Posts Tagged ‘enzymes’

Enzymes, Wolf Spiders, Little Blue Wasps, and You

Saturday, July 21st, 2012

The battle was fierce. The wolf spider was fighting for its life. The little blue wasp was fighting for the next generation. Suddenly the spider went limp. It was still alive, but it was incapable of moving its limbs.

How had the wasp done it? All venom, whether wasp, spider, or snake, works by stopping certain enzymes from functioning. The wasp’s venom stopped the spider’s motion by filling the receptor site of the enzymes that made motion possible.

Your body uses such tricks also, even though you don’t have venom. Your life is controlled by a complex series of enzymatic actions which are turned on or turned off as the occasion demands. Everything we do, think, or feel is the outcome of enzymes synthesizing or breaking down other molecules. Healing injuries, resisting disease organisms, and growing are enzyme driven.

Your body has a limited capacity to produce enzymes and is designed to make use of “captured” enzymes such as those found in raw foods. If you eat raw foods or use supplemental food enzymes with cooked meals, your body saves on the enzymes it needs to produce. It can then invest those savings in certain immune cells to “sting” disease organisms to enzymatically overcome them to keep you healthy.

By Ellis Hein

Enzyme Alive or Dead

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

That title could mean many different things. Your cells are either enzyme alive or they can’t perform the necessary metabolic functions to sustain life. Your whole body is either enzymatically alive or it is dead.

However, this title is a question regarding the lacto-fermented foods I produce. Do they have live enzymes?

One of the tests for live, activated enzymes is to sprinkle some over a bowl of warm oatmeal and let it sit for 20 minutes. If the enzymes liquefy the oatmeal, you know they are active. If no liquid forms, either the enzymes are not viable or they lack certain co-factors, minerals and vitamins, to activate them. Which amounts to the same thing as far as function goes.

I was warming up my breakfast of lacto-fermented oatmeal and had added in a lump of cold, non-fermented oatmeal. I let my bowl of food warm gently over a pan of hot water for about 20 minutes until the food was ready to eat. After uncovering the bowl, the first thing I noticed was a quantity of clear liquid around the lump of non-fermented oatmeal. While not appetizing, it was exciting to verify that I am producing enzyme alive, easy to digest food.

So, definitely not dead!

By Ellis Hein