Among raw-food enthusiasts, there is a very popular myth that enzymes
are "alive" and these so-called "living enzymes" somehow
(never supported with biochemistry) assist the body in digesting food.
There is also a myth that foods are "alive"
and therefore contain "living enzymes". Well, foods are
rendered quite dead upon chewing, and certainly the food's being digested
would also certainly kill any living cell that was not
killed by chewing. If you think that foods are alive, then chew
some seeds and plant the mush thus prepared, and wait for it to sprout
and grow - does anyone really believe chewed foods can be "alive".
are proteins, so are
not alive just like any other chemical
is not "alive"; perhaps they are a very special class of chemicals,
but there is no credible scientist that will claim they are "alive".
Thus, "living enzymes" exist only in the domain of contemporary
Enzymes mediate "Life" and make it
possible because they catalyze
chemical reactions that otherwise can not take place at relatively low
body temperatures. But, chemicals are not alive.
How do we know if something is "alive"?
The best test I can come up with is that the test subject must display
the following characteristics:
eat, excrete, and reproduce. Thus, bacteria are alive, while viruses
are not. Enzymes do not eat, excrete, or reproduce.
Apparently, the "living enzyme" myth
was started by Howell in an ancient, crackpot book called: Enzyme
Nutrition. Howell was born in 1898, so one can assess must how
out-of-date his unsupported, pseudoscientific claims are. Assuming
he wrote this book at age 30, and that information doubles every 10 years,
we now have ~256 times as much information available then when this book
was written, and guess what, no contemporary scientist claims enzymes
Unfortunately, the original Hippocrates Heath
Institute (and its current
incarnation) heavily promoted this false concept in the '70's, and beyond,
so is mostly responsible for the propagation of this myth.
But, unrestrained by intellectual inconveniences,
like scientific facts and biochemistry, large numbers of today's nutribabblers
hold fast to this silly myth because of the "feel good" fantasy
that accompanies the self-delusional claim that one is eating "living
foods" with magic "living enzymes". Surely, one is
smugly superior, but only in one's internal fantasy world, if claims to
eat nonexistent "living foods".
The claim that plant enzymes "help digest"
our foods is readily seen as false with a little knowledge of how enzymes
Enzymes need very specific conditions,
such as temperature, pH,
and co-enzymes to properly function. Plant enzymes exist to support
the anabolic mechanisms
of the specific plant species, certainly not the catabolic
process of human digestion. Since these sets of chemistries are
totally different, the proponents of the "food enzymes" myth
have the responsibility to explain how one specific enzyme can do both
in different species with different fundamental chemistries (plants run
chemistry, while animals run on protein
chemistry); they can not! Since plants have pre-existed the human
species for unknown million of years, the "food enzyme" proponents
need to explain just HOW plants anticipated the evolution
of the human species by millions of years, and then changed their
own biochemistry accordingly; they can not!
Surely, raw foods are superior,
nutritionally, simply because cooking denatures
proteins and radically changes the inherent chemistry of cooked foods
by other mechanisms, such as hydrolysis
(splitting by water)
Our species evolved on raw food (until a few
thousands of years ago), and there are no evolutionary mechanisms to allow
our species to "adapt"
to the large variety of very different and unknown chemicals created by
the high temperatures of cooking.
the most potent carcinogens known, are created by cooking "meat".
Cooking either animal products or starches
So, a raw diet of fruits and "vegetables"
is the closest possible to the diet
of the chimps whose genetic code is 98.4%
identical to that of humans. Clearly, that miniscule difference
is due to the major differences in physiology, not those of digestive
There is no doubt that a raw diet supports superior
health, in both humans and other animal species, but that is not due to
mythical, nonexistent "living enzymes".