All posts tagged enzymes

me and Matthew debating “chemicals” and whole foods

by Robyn on March 22, 2010 in Raw Food with 23 Comments
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I have more to say about Expo West, but today I’ll write you some of a text exchange I’m having right now with my good friend Matthew F., who loves science and despises religion. I’ll leave out the unrelated parts, like about what day we’re going to take our kids skiing this week:

MF: Did you see my email about the chemical composition of apples? I always hated apples and I knew they were made of chemicals! Now that I know they’re made of chemicals, I can safely remove them from my diet! Whew!

GSG: Just because there are “chemical” compounds in natural foods (hello, EVERYTHING is on the periodic chart) doesn’t mean that eating synthetic chemicals is a good idea.

MF: You said chemicals, not SYNTHETIC chemicals. Sh**! Where’s an apple?

GSG: If you want to eat chemicals that are isolated and bathed in petroleum products and preserved in formaldehyde, go for it! (Num num.) Me, I’m eating your apple.

MF: You make is sound like all synthetic chemicals are bad and I agree that some are, but some natural things are bad for you too. There is so much hype and misconceptions about good nutrition. We have to not be married to our preferences and our “doctors” who don’t use the scientific method.

GSG: I’m not married to any acupuncturists or anything but I think I have a strong tendency based on a lot of evidence to eat whole foods instead of refined ones. The scientific method has been applied pretty well in that arena. And the same logic follows that hundreds of synergistic and perfect combinations of elements in an apple that science doesn’t even understand yet are better for me than a man-made pill with a synthetic, isolated vitamin in it.

Have you replaced God with science? What if God made perfect foods and science can’t and never will? What if science is just imperfect humans mucking around trying to make sense of complexity? Science is good but often fatally flawed. Not all science is equal. Methods are more sophisticated now but motivations are more suspect. Precious little “objective” science is left since the “scientific method” was originally conceived in all its idealism.

MF: What about apple trees that are fed water with pesticides in it, or a green smoothie girl who has the bad kind of synthetic chemicals in the plants in her smoothies?

GSG: Chemicals are everywhere. But less of them is better.

MF: Those people get colon cancer while the bastard who eats hamburgers lives to be 82.

GSG: Not usually. According to science more chemicals = more cancer, in general. Says a huge and growing pile of evidence.

MF: Synthetic ones, you mean.

GSG: That’s usually what people are referring to when they say “chemicals.” If you don’t see the diff between an apple and a can of Sprite (they’re both sugar, right?) we have a problem. My kid’s pediatrician said there was no diff.

MF: What IS the diff between sugar found in Sprite and sugar found in an apple? We need it for energy and brain function–so where does sugar in Sprite come from?

GSG: It’s massively chemically altered, concentrated, removed from other elements that make it a nutritious food. Like fiber. Like hundreds of micronutrients. Like dozens of types of enzymes.

raw food diet: isn’t steaming good? and, my kids come back sick

by Robyn on July 28, 2009 in Raw Food with 12 Comments
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Update: Yep. All four of my kids puked their guts up at their dad’s family reunion. Just like always. Poor little guys. (Well, one of them is 6’2″, not that little, huh?) Back to the green smoothie diet! So happy to have my kids back. It’s my job to help them recover.

My daughters come back from an extended period away, wanting to cleanse. I told the girls today to sit down and brainstorm a list of fruits and veggies they want me to buy for them. That way they’re in the driver’s seat, eating things they like, and I get my way, too (high nutrition, mostly raw food diet). Remember that old prayer asking God to grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change, and the will to change the things I can? I can’t change what their dad feeds them.   (My girls report that their aunts and uncles all provided a vegetarian option to the menu made for everyone else on the nights they cooked, which was sweet.) But I CAN help them cleanse and drop unwanted pounds when they’re home. Once the girls came home and said, “Mom, we want to eat nothing but fruits and vegetables for three days. Can you help us do that?” (Of course I can.)

Still talking about the raw food diet today. Everybody, including nutritionists, suggest steaming. I’d rather have you eat steamed broccoli than no broccoli! (I personally do not enjoy raw broccoli unless it’s chopped small and in a really yummy salad. NO, NOT THE KIND WITH BACON.)

But that broccoli is still heated to well over 212 degrees, and vitamins and enzymes die over 116 degrees. And mineral salts are lost and deanimated. Cooking, even steaming, destroys indoles in vegetables, which are wonderfully anti-carcinogenic.

Worse, when you cook things, free radicals are created. (Free radicals are unpaired molecules that destroy cells and cause cancer. Antioxidants in raw foods mop them up.) Some amino acids (lysine and glutamine) in proteins are destroyed by cooking. You probably already know what high heats do to fats: alter them to become trans fats that are highly destructive carcinogens. And when fiber in food is cooked, it is slimy and soft and doesn’t have the broom-like power to clean the intestine any more.

I do eat cooked plant food and make no apologies for it. But I make every meal or snack at least 60% raw food, and often it’s 80% or more. Then you’re supplementing the cooked foods with enzymes. Doing this regularly will have a dramatic effect on your youthfulness.

On a related topic, here’s the dehydrator I recommend, by the way, to make crunchy snacks like in Ch. 7 of 12 Steps, preserving enzymes and vitamins:

http://greensmoothiegirl.com/dehydrator.html

enzymes, raw food, stomach acid

by Robyn on June 1, 2009 in Raw Food with 3 Comments
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An excerpt from the FAQ of my new book coming out next month:

Dear GreenSmoothieGirl: How can enzymes and eating raw food be so important when stomach acid would kill any enzymes that came with the food anyway?

 

A: Good question. Some people think that the low pH of the stomach stops salivary and any other food or supplemental enzymes from working. A number of experiments Dr. Howell writes about show that this is not so. Some enzymes are shown to work actively at two different pH ranges. Another study shows that salivary and supplemental enzymes were re-activated in the alkaline duodenum and lower in the intestine after going through the stomach. Hydrochloric acid in the stomach is not as strong as once thought to be and neither when used in in vitro experiments (outside the body). A Journal of Nutrition-published study at Northwestern University showed 51 percent of amylase from malted barley was intact when passed into the intestine.

 

Enzymes manufactured by the pancreas of a person or animal are sensitive to pH because they aren’t adapted to anything outside the restrictive confines of the body. But microbial-derived dietary supplement enzymes are very adaptive, since fungus grows in a variety of places and conditions. These enzymes survive the acidity of the lower stomach. These plant-based sources are the digestive enzyme supplements I prefer.

 

As with so many other things in the human body, we’ve been provided with the ideal environment to digest food. Problems occur when we alter our food instead of giving our body the kind of nutrition we were designed to digest easily, that people used to eat for thousands of years.

 

Dr. Howell says that we’re born with a finite ability to produce endogenous enzymes, and by middle age, most of that ability is gone. (And he said this 25 years ago, before the modern diet worsened. Some experts make even more dire projections, such as Westerners are burning out enzyme capacity by age 35.) The answer, of course, is to eat as much raw food as possible, and as little cooked or processed food, too.

 

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