P. S.: Post Scriptum

If you go around the net, looking for information about enzymes and digestion, you often find detailed explanations. Explenations that generally say that enzymes come in a limited quantity, that if you eat raw food you are taking in new enzymes, thus not depleting your resources but if you eat cooked food you deactivate the enzymes, and eventually (over the years) you will have troubles digesting food. If you, instead, go to wikipedia nothing of this is present. Nor if you ask to a ‘normal’ doctor will they tell you any of this. What follows is an excerpt that you will find quite around in the net. It refers to enzymes in the context of dog food. I believe it was originated from the Akita book by Barbara Bouyet, although by now it has been copied many times around the net (I took it from here). Although it refers to dog food, the concepts are equally valid for other organisms, and human beings in particular. I will put in bold parts that I found difficulties in being confirmed by doctors.

…Although it is an oversimplification to say that bowl of dog food cannot be used by the body without the help of “enzymes,” it is a fact.

Enzymes are proteins known as “reaction catalysts of biological systems.” These catalysts (enzymes) are important because the body’s temperature and internal environment do not allow chemical reactions to occur at a rate rapid enough to sustain life. Enzymes speed up the reaction by increasing the frequency of colliding molecules. In other words, enzymes speed up a biological reaction by binding with the substance involved in the reaction.

Enzymes are relatively specific; meaning each enzyme reacts only with a specific molecule. There are more than 1300 known enzymes and each enzyme requires certain conditions for optimum activity-correct temperature and pH, the presence of organic molecules known as “coenzymes,” and the absence of enzyme inhibitors. Coenzymes are often vitamin derivatives. This is all very complex and a good deal more academic than intended but it is important to explain the role of enzymes. Researchers are learning that certain enzymes are vital in maintaining health, and preventing diseases. Enzymes are effective in fighting inflammatory diseases, improving circulation, decreasing the rate of inflammation, aiding in tissue repair, complementing autoimmune therapy, and of course, the digestion of food.

Each of us receives a supply of enzymes at birth. The supply is NOT limitless; it must supply the organism with life sustaining enzymes for the duration of its existence. When the enzyme supply is low, it signals the breakdown of the organism (meaning you, me, our dogs–all of us). Enzymes are needed to run all body systems. Metabolic enzymes are used by the heart, lungs, kidneys, immune system, and for brain functions; digestive enzymes convert protein, carbohydrates and fat into fuel to maintain the organism. Over-taxing the body to supply digestive enzymes can reduce the supply of metabolic enzymes. Eventually, the body becomes enzyme-deficient making it vulnerable to disease. Not surprisingly, glands and major organs suffer most from enzyme deficiency.

How can you prevent the body from depleting its own supply of enzymes? Nature solved the problem for us by providing those enzymes in raw foods. Food enzymes begin the process of digestion in the stomach. If there are no food enzymes the body must produce additional digestive enzymes resulting in fewer metabolic enzymes. If you feed your dog a diet containing at least 70% raw foods, you’re providing these vital enzymes.
Congratulations!

Cooking or processing food above 118 degrees Fahrenheit destroys all food enzymes. If your dog’s diet consists mainly of cooked or processed foods, the animal’s store of metabolic enzymes will be converted into digestive enzymes. The lack of food enzymes puts a heavier burden on the body to generate adequate enzymes to complete digestion.

In nature animals know to seek out those foods that satisfy their nutritional needs. For example: free-roaming wolves hunt grazing animals whenever possible. Before eating muscle or bone, the wolves feast on stomach contents, the liver, pancreas, and intestines-in other words, they are gorging on enzyme-laden tissues. Wolf pups are weaned and maintained on regurgitated food, also heavily laced with digestive enzymes.

