Robyn's Blog

I am in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and Spokane, Washington for the Thanksgiving weekend.  The three of us here are 40, 60, and 80 year old women–me running my five miles each morning, my aunt walking, and my grama lying on the couch recovering from knee replacement.  It’s her third joint replacement, with a fourth scheduled (hips and knees done, shoulder coming up).  Is this an inevitable part of aging?  Is this what I have to look forward to?  As you know, I’m doing what I can to stave aging off.  We staged an intervention this morning to talk about grama’s unwillingness to use the cane/walker, to consider that driving isn’t such a good idea, and to suggest she stop running for the phone and leaping up off the couch.  She’s already fallen once while we’ve been here, and we’re worried.  It’s hard to see someone you love suffering with arthritis, memory loss, and many other degenerative conditions.  And this holiday weekend has been a reflective time to think about generations, love, loss, aging, family.

My aunt and grama are both a little worried that I’m denying my kids the protein they need (my daughters being vegetarian and all of us eating very little animal food).  And they express concern about calcium, since we don’t get dairy products.  I told them not to worry because I’ve never drunk milk and have the bone density of a 20-year old.  They look at me, a little puzzled, confused, and concerned.  From what I see in milk drinkers, both in the literature and in my life (anecdotally), well, let’s just say I’m going to keep going down this path I’m on.

My grama is technically not.  (My actual grama, I mean.)  She’s my grampa’s fifth wife–my own grandmother died at her own hand at the age of 33.  My aunt I traveled here with was five years old at the time and, in all the chaos with police officers and ambulance EMT’s milling about not paying attention to her, she tragically walked into the bedroom to see the scene after my grandmother put a bullet in her head. 

“Grama” has been in my life since shortly after I was born, so she’s the only grama I’ve ever known.  She’s an amazing lady who is the best caretaker for my grampa I could ever hope for.  He completely lost his memory years ago and is now in a rest home.  I went to see him tonight, where he was preoccupied with touching my hair, and kept telling me it is pretty and gold.  I told him he could touch it all he wanted.  I miss the real him, but his sense of humor is still there even if he asks the same question a dozen times.  And my grama is as patient and loving the 12th time as the 1st.  Her first marriage did not work out–and amazingly, last night, we went to have dinner at the home of the woman who next married her first husband!  That is the kind of woman my grama is.  She’s forgiving and patient.  I want to be like her when I grow up.  (All except for her liberal use of the words “sh*t” and “d*mn,” haha.)

Aging is inevitable.  But I am here watching what hell it is at the end.  And I’m entirely unconvinced that it has to happen as early as it does for most of us. 

Dear GreenSmoothieGirl:  What are foods that help digestion? Some raw foodists eat raw meat.  Raw meat and milk have enzymes, so aren’t they good foods?

Answer:  We’ll leave the Oxford/Cornell China Project out of this discussion, which shows that animal protein causes many diseases.  (The primary author of that pivotal study, Dr. Campbell, told me he did not study predigested or fermented milk products, such as kefir or yogurt.)  Raw milk has over 35 enzymes.  If you’re going to use dairy products or milk, raw certainly has those many advantages over pasteurized.  One very old study showed the highest morbidity (death) rate in newborns drinking pasteurized cow milk, a much improved rate for those drinking raw milk, and higher still for those who were fortunate to be breastfed by their mothers.

However, you run many bacterial risks with the way milk and meat will be raised, handled, and transported to you.  Meat in particular is troublesome, and I would not recommend eating it raw, even if you go to all the trouble of finding truly range-fed, organic chickens or beef.  The shockingly lax U.S. standards for poultry allow virtually anything to be legally given labels like “natural” and “range fed.”  We can obtain live enzymes through plant food, much more safely. 

That said, I believe much evidence shows kefir or yogurt to be an excellent food with its natural probiotics.  If you can find a source you trust of raw milk, and can obtain kefir grains, you can use the raw milk and predigest the casein proteins with the action of the live kefir grains.  Raw goat milk is preferable to cow milk, with its smaller fat molecule that is not mucous forming like cow milk is.  (Vegans can make kefir with coconut liquid.)

I’m visiting my grampa in Couer d’Alene, Idaho, for the rest of the week and may be offline.  (He is in a home, and I am flying out with my aunt.)  After that I’ll talk about what enzymes supplements to take.  Happy Thanksgiving!

Dear GreenSmoothieGirl:  How can enzymes and eating raw food be so important when stomach acid would kill any enzymes that came with the food anyway?

