This book tells the story of raw food—why it is beneficial and how to begin the raw-food journey. Before that journey begins, however, I’d like to share some insights into the science behind raw food, explaining just why eating raw affects the body the way it does. And it all has to do with enzymes.
Enzymes are indeed the spark of life. Without them, no flower could bloom, no human could think, no cell could live; in fact, life as we know it would not be possible. Despite such importance, most of us might not care much about enzymes, or even know what they are. We probably are all familiar with DNA, the basic genetic material of cells, the substance of our genes, which in the media, on television, and at scientific conferences gets all the publicity and grabs the spotlight. We hear on a near weekly basis about gene technology, the Genome Project to map our human chromosomes, gene therapy to treat all manner of degenerative and inherited disease. But we don’t hear much about enzymes; though I’ve seen literally dozens of stories in the popular press discussing the miracles of our genes, I don’t recall, other than articles written about my work, any articles highlighting enzymes, what they do, their role in health, and importantly, their potential as a treatment for human disease. There are, to my knowledge, no noteworthy conferences devoted to these molecules, no PowerPoint press releases extolling their significance, no TV specials to glamorize, or mystify.
They deserve more attention, certainly. But what, actually, are these molecules, these sparks of life, as I call them? Enzymes are first, and foremost, proteins. We all have some idea of what a protein is: it’s the material that makes up our muscle; it’s the shaft of our hair, the stuff of our nails, the gel in Knox gelatin we take to strengthen those nails.
To a biochemist, proteins are interesting molecules, consisting, as they all do, of complex arrays of amino acids, their basic bricks or building blocks. There are some twenty-four or so amino acids used by us humans, including eight essential amino acids, so called because we cannot make them in our cells, and they must be provided like a vitamin or mineral in the diet. The other sixteen we can manufacture from molecules such as glucose or even from other amino acids.
Enzymes are protein catalysts, that is, a molecule that allows a chemical reaction to occur efficiently, with a minimal amount of energy needed to get the process, whatever it may be, going. Enzymes essentially allow things to happen easily. For example, there are reactions in all our cells that without catalysts would require thousands of degrees of temperature, and thousands of years to come to completion, but with these molecules present, can happen within milliseconds at our comfortable temperature of 98.6 degrees. You can see, then, why without enzymes, there would be no life at all. A thousand degrees of heat would vaporize any cell, very very quickly.
Enzymes do many things, both within our cells and without. They help produce chemical energy to fuel our cells and their many varied activities. Our immune cells, our neurotrophils and lymphocytes, use enzymes to attack and kill bacteria, viruses, and fungi, as well as dangerous cancer cells that some scientists believe form every day in all of us. In the nucleus, another set of these unusual proteins allow DNA to repair itself from the ravages of free radicals and other toxic assaults, and in fact, without certain enzymes our genetic material could not duplicate itself as needed for cell division. That’s a pretty important assignment, when you consider that, for example, the lining of the intestinal tract replaces itself every five days, and without these nuclear enzymes such efficient turnover would be impossible. So, though DNA gets the headlines, without enzymes it can do nothing.
And outside the cells, in the stomach and small intestine, digestive enzymes such as pepsin and sucrase released by the gut lining help break down proteins and carbohydrates to jump start the digestive process. And importantly, at the back of the upper abdomen sits the pancreas, a most powerful gland that produces insulin, to regulate sugar metabolism and dozens of enzymes without which efficient digestion would be impossible.
Not surprisingly, enzymes, as busy as they are, wear out and need to be replaced. Our bodies—our tissues and cells—have the ability to make the enzymes we need from the basic amino acids provided by food, or available through cellular recycling. But this process, as useful as it is, has its drawbacks; enzymes are complicated molecules, sometimes consisting of thousands of amino acids, that must be aligned in a very precise order—one out of line, and the enzyme will most likely not be able to carry out its assigned responsibility. It’s a difficult undertaking to make so many of these molecules, an effort that requires energy enzymes. Certainly, we can make the enzymes we need, but it would make sense if we didn’t have to expend time, and metabolic effort, and energy creating and replacing worn out and lost proteins. Think of it, in every second there are thousands of reactions going on in every cell, each usually involving a series of steps that require at every point a different enzyme—it’s a major manufacturing job to keep those catalysts in adequate supply.