Since it’s unlikely we can provide the same food a wolf enjoys in the wild, adding a digestive enzyme supplement to each meal may be essential for optimum digestion and overall good health. A multiple digestive enzyme should contain pancreatin, lipase, ox bile, pepsin, betain hydrochloric acid (HCL), bromelain, papain, amylase and protease. The enzyme should be a powder or capsule to assure the digestive process begins in the stomach. These enzymes are readily available at all health food and vitamin stores.

Let me clarify that I am not here disbelieveing what the author of this piece is saying. In fact I think it is spot on. The only precisation I might do is that not all enzymes unfold at the same temperature, so saying that once you reach 118 degrees F. enzymes are all gone is an imprecision. They are mostly gone.

But the article is full of factual information, so where is this information coming from? If you ask doctors, they will generally wave their left hand (the right one is used for academia), pointing to an unrecognised source, probably someone in alternative medicine. Their face distorted by the thought.

But this information must have a source, so I set out, on Sunday, looking for the academic sources. I have some personal reason for this. As I explained in an italian post that is having some moderate success, I am a person who, thanks to raw milk, and raw dairies in general, was able to come out of a situation of cronic illness. At some point of my life (around age 30) I was unable to digest most foods, which included milk and derivatives, eggs and cooked meat. I was becoming a vegetarian by necessity, while becoming also thinner and thinner, and weaker and weaker. I was just not absorbing most food. Eventually I read a book (”We want to live”, by Aajonus Vonderplanitz) in one night. The book included a big description on the importance of enzymes and of raw food for digestion, and in the morning I switched gear.

My post sparked some discussions around the net, and I was contacted by three people, all asking for the scientific sources about my diet. Two were “milk” intollerant, and one was the farmer that was selling raw milk near Rome. Yes, because in the meantime the laws have changed, and now in Italy it is possible to sell raw milk (I also started a wiki page, with the disordered list of all the places where you can buy it), albeit after incredible controls.

Giuseppe, the farmer, was bringing on the experience of having more and more people being able to start again to digest milk, while doctors, around the net, disbelieveing his experience, and cornering it as a peculiar case.

This is actually quite cute, it goes like this: first you have the doctors telling you that you have a lactose intollerance, and they tell you not to drink milk of any kind, then once you find that raw milk is actually beneficial for you, they change their mind and declare that actually you did not have the intollerance in the first place, but something else … usually unspecified

But the information on how to treat this intolerance is widely available in the net (go to any raw food forum, and you’ll find instructions and testimonials). So where is this information coming from? I mean, originally. The key word seemed to be “enzyme deficiency”. And actually “acquired enzyme deficiency”. So first thing I went to pubmed where the doctors make their own researches. Or at least they should!

“enzyme deficiency” gives you 1236 references. Not an amazing number considering how many people seem to suffer from them (this in itself tells you how little importance is the medical community giving to it). As a comparison “HIV” gives you 194888 citations. “Enzyme deficiency”+milk gives you only 9 references, and one is about mouse milk! “enzyme deficiency”+intolerance: 22 references. I went through the abstract of all of them, and although they were all very technical, and I myself am not a doctor, none of them seemed to address the issue. No intolerance caused by enzyme deficiency. Or how raw food affects enzyme deficiency (”Enzyme deficiency”+raw: 0 results; “Enzyme deficiency”+uncooked: 1 results; “Enzyme deficiency”+diet: 46 results;). Note how instead intolerance+raw gave 18 results, and most of them seemed to be on the topic. For example:
Kefir improves lactose digestion and tolerance in adults with lactose maldigestion., seems absolutely spot on. Too bad that it does not make the link: enzyme deficienty => intolerance. Also the article is recent: 2003. Unless a doctor is keeping up to date with this particular field would not have read it. And you even need to pay to read it: $25. They want blood, and it was probably even reasearch done with government money!
Also “Solk P” seemed to have done quite some research in the topic of milk intolerance, but the articles are all in Czech.
In short pubmed, up to now, seem to provide little, if any reference to acquired ezyme deficiency, due to a diet of pasteurized milk, as a cause of lactose intolerance. And how this intolerance can be overcome thanks to raw milk.

