ENZYMES

The whole raw food thing has a couple of delicious attractors to it.

One: the food is easy and tastes good. A fresh peach off the tree is heaven. Some chard these days, that has been softened by frost after frost is delicious. They are right there for the picking, they couldn’t be any fresher and they taste great. This is fast foods the way fast foods is supposed to be: from the tree or ground right into your mouth if you are lucky enough to have your own garden and orchard, or have one to easily visit. ( Or ride a bike to, and cut out the fossil fuel connection.)

Two: the food is high in water. Our bodies, we all know are 70% water or more. Raw foods are full of water that nature has kissed with sun and soil and plant magical transformation. This is the best water you can get and raw foods are full of this water.

Three: every raw food has intact the enzymes that nature has provided for that food to breakdown. Either the food breaks down like the peach to create food for the seed, or the food breaks down the way chard would to return to soil and keep the cycle of growth and vitality going, but these live foods still have enzymes in them. So when you eat them, the foods break down inside of you and are much more easily digested. When we are young, or so the natural doctors say, we have extra enzymes, and so we can handle food without enzymes. As we get older, these enzymes get used up and the foods are harder and harder to digest.

Cooking destroys the enzymes. Any heat over 110 or 115 degrees (stick your hand in and have to pull it out quick), destroys enzymes, so all cooked food is worthless in having enzymes.

In nature, foods full of natural sugars have the enzymes to digest those sugars, and foods full of protein have those enzymes and foods with fat, have lipase to digest the fat. This is why Victoria Botenko talks of how she lost 120 pounds eating gobs of avocados. The lipase in the avocados digested her extra fat. And the lipase in sunflower seeds or almonds or raw butter or olive oil would also do the same.

Recall an earlier essay on seeds: to de-activate an enzyme inhibitor in seeds and nuts, soak them at least overnight, and then if you want even a little more umph in them, start draining and sprouting them. Again, we want to maximize enzymes for ourselves.

All good raw foods books, and the Price Pottenger Nutritional Foundation, have tons to say about nutrition.

You could try any of these, and many more:

Price Pottenger Nutritional Foundation.

Carol Alt

Raw Family