It would be helpful, from a thermodynamic perspective, if we could get our enzymes preformed, premade, ready to go to work, without always having to start from scratch. It would save time, effort, and energy.
There is a way, of course, and that way is from our food. But, as we shall see, only from raw food. Enzymes are indeed wonderful molecules, extraordinarily complex in their design and in their behavior, but like most proteins, they are very sensitive to heat. At around 106–107 degrees F., enzymes begin deteriorating, and above 116 degrees, most denature—that is, they become completely inactive, unable to do anything useful in the cell. That’s why fevers above 107 degrees F. are generally deadly, because at that point our enzymes start self-destructing, throughout all our tissues.
When we cook food, we change it in many ways; scientists have known for years that heat inactivates certain vitamins such as folic acid and vitamin C, and at sustained, high temperatures, certain minerals, such as calcium, become less readily absorbed. All this is true—when you cook food, you change certain vitamins for the worse, and you make certain minerals less biologically accessible, but what even nutritional scientists in general ignore is that when you cook food, you very quickly destroy all its enzymes. Keep in mind that food, whether it be of plant or animal origin, a fruit, vegetable, nut, seed, grain product, egg, piece of fish, or cut of meat—are themselves made up of cells, all loaded with their own cast of enzymes. Depending on the type of food, these food enzymes, as some have called them, can stay active for prolonged periods of time, particularly if refrigerated, since cold temperatures slow down their deterioration. Those in nuts and seeds, protected by a tough outer coat, seem able to last eternally, and even wheat grains buried with the pharaohs thousands of years ago can germinate under the right conditions—a process that requires active enzymes. But as soon as you cook them, the enzymes are dead, forever.
So, when you cook food, be it fruit, vegetable, nut, seed, grain, egg, dairy, fish, poultry, meat—all the enzymes are gone, very quickly. The body can use its own enzymes in the digestive tract to break these denatured proteins down into the component amino acids, absorb them as such, then put them back together into brand new enzymes—a process that is, again, time and energy consuming, and amounts to basically reinventing a very complicated wheel.
Edward Howell, the underappreciated American physician and scientist, first proposed during the 1920s and 1930s that raw food contains living, vital enzymes in their active form—enzymes that can be absorbed, much like a vitamin or mineral, from the digestive tract, and be used by our cells to replenish our own stock of worn or defective catalysts. This was a controversial claim that few scientists in Howell’s day, and few today, would accept. First, the usual objection raised then and now is that enzymes are themselves proteins, and like any ingested protein, will be broken down in the gut into the constitutive amino acids during the digestive process. However, in meticulously performed studies, Howell showed over and over again that in humans and in animals, these complicated molecules largely survive digestion, are absorbed, and seem to be reused. More recently, the research team of Drs. Liebow and Rothman have, over a twenty-five-year period, documented again that certain pancreatic enzymes, as complicated as they are, are taken up in the gut, intact and active.
Howell actually came to these conclusions out of his experiences trying to find a solution for his own declining health. Apparently, in his twenties he became quite ill, to the point he thought he would be unable to continue his medical career. From what I’ve read, his symptoms seem consistent with what we might today call Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, persistent exhaustion and malaise so severe he was virtually non-functional. He consulted a variety of doctors, both orthodox and unconventional, with no results, until he finally put himself on a complete raw-foods diet. I want to emphasize that the eating plan Howell himself followed was not vegetarian, but included raw eggs, raw dairy products, even raw meat, along with juices, raw fruits, raw vegetables, and sprouted raw nuts, seeds, and grains. This eating approach was the only therapy that made any difference in his health, and, research scientist that he was, he carefully studied the diet that had brought him back to exuberant well-being. To him, it wasn’t the vitamins and minerals that made the difference, though he knew some of these might be affected by cooking—when he had previously taken vitamin or mineral concentrates, he had felt no better. What he thought ultimately cured him were the enzymes in the raw food, these protein catalysts that he now believed must be absorbed in a usable and potent form.
