Digestive Enzyme Supplements—What You Need to Know—NOW

If you are one of the millions of people who reach for over-the-counter or prescription antacids on a regular basis, you’ve probably heard of digestive enzymes. You might have considered that yours are a little low or inactive, or maybe you never thought about it. Perhaps you even thought that an overly acid stomach was just like having a digestive system that was overqualified for the job. At any rate, what harm could it do to relieve your symptoms with an antacid?  As it turns out, plenty.  If reaching for those tablets to ease gas, bloating, indigestion, heartburn, or other discomforts is preventing you from addressing the cause of the problem, you are literally taking years off of your life.  We asked health reporter Marcy Crawford to answer your most common questions about enzymes, and we came up with a very good recommended formula.

What’s Wrong with Taking Antacids to Fix my Digestive Troubles?

Antacids do not help you digest your food—they simply ease the pain from your body’s overproduction of acid.  Nothing is wrong with easing your pain, per se, but if you have consistent digestive upset, you are almost certainly lacking in the necessary enzymes to process your food.  This is much more than just an inconvenience that can be resolved with a few chalky tablets to chew on. When you can’t digest your food, your body works overtime to focus on that issue, necessarily neglecting others that are also critical to your health.

How Does Digestive Upset Relate to Aging and Disease?

Many of us think of enzymes primarily in their digestive function, but the truth is that between digestive and metabolic types, enzymes are necessary to every single bodily function. That’s right—thinking, feeling, transferring nutrients to cells, breathing, fighting infection, you name it.  When we consume foods that do not contain their own digestive enzymes—that is, all foods that are not raw and unprocessed—our bodies must produce enzymes for digestion.  Digestive enzymes are critical because the body places digestion as a top priority.  When it does, it is not able to simultaneously form all of the enzymes it needs for other bodily functions.  The human body also has only a limited capability of enzyme production, so the more we use for digestion, the less we have available to fight infection or assist in other metabolic processes.  A lack of enzymes in our systems to process food and toxins also leads these toxins to remain in or bodies, directly causing infection and illness.  The depletion and weakening of enzymes is a basic cause of all illness and disease—that is, wherever an infection or malfunction of the body is examined, there will be an enzyme lacking that helps that particular function.

Doesn’t Nature Design Us to Have What We Need to Live?

Well, yes.  But our life span has steadily increased past what nature intended. Some individuals have the ability to produce 20 years’ worth of enzymes, while the more fortunate ones may have 60 years’ worth.  It is completely determined by genetics what your ability is, and then further affected by your lifestyle.  The more you stress your body with hard labor or inadequate exercise, poor diet, or major illnesses, the more enzymes you will need and the faster your ability to create them will run out.  Also, all people’s digestive enzymes become less potent with age, with several studies supporting finds of younger people and animals having much stronger enzymes of all types than when they are older.

Even children, with their powerful enzymes and ability to produce ample supplies, benefit from receiving as many active enzymes from food and supplements as possible.  Just as with adults, children still have a limited capacity to produce enzymes, and the more digestive types that are provided from the outside, the more enzymes children will have available to them for all other bodily functions and systems in order to grow and fight illness and disease.

Also, cooking and processing foods destroys the enzymes contained in them, so our bodies must provide all of the enzymes necessary to digest cooked and processed foods.

So Why Isn’t Everyone Supplementing with Enzymes?

We think that this is only a matter of time, since enzymes may in fact be our strongest weapons against disease, as is currently being shown with research from around the world.  Since we have found out only in the last hundred year that enzymes are involved in every process in the body, information is exponentially accumulating that points to every disease’s common factor as a breakdown of the enzyme production needed to support the body’s functions in any given area.  It follows, then, that if we can provide usable enzymes of enough variety, they will be playing a larger and larger role in medicine in the years to come.  As much talk as there is out there about great enzyme-rich foods (such as raw produce and uncooked meat), there is still little awareness in the general public as to how important enzyme supplementation is.

Can Enzyme Supplements Help if I’m Already Sick?