I then moved to the net directly. Let’s see what’s around. And now the information started to flow. From Enzymes: The tiny and enormous difference between raw and cooked foods (note, the page formats in a disordered fashion on some browser):

Virtually all chronic degenerative diseases are caused or aggravated by digestive problems. After the most extensive study on nutrition ever undertaken by the government, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs concluded in its 1978 report entitled “Diet and Killer Diseases,” that the average American diet is responsible for the development of chronic degenerative diseases such as heart disease, atherosclerosis, cancer, diabetes, stroke, etc. Many of the most common health complaints revolve around a 20-foot, mucus-lined tube that directly interfaces us with our environment. This is no mystery: This is the gastro-intestinal tract, affectionately abbreviated “GI.” The job of the GI is to alchemically transmute the food we eat into our flesh, blood, actions, thoughts and feelings… with a little help from our friends the salivary glands, the pancreas, the liver, and most importantly RAW FOOD — all of which provide (now we’re getting to the point) ENZYMES.

Enzymes are delicate dynamos. Delicate because they are destroyed by temperatures over 118 degrees (some by as little as 105 degrees), which means that they may not survive even light steaming. Dynamos because they are powerful biochemical catalysts; they speed burning or building reactions in the body according to need. They are specialized proteins, often with long complicated names ending in -ase.

The three primary digestive enzymes are protease, lipase and amylase which digest, respectively, protein, fat (lipids), and carbohydrates (which includes sugars). Amylase comes from the salivary glands: carbohydrates start digesting right in our mouth. Have you ever chewed a piece of bread or potato for an extra moment before swallowing, and tasted how sweet it is? (It is a good idea to chew our foods thoroughly; literally making juice in our mouths before swallowing.) Lipase is synthesized principally in the liver and protease comes from the pancreas.

Although the enzyme-producing organs continue to function over the entire course of a healthy life, they eventually wear down, especially with the “standard American diet” (which, in the naturopathic community, we call SAD.) Dr. Francis M. Pottenger’s nutritional studies have shown that a regular diet of cooked or canned foods causes the development of chronic degenerative diseases and premature mortality. Professor Jackson of the Dept. of Anatomy, University of Minnesota, has shown that rats fed for 135 days on an 80 percent cooked food diet resulted in an increase pancreatic weight of 20 to 30 percent. What this means is that the pancreas is forced to work harder with a cooked food diet. “Although the body can manufacture enzymes, the more you use your enzyme potential, the faster it is going to run out…” wrote Dr. Edward Howell, who pioneered research in the benefits of food enzymes. A youth of 18 may produce amylase levels 30 times greater than those of an 85 year old person.

Enzymes are what make seeds sprout. Sprouts are, in fact, one of the richest sources of enzymes. Other excellent sources are papaya, pineapple and the aspergillus plant. Science cannot duplicate enzymes, because they are the stuff of life itself. Only raw food has functional “live” enzymes. Therefore the liver, pancreas, stomach and intestines must come to the rescue and furnish the requisite digestive enzymes to the individual nourished solely on a cooked food diet.

The article contains other important information on raw food, so I shall suggest that you read it directly, but it had some key informations, absent in the Akira article: again the note on 118 degrees. Also:

After the most extensive study on nutrition ever undertaken by the government, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs concluded in its 1978 report entitled “Diet and Killer Diseases,” that the average American diet is responsible for the development of chronic degenerative diseases such as heart disease, atherosclerosis, cancer, diabetes, stroke, etc.

and

Dr. Francis M. Pottenger’s nutritional studies have shown that a regular diet of cooked or canned foods causes the development of chronic degenerative diseases and premature mortality.

Professor Jackson of the Dept. of Anatomy, University of Minnesota, has shown that rats fed for 135 days on an 80 percent cooked food diet resulted in an increase pancreatic weight of 20 to 30 percent

“Although the body can manufacture enzymes, the more you use your enzyme potential, the faster it is going to run out…” wrote Dr. Edward Howell, who pioneered research in the benefits of food enzymes.

