Importance of digestive enzymes

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When your body digests its food it needs enzymes to do it. If you constantly ate a diet of raw organic plant food, the enzymes it contained would help you to digest what you were eating. But if you cook your food or buy fruit and vegetables from the supermarket, which have not only been sprayed with pesticides, but also may have been irradiated, then the enzymes will have been destroyed. So your body has to set to and manufacture its own. To do it, it has to use up important energy!

If you cut up an apple and left it for half an hour you will notice that it starts to turn brown. This is the apples own enzymes starting to break it down. So, when you eat raw foods such as this, a lot of the digestion work is done by the food itself so your body doesn't have to work so hard. This process does'nt happen when you eat any sort of cooked or processed foods making your body work harder and as you get older you may not be so efficient at producing these enzymes especially if you have been over working your body for years.

Digestive enzymes are secreted into the digestive tract to break down your food into small particles that can then be absorbed across the gut wall into the bloodstream. If this enzyme system isn't working effectively, undigested food passing into the large intestine will be fermented by the resident bacteria, causing bloating, flatulence and diarrhoea.

Larger particles of food will also find their way into the bloodstream, which is thought to give you the symptoms associated with food intolerances as the immune system attacks these particles, as they shouldn't be there.

But here you can help quite easily. You can do one of two things. You can either buy digestive enzymes and take one with each meal, or you can manufacture your own laden packed source of natural enzymes to add to your meals by sprouting seeds in a jar on your window sill. Alfalfa seeds, considered the perfect food by some nutritionists, can be bought inexpensively at the health food store, soaked in a jar overnight and then drained and rinsed daily until it sprouts chlorophyll rich shoots five or six days later. It contains vitamins A, B complex, C, E and K as well as calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, selenium and zinc all ready and available for your body to absorb.

In addition to alfalfa there are are dozens of seeds you can sprout, including various forms of whole beans and peas and lentils (not split) all of which have different food values. The sprouting increases the food value by a colossal amount and can help digest anything up to 75% of the food within which it finds itself, without any help at all from the body's enzymes. Nature provides the perfect food for the newly developing and incredibly fast growing plant, as soon as it sprouts and we can cash in on that by eating them at their best.

There is a wonderfully inexpensive book called ' The Sprouters Handbook ' by Edward Cairney which is easy to read and gives you an A-Z of sprouts and how to grow them. It is very easy indeed.

You can also help your body to digest its food by chewing every mouthful at least ten times before swallowing, this helps to break down food into smaller pieces and activate the enzymes that are present in your food. Get used to putting down your knife and fork between each bite to slow you down. The food in your mouth needs to be broken down as much as possible and mixed with saliva before you swallow it.