Author: James Moffat
With December 25th just weeks away, it’s time to start thinking about everything involved with the holiday: The family, the fun, the festivities. Oh yeah – the food.
It’s a holiday of indulgence. We indulge during the feast, then we indulge in leftovers in the days – sometimes hours, depending on when your feast begins – following. And for the most part, it’s not meager helpings; most Holiday plates are bountiful.
But that bounty can quickly lead to indigestion, soreness and more if you don’t take proper care. This means eating within your means (best to leave the second – maybe even third – plate for leftovers), eating slowly and chewing your food properly, and taking digestive enzymes.
What Are Enzymes?
Enzymes are responsible for every activity of life, and are especially important for the body’s proper absorption and utilization of food. Research has shown that maintaining normal levels of key enzymes is important to maintaining overall health. There are two classifications of enzymes in the body: digestive, which help us utilize the nutrients in foods; and metabolic, which are responsible for bodily reactions such as energy production and detoxification.
We’re here to focus on digestive enzymes. Proteases (aids in digesting protein), amylases (aids in digesting carbohydrates), and lipases (aids in digesting fats) are the three primary digestive enzymes, which function as the biological catalyst to breaking down food. In today’s world of processed and fast foods, the body must work harder to break down food and absorb the nutrients. And poor eating habits – including improper or inadequate chewing and eating on the run – contribute to reduced levels of digestive enzymes, meaning the body isn’t working at its peak performance to absorb nutrients in the foods we eat.
In addition, food enzymes – present in all those great Thanksgiving staples – are sensitive to heat. That means they are usually inactivated when food is cooked to serve, leaving your body with the challenge of trying to break down foods for absorption into your system with no help from the natural enzymes that would otherwise be present in many of the foods we eat.
All of these things might make your Thanksgiving feast a nutritional nightmare. But by supplementing with digestive enzymes, you’ll be able to maximize the activity of the body’s own enzymes and the “friendly” bacteria your body needs to not only break down the feast and help prevent the occasional upset stomach, but also to absorb the nutrients from those foods.
By making digestive enzymes part of your Thanksgiving routine, you’ll be able to give thanks for all that this holiday is about – the family, the fun, the festivities. Oh yeah – the food.
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