Finally something! The US senate report seemed the first place to start, but it is absent both from Amazon, nor could I find it in the web site of the Senate itself. All references in the net seem to just repeat the same phrase. Was there only one person that tread the report and reported on it?

Pottenger was more reliable. His work, and the work of Weston A. Price have inspired the creation of a foundation: the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation(PPNF), a non-profit educational resource with a unique library of over 10,000 books and publications on health and nutrition. PPNF owns and protects the original copyrighted research of Weston A. Price, DDS and Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., MD. . Makes you feel that if the foundation was not there the work from Pottinger would be out of print, and probably forgotten. Instead Pottinger work seem to be quite well known, even Wikipedia carries information about him. We are nearly mainstream! So what was his research? The reason why he is notorius in raw food circles is for his research on cats. A description of which we can find in wikipedia.

The Pottenger cats study lasted for ten years, with three generations of cats being studied. Approximately 900 cats were involved. This study was specifically designed to show the difference between eating raw foods versus cooked and processed foods over a long period of time. The experiment in which one group of cats received only raw milk and raw meat, while other groups received part of the diet as pasteurized milk or cooked meat, can be summarized as follows:

• Adequate Diet A: 1/3 raw milk, cod liver oil and 2/3 raw meat.
• Defficient Diet B: 1/3 raw meat, cod liver oil and 2/3 pasteurized milk.
• Defficient Diet C: 1/3 raw meat, cod liver oil and 2/3 evaporated milk.
• Defficient Diet D: 1/3 raw meat, cod liver oil and 2/3 sweetened condensed milk.
• Defficient Diet E: raw metabolized vitamin D milk only.

Effects on cats

• The cats eating only raw food were disease free and healthy, generation after generation after generation.
• The cats eating the cooked and processed foods had all kinds of problems.
  • By the end of the first generation the cats started to develop degenerative diseases and became quite lazy.
  • By the end of the second generation the cats had developed degenerative diseases by mid-life and started losing their coordination.
  • By the end of the third generation the cats had developed degenerative diseases very early in life and some were born blind and weak and had a much shorter life span. Many of the third generation cats couldn’t even produce offspring. There was an abundance of parasites and vermin while skin diseases and allergies increased from an incidence of five percent in normal cats to over 90 percent in the third generation of deficient cats. Kittens of the third generation did not survive six months. Bones became soft and pliable and the cats suffered from adverse personality changes. Males became docile while females became more aggressive.
  • The cats suffered from most of the degenerative diseases encountered in human medicine and died out totally by the fourth generation.

His conclusions:

• A diet consisting exclusively of raw milk and raw meat was the only adequate intake which insured the maintenance of optimal health for the cats. Cats on the all-raw diet showed good bone structure with wide palates and plenty of space for the teeth as well as excellent bone density, shiny fur, and lack of parasites and disease. They reproduced with ease and were gentle and easy to handle.
• Cooking the meat, or substituting heat processed milks for raw, resulted in heterogeneous reproduction and physical degeneration that escalated with each successive generation.
• The changes in facial structure and beginning of degenerative diseases that Dr. Pottenger observed in cats on deficient diets mirrored the human degeneration that Dr. Price found in tribes and villages that had abandoned traditional foods.

Notice also the reference at the end to another name, Dr. Price.

Dr. Weston A. Price, at the present time have no reference in wikipedia. Yet not one but two foundations have been named after him: the Price-Pottenger foundation, and The Weston A. Price Foundation. Who describes itself as being: nonprofit, tax-exempt charity founded in 1999 to disseminate the research of nutrition pioneer Dr. Weston A. Price, whose studies of isolated nonindustrialized peoples established the parameters of human health and determined the optimum characteristics of human diets.

