Hi PaleoRedHead

I've ummed and ahhed for a while over sending you a message; reading your post on plant enzymes made me want to reply immediately but I couldn't think how to go about it delicately. Hence the personal message. I know how this is going to seem, coming from someone you don't know from Adam, but please please don't clam up. I really, honestly, think you've been taken in and possibly taken advanage of by something not worthy of such attention. For what it's worth, here is my opinion. Take it or leave it of course, and either way I wish you the best. Feel free to quote me, or I will post a response to your topic if you want, I leave it up to you.

My own credentials are an honours degree in molecular biology and a decade of work in the pharmaceutical industry. I'm not an enzyme specialist by any means, but in a way that makes me more concerned.

First I want to assert that Dr. Howell is claiming to be scientific and therefore it is justified for me to critique his claims on a scientific basis. I cannot address what he or you choose to believe on a mystical or spiritual plane.

The main problem with Dr. Howell's arguments is the statement that enzymes are special among biological building blocks, imbued with a kind of 'life force' distinct from their chemical, physical and biological properties. There is no scientific evidence in that enzymes are anything more than catalytic proteins. The mechanism by which enzymes function in general has been described very comprehensively by science; while only a few enzymes can be regarded as fully understood, there has never been a need to invoke an energy that is new to science.

Equally, there is no sense in which the body has a limited 'enzyme potential'. Enzymes, like any proteins, are synthesized by the body as needed from amino acid building blocks. Some amino acids cannot be synthesized by the body and must be ingested. Of course there are many factors that can lead to malfunction of enzyme synthesis, such as disease and toxins; but again there is no evidence that a 'potential', new to science, is responsible for maintaining the process.

This leaves the question over whether ingesting plant enzymes has any nutritional benefit. If you bite an apple and leave it, it will brown; this is in a sense the apple digesting itself, as enzymes are released from their normal operation in the general molecular maelstrom incurred by your teeth. So yes, an apple that has been chewed and swallowed will release some of its nutrition without any further help from digestive enzymes. However: first, browning is significantly accelerated by heat. Cooking an apple helps the process, because the denaturing effect on the apple's own digestive enzymes is outweighed by the further breakdown of cellular structures (incidentally releasing more nutrients). Second, the concentration of digestive enzymes in a human digestive tract vastly outweighs the few digestive enzymes naturally available in the apple.

The significant point here is that it is the purpose of digestion to break down cellular structures and large molecules into smaller units that can be absorbed and used by the body's metabolism. There are very few cases described by science where a complete protein can be used directly by the body; in fact such an occurrence is often pathological, as in the case of lectins.

I very strongly believe that the undoubted benefit of eating raw food is entirely explicable by the generation by oxidation of 'unnatural' and possibly toxic chemicals (especially if the food is burnt), and the effect of heat on some very significant (relatively) small molecules that cannot be synthesized by the body - for example vitamins. And since these molecules are (probably) not found in your enzyme supplement in the required doses, I think you would be much much better off simply ( ) eating more fresh seasonal produce.

Sorry for the very short consideration of this big topic (and without references, I do have a real job ). More can be found here: http://www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-cooked/raw-cooked-2b.shtml.

Regards

G