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When I want to follow a topic I go into “my profile” and look at the posts “all” section then click on a comment I made on that post to see the whole thread again. Of course this doesn’t work if you have not made a comment on the thread… ;-)
Well it will work for me..just made two yayyy!!...thanks Springleaf ;-)
Springleaf, at least we’re both on the raw food side.
However, just to be clear, you are lumping all proteins together as if they are dietary proteins. This is not the case. Whether enzymes are proteins or protein carriers, we are not talking about dietary protein here (if enzymes are sometimes considered proteins, they would be considered biological proteins, not dietary). That would be like considering all salts to be like table salt. Salts are any acid-base neutralizations, and many of them would be quite toxic to eat.
Yes, the enzymes in food DO help digest our food. They are food enzymes, and this takes place in the upper stomach before our digestive enzymes take over.
Regardless, logic would dictate that yes, we can make more digestive enzymes, but at a cost to other metabolic processes. What happens is that our body will use and rearrange metabolic enzymes to aid in digestion when there are no food enzymes present to initiate the breakdown of foods. Food enzymes are destroyed when we cook food. Nothing occurs in the body without a metabolic cost.
And this is the reason that enzymes are not dietary proteins. Enzymes are destroyed above 118F, but dietary proteins are denatured at much higher temperatures, so you can have processed and cooked foods that still have bio-available protein, like in protein bars and phony meats. They are all cooked and processed and enzymatically dead, yet have usable protein. IF enzymes are proteins, they are not dietary proteins.
We are almost saying the same thing, but it is enzymes, not dietary protein, that are initially killed in cooking. Otherwise raw wouldn’t as beneficial as it is, because half the cooked food would be as good for us as raw food, which it isn’t (the rare steak eaters would be the healthiest of the meat eaters; whereas in reality, the more meat is cooked the more digestible it becomes because, unlike carnivores, we don’t have very strong stomach acids to break down the proteins in meat).
Kendra, this has been your biochemistry course for the day. Hope your head doesn’t blow up.
Peace to all.
SPRINGLEAF You wrote:
The body has very efficient sensing mechanisms and via feed back loops can simply make more of any digestive enzymes it senses it requires.
I met a raw foodie who was both a dentist and chiropractor. He taught a class I attended and said that the teeth “tag” your incoming food and signal the pancreas as to what type of digestive enzymes you need to produce for what you are eating. He further stated caps, veneers, etc. impaired this process. I thought it was odd to hear someone in a profession speak openly about what he believed to be a serious health consequence of having most cosmetic dental work. I could never find anything on that topic. Could this be a part of the “feed back loops” your refer to?
If a major raw food benefit is actually grounded in the natural state of the enzymes (clearly up for debate), aren’t we radically altering PH of raw foods using popular preparation techniques? My understanding is that lemons/limes are alkaline in the body but otherwise highly acidic. If I make a chopped green salad and marinate it in a lemon juice based dressing haven’t I just denatured the greens as if I just cooked them?
At this point, I am inclined to think the benefits of eating raw food are:Just to let you know thqt I never had The Argument with the sceptic vegetarian, he just said I’d lost lots of weight which pleased me! Some excellent points from all of you tho, thanks, you all rock!
I did read today (in David Wolfe’s book I think) that dogs fed cooked food had certain enzymes in their saliva(?) to help digest it. When put on a raw diet, they lost the ability to form these enzymes. This would indicate that the cooked foods indeed put the body under more stress by having to make these enzymes.
Again, it wasn’t referenced but I do remember when I did my degree, that people who lay off alcohol for a while do not make the enzyme responsible for metabolising it, therefore, if you don’t drink for a while and then you do, it hits you quicker because your body has to readjust and start making the enzyme again. Seasoned drinkers probably have the enzyme swilling around all the time! As this is true, then there may be a foundation for the fact that we do not expend energy on extra digestive enzymes as we are not needing them.
Also read interesting (but a bit morbid) article in Scientific American about enzymes after we die (that the increasing acidity causes enzymes to ‘eat’ our cells bluntly put), which may tie in with the point that there may be enzymes in plant foods that programme the plant to rot if not eaten. More raw food for thought…
meditating Yes, I agree with your points 1, 3 and 4. However I have done some research since one of my previous posts and have found out that the immune response theory is based on very old research and personally having assesed the evidence I no longer belive it to be true, but maybe this is for another thread!
Biochemical sciences where in their infancy in the early part of last century, the lab equipment was so basic and unreliable that it took weeks to gain even basic answers and many of the techniques used today simply did not exist, or required such a large sample sizes as to be unusable. Personally I feel that any work performed before about 1970 and not repeated since should not be trusted until it has been repeated in a modern reliable lab setting. Both the enzyme work and immune response work were performed in the 1930’s, before it was even recognised what an enzyme was! (A protein, which quite oftern has a metal ion or vitamin bound to it as a co-factor). Also the enzyme work was not published in a peer reviewed scientific journal. This is the accepted way for scientists to publish their work, it requires other scientists in the field to study the proof and make any objections, which may be answered by, if nessassary, more experiments, better controls ect, before the paper is published. The more reputable/groundbreaking the paper the better the journal it will be published in. A scientist who can’t get their paper in any journal has failed to show that their experiments are repeatable and accurate.
I am familiar with the process of autolysis (where a cell digests its self using its own enzymes) but this happens at a much higher pH than the stomach (stomach is pH 2-4, usually nearer 2), each increase in pH from say 2 to 3 is a tenfold incease in alkilinity (low pH is acidic, high is basic, or alkaline). Plants enzymes (indeed all enzymes) have an optimal pH range in which they work, it is usually quite a narrow range, say 7.0 to 7.2 for eg. In the highly acidic stomach environment the plant enzymes simply could not function.
I agree about the stomach acid being too acid, I was thinking more that once raw food, say an apple, is chewed up in the mouth, those enzymes are released that help the self-destruct mechanism and in turn reduce the need for our bodies to do the work. Can’t support this hypothesis really though.
Sorry, was not clear, the apple releases the enzymes.
Yes, I would think that the autolysis enzymes may cause a very small amount of digestion to occur before the food reaches the stomach, but I would think this effect would be minimal really, due to the short amount of time in which they have to work. It is true that the body senses which enzymes it needs to make via feedback loops, this would hold true for both the dogs and the alcohol. But the body is perfectly evolved to utilise these mechanisms and to do so does not cause it stress. The stress is caused not by making the enzymes to digest cooked food/alcohol, but by the breakdown products produced, which the body can’t deal with.