So, while Pottenger was busy studying cats, Price was busy studying natives, non industrialized people. And he found that when people moved from a traditional diet to a non traditional western one, their health started to deteriorate. Teeth started to have cavities, and the dental arch is generally well developed. He found even more degenerative illness, and he wrote his findings in a book that is now a basic reference book in alternative dietology: Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price, DDS. The book is so important that one of the points in the mission statement in the Price-Pottenger foundation is:

• Continue to republish Dr. Weston A. Price’s book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration along with others of his works and make them available to the public in perpetuity.

.
Makes me wonder who will take care of my blog, once I die
While Weston Price foundation considered milk to be so important that Real Milk is one of their project. Not much direct information about enzymes, but we are on track. I ordered both works from the Price-Pottenger foundation, the book from Price and the book (article?) from Pottenger.

Yet most of this work is totally unknown to the greatest part of the medical community.

Let’s continue our search. You might remember that we left some unfollowed strands: Dr. Edward Howell, who allegedly pioneered the research on enzymes. And Dr Howell is the author of another book: Enzyme Nutrition. Which I also ordered. Looking around on the net I could find a:
“Condensed Summary and Conclusions of Dr. Edward Howell’s Research”. Actually the 2 pages is no longer there, but can still be read from Google cache system (page 1, page 2). Please go and read those two pages, then come back (I saved the info on the local wiki, just in case). If those are the personal finding of the research of Dr. Edward Howell, we might have found what we were looking for! I also ordered Howell’s book.

Just to conclude let me add that another researcher in the field of raw milk is William Campbell Douglass. He wrote “The Milk book”, he also authored the Supplemental Report in favor of Raw Milk, which was used in the trial in California to decide if raw milk was going to be sold. They decided it would. The supplement looks a lot like a condensed version of the book, with similar tables, similar histograms, and just less chit chat.

The book that I first read was: Aajonus Vonderplanitz, We want to live, which is slowly becoming a classic, albeit his description is narrative, and not academic. His second book, the Recepies for Living without Disease seems a more accurate study, but it is still considered far out, even by alternative nutritionists.

Following those books I not only drink and thrive on raw milk, but eat raw meat. And the academic source of this: Captain Vilhjalmur Stefansson. The artic explorer, and anthropolgist. who showed that not only is possible to leave on meat alone (as Innuit do), but those population show no signs of degenerative illness (a result similar to the resul from Price). Nor did he found any sign of cancer. Infact he linked cancer with civilisation, and the use of grains. But maybe we leave this topic for another post.

I am right now waiting for 3 books, the book from Price, from Howell, and from Pottenger. When they will arrive, in a few weeks I shall read them and finally discover how much of the information we now refer to about enzymes is coming from there. What will probably instead remain a mystery is why medicine has never acknowledged those researches.

Ricapitulating, the following book seem to be at the root of the modern believes about enzymes:

Dr. Weston A. Price: Nutrition and Physical Degeneration
Francis Pottenger: Pottenger’s Cats (although I doubt that this is the original title)
Dr. Edward Howell: Enzyme Nutrition
Vilhjalmur Stefansson: Cancer: Disease of civilization? An anthropologi and Historical study (Available at the Stefansson Collection, Dartmouth College)

More recent books that seem to me to make a good job in condensing it all (but please read the sources too):
Aajonus Vonderplanitz: We want to live & The recepies for living without disease;
William Campbell Douglass:Supplemental Report in favor of Raw Milk & The Milk of human kindness is non pastorized;

Another book that although I haven’t checked, seem to receive many praises around, and is probably another good modern work (but not necessarily containing original research) is

Sally Fallon & Mary G. Enig:Nourishing Traditions

And as the French would say:
bon apetit!

Related posts:

1. Timesonline censors unconfortable comments As many of you know, I eat in Primal Diet from a long time. It is at least 3 or 4 years. I was very ill when I started, and feel much better now. I often look around to see when new articles appear on this diet, and I was very happy to read that [...]...