With his health renewed, Howell began to apply what he had learned and continued to do so with thousands of patients over the span of a fifty-year career. And over and over, he reported what he found in himself, that when all else failed, raw food could frequently help. In his two published books, Howell discusses his experiences and cites hundreds of scientific studies of both laboratory animals and humans to support his contention that raw is best.
Another scientist who made a strong case for the value of raw over cooked food was the University of Southern California physician Francis Pottenger, a most interesting character. Trained in the early twentieth century as an expert in tuberculosis, a rampant disease at the time, Pottenger’s interests were wide-ranging: he wrote a text on neurophysiology, for example, that is still a classic. For our purposes, of greatest import are the series of cat studies he completed during the 1930s. These were simple experiments, to be sure; repeatedly, he would separate two groups of cats, feed one a completely raw meat, raw milk diet, and feed the other nothing but cooked meat and pasteurized milk. He would follow the cats through multiple generations, feeding the offspring in the same way as the parents, so the kittens of raw-food cats got nothing but raw, and those with parents eating cooked food, got the cooked. Simple enough, indeed. But the results were extraordinary: in the raw-foods group, the cats remained, through generation after generation, healthy and happy, with normal bone structure, healthy fur, and a resistance to allergies, arthritis, eye problems, and other degenerative diseases. They were happy cats who lived in peace with each other in their cat world. The cooked-food cats, after only one or two generations, suffered an epidemic of abnormalities in the bones, chronic skin problems, allergies, arthritis, and a host of degenerative illnesses. These animals also exhibited all manner of anti-social behavior to the point that their cat society began to break down. By the third generation, the animals were so deteriorated they could not even reproduce and the line came to an end. Each time Pottenger repeated the experiments, the results were the same: the raw-food animals stayed wonderfully healthy, generation after generation, the cooked-food animals suffered and eventually died out.
These were extraordinary results, but largely ignored by the mainstream medical world. But, like Howell, Pottenger made a clear and persuasive case that though we humans take cooked food for granted, raw and cooked are not the same. And the difference must be the enzymes.
What Howell claimed and what Pottenger observed really shouldn’t be that surprising. I have long found it interesting that of all the millions upon millions of animal species that have existed since life began, we are the only one that cooks its food. No other species has done that, not fruit flies, not gorillas, not dinosaurs; in nature, it’s all raw. Of course, our dog and cat pets eat cooked food, but that’s only because they hang around us, and like us, they also now suffer an epidemic of degenerative diseases, including cancer. But certainly, cooking, which we all take for granted, is an extraordinary change to have made in something so vital as our food, and a change that scientists and anthropologists generally ignore despite the work of men like Howell and Pottenger.
There is another name, another man, that deserves mentioning, Dr. John Beard, the Scotsman who at the turn of the last century first suggested that the pancreatic proteolytic enzyme trypsin represents the body’s main defense against cancer, and would be useful as a cancer treatment. Even then, scientists recognized that trypsin was one of the main digestive enzymes, but prior to Beard it was thought to have no other function. Beard’s thesis, revolutionary and controversial at the time, remains revolutionary and controversial today, a hundred years later. But his life’s work with enzymes has been the impetus of my own research career, since I first heard his name while a medical student at Cornell.
In our office today, we continue in the traditions of Howell, Pottenger, and Beard, and use enzymes against cancer and other degenerative diseases. We have already completed our first clinical trial, in which we treated patients with advanced pancreatic cancer with large doses of proteolytic enzymes. Fortunately, the results were substantial enough to warrant a National Cancer Institute-National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine grant to study our approach in a large-scale clinical effort. So we are making progress—the work of scientists such as Beard is finally being properly tested, and hopefully, someday, deservedly recognized.
I was pleased when I learned that my friend Carol Alt intended to write a book about raw foods, and how a raw-foods approach made such a difference in her own health. Her personal story is inspiring, and I always think it useful when ideas that have remained largely hidden are brought into the open for discussion and review. I admire Carol, as busy as she is, for taking the time to share, in her own way, what raw foods and enzymes have done for her. I wish her well with her effort, and continued good health.