Absolutely, just as rest, fluids, and anything that improves your immune system helps.  Enzyme therapy can help with obesity, arthritis, cancer, allergies, high cholesterol, and diabetes, among other conditions.  While enzymes alone may not be able to fight off a debilitating or fatal illness, they are certainly as helpful as any other building block of the immune system.  In the case of allergies, researchers theorize that a lack of enzymes to process invasive substances may be what causes the body to react to allergens.  In other words, perhaps anyone would be allergic to milk or dust or cat dander if we were lacking the enzyme needed to dispose of it within the body.  The case with cholesterol is similar.  Since cholesterol is a form of fat, if a person had adequate amounts of the appropriate enzyme needed to process that fat, cholesterol would be lowered.  This also makes sense when we consider the relationship of natural enzyme depletion with age and the prevalence of disease in old age.  Adult onset diabetes has also been found to respond well to the administration of the enzyme amylase, which works directly on blood sugar.

Enzyme deficiency can also be the cause of illnesses such as depression and hypoglycemia, which can be caused by a enzyme deficiency that results in foods not being converted to proper breakdown products.

Remember that enzymes are required for ALL bodily functions, not just digestion. Even if you do not need more enzymes to fight illness or because of advancing age, a very active lifestyle also demands more enzymes. The more of ANYTHING you do, the more enzymes you need.

Why Supplement? Can’t I Get Enough Enzymes by Choosing Good Foods?

If you eat cooked or processed foods, you do not get enough enzymes.  Processing includes gas ripening of fruits and vegetables, irradiating (a process our government requires of many manufacturers in order to protect us from harmful substances in foods), and altering foods such as turning grains into flours and pastas.  Raw foods provide a perfect balance of enzymes to process the foods in which they are contained.  There are not, however, any excess or storable enzymes contained in those foods, so the enzymes are only useable for that particular food.

Are You Advocating Raw Diet?

Not necessarily. While a raw diet is feasible for some people, many are not willing or able due to availability of foods, cultural, or other reasons.  Also, animal products and some vegetable products such as beans carry a high risk of infection if eaten raw.  Even for vegans, the high fiber content in raw foods can be too difficult to digest in large quantities.  Individuals who are blessed with an inherited ability to produce greater amounts of enzymes and have a stronger digestive constitution in general will find a raw diet more comfortable, while others would find it absolutely intolerable.  Ironically, the cooking process that makes fibers easier to digest also destroys enzymes.  Another difficulty that vegans may have is making sure they consume complete proteins with careful food combinations. This is critical to enzyme production because our bodies can only create metabolic enzymes when adequate essential amino acids are consumed from animal products or carefully combined vegetarian foods.

How Can I Choose a Good Enzyme Supplement?

Look for a variety of enzymes, as each one is designed to break down a particular type of nutrient or other substance.  There are some good supplements with high quality ingredients available.  One of the best and most powerful is Digest-ALL™, from Metabolic Response Modifiers (MRM). 

Be careful of unit measurements that are by weight or other unique abbreviations instead of the standard FCC measurement coding.  And we don’t recommend single enzyme formulas because they are designed to digest one type of food (like fats or starches), but most of us eat a wide variety of foods at our meals and have overall enzyme deficiencies.  A well-rounded formula like Digest-ALL provides enzymes necessary for all types of digestive needs.  Plus, a formula has to work at a wide pH range and provide enough enzyme power to truly digest your food well.  Digest-ALL contains three different proteases from non-animal sources that are active in a wide pH range of 3 to 9 at body temperature and in the presence of moisture.  Proteases can hydrolyze protein to various amino acids.  Finally, for low-carb lifestyles, Digest-ALL provides enough active amylase to assist in the digestion of 30 potatoes, 9 ounces protein and 60 grams of fat. 

Digest-ALL promotes optimal digestion and reduces our need to produce digestive enzymes allowing our body to manufacture the metabolic enzymes needed to operate efficiently.  Finally, Digest-ALL’s unique proprietary blend of ginger, peppermint and triphala provide a soothing, comfortable and balanced digestion process.

Digest-ALL provides enough active amylase to assist in the digestion of 30 potatoes, 9 ounces protein and 60 grams of fat. 

FYI:  Enzyme Shopping Guide

Use these enzymes as a guide when you are looking for your own enzyme supplement:

§         Amylase (breaks down carbohydrates including starch and glycogen)

§         Lactase (breaks down milk sugar)

§         Maltase (breaks down carbohydrates, malt and grain sugars)

§         Invertase (breaks down carbohydrates, especially sucrose and maltose)

§         Hemilase (breaks down carbohydrates)