of these precious enzymes in the body would help to prevent cancer from developing in the first place.
Epidemiological studies on human populations show that those who eat fresh fruits and vegetables that are loaded with natural enzymes have dramatically reduced levels of cancer, obesity, and other diseases. Whether the high enzyme content of these foods is partially responsible for their anti-cancer effect has not been proven, but the evidence is compelling.
Evidence from the Animal Kingdom
Animals also harness the power of enzymes in food by burying or covering it, thereby allowing enzyme activity to begin and food to be predigested. That way, animals preserve their own enzyme supply. In fact, animals – and also the people of some native cultures – teach us not only about how to preserve our enzyme supply, but also about disease prevention through efficient use of enzymes.
Although whales have up to 6 inches of fat keeping them warm, for example, their arteries are unclogged. Similarly Eskimos, who frequently eat large quantities of fat, are often not obese. Both these groups eat the fat-digesting enzyme lipase in the form of raw living foods.
Cooking of food, particularly if heat is prolonged and over 118 degrees Fahrenheit, destroys enzymes in that food, leaving what is commonly consumed by the modern person – an "enzymeless" diet. This is how by middle age we become metabolically depleted of enzymes.
The glands and major organs, including the brain, suffer most from this deficiency. The brain may actually shrink as a result of a cooked, over-refined diet devoid of the enzymes the body so desperately needs. It has been shown that the brains of wild animals are almost always larger in size and heavier than those of their domesticated enzyme-void counterparts. The brains of wild meadow mice are twice as heavy as those of laboratory mice. Even Charles Darwin noted that the domesticated rabbit has a smaller brain than his wild cousin.
If there is enzyme deficiency in the body, the pancreas will compensate and swell – indicating that it is having to work much harder. Laboratory mice fed heat-processed enzymeless food have a pancreas two or three times heavier than that of wild mice eating their natural enzyme-rich diet of living food.
Moreover, Dr. Howell found in his research that there is a direct correlation between consumption of dead, enzyme-void foods and obesity in mice. Mice that consumed cooked, dead food diets were almost nearly twice as heavy as mice consuming natural living foods found in the wild.
So how do you make deposits into your "enzyme bank account" to optimize your health while burning fat and staying slim?
In Eating for Energy you'll learn how to limit the number of withdrawals and how to maximize the number of deposits you make into your enzyme bank account.
For now, here's a sample recipe (from the Eating for Energy book) I want to leave with you. It's a breakfast cereal that will get your metabolic engine revved up.
Banana-Pear Cereal
1 banana, chopped
1 pear, cubed
1 date, diced
¼ cup almonds, chopped
1 tbsp ground flaxseed
1 tbsp hemp protein/flour
Mix all ingredients in a bowl and top with almond milk (grind additional almonds in a coffee grinder, then add water). Absolutely delicious and energizing!