Good one.  Some people think that the low pH of the stomach stops salivary and any other food or supplemental enzymes from working.  A number of experiments Howell writes about show this is not so.  Some enzymes are shown to work actively at two different pH ranges.  Another study shows that salivary and supplemental enzymes were re-activated in the alkaline duodenum and lower in the intestine after going through the stomach.  Hydrochloric acid in the stomach is not as strong as once thought to be and when used in in vitro experiments (outside the body).  A Journal of Nutrition-published study at Northwestern showed 51 percent of amylase from malted barley was intact when passed into the intestine.

Enzymes manufactured by the pancreas of a person or animal are sensitive to pH because they aren’t adapted to anything outside the restrictive confines of the body.  But, microbial-derived dietary supplement enzymes are very adaptive, since fungus grows in a variety of places and conditions.  These enzymes survive the acidity of the lower stomach.  These plant-based sources are the digestive enzyme supplements I prefer (more on that later).

As with so many other things in the human body, we’ve been provided with the ideal environment to digest food.  Problems occur when we alter our food instead of giving our body the kind of nutrition we were designed to digest easily, that people used to eat for thousands of years.

Dr. Howell says that we’re born with a finite ability to produce endogenous enzymes, and by middle age, most of that ability is gone.  (And he said this 25 years ago, before the modern diet worsened.  Some experts make even more dire projections, that Westerners are burning out enzyme capacity by age 35.)  The answer, of course, is to eat as much raw food as possible, and as little cooked or processed food as possible.

Tomorrow, raw meat and dairy.  After that, I’ll address whether you should take a digestive enzyme.

We don’t think of our stomach as being two-chambered, but Howell goes to lengths to document all the experts and studies (including Gray’s Anatomy) saying that it does, in fact, have two distinct parts.  And in the upper stomach, or “food enzyme stomach,” gastric juices are not released, and peristalsis is not yet churning the food.  Most nutritionists don’t know this.  But that’s where the digestive enzymes inherent in raw foods do their work for about 30-60 minutes before the lower stomach opens and stomach acid must begin to work.  If the food is cooked, it sits there doing nothing, with any bacteria you swallowed with it getting a foothold.  Or, the predigestion that can take place there only with raw food makes the draw on the body’s supply much less when that food continues on through the digestive tract.

Think of a snake, for instance, who eats a rat.  That rat is so large that it can’t enter the snake’s stomach for some time to be broken down by stomach acids, until the natural enzymes that came inside the rat break it down.  The healthy ancient meat eaters of various cultures ate not just meat and dairy products, but fermented products—foods that are broken down into component parts by live food enzymes.  Some bizarre examples are Eskimos who eat the contents of a caribou’s stomach (and a number of other putrefied foods) as a “salad,” and Indians of the Amazon River basin, who chew boiled yucca, spit it into jars, and let it ferment with the amylase enzyme in saliva.  This food is their main nourishment, with the average person drinking a gallon a day!

Because of the terrible draw on our enzyme processes when we don’t supply exogenous food enzymes, all metabolic activity is affected.  Consequently we have dental cavities, baldness, thinning hair, and breaking nails, allergies, acne, headaches, constipation, cancer, energy problems, and so many more diseases.  Animals in the wild simply don’t have the hundreds (thousands?) of diseases that modern man does as a result of destroying the enzymes in our food.  Even the “healthy” among us tend to have many of the smaller ailments that no animal eating raw food in the wild has.  Dr. Howell says that the idea that “nature cures” we’re all familiar with can refer only to metabolic enzyme activity, because “there is no other mechanism in the body to cure anything.”

In 1943, Northwestern University established the Law of Adaptive Secretion of Digestive Enzymes through experiments on rats.  Dozens of other research teams later strengthened this law’s premise with similar findings.  Researchers studied the amount of digestive enzymes secreted by the pancreas.  What researchers found was that an organism values its enzymes highly: it will make no more than are needed for the job.  So, if raw food containing exogenous enzymes are provided, the body has to manufacture very little, leaving its resources and energy well allocated to metabolic processes.

Many studies from the first half of the 1900’s prove that when an animal eats lots of starch, amylase is primarily produced.  A meat-eating animal is found to produce mostly protease.  A whale’s stomach has no amylase in it, because a whale eats no carbohydrate.  And people? When we bring in lots of exogenous enzymes in our food, our body produces very little, leaving those capacities free for other metabolic work.  Scientists missed knowing this, and Medicine and even Nutrition, as disciplines, have misunderstood or ignored these discoveries.  By and large, those charged with guiding us to good health have ignored the critical factor of helping us avoid enzyme burnout.

Just like people have enlarged livers or enlarged hearts when those organs are heavily taxed, the pancreas becomes enlarged when a body is fed lots of enzyme-free (cooked or processed) food.  Lab mice eating a cooked, enzyme-free food have a pancreas two to three times heavier than wild mice eating a raw-food natural enzyme diet.

Howell outlines three types of enzymes we need: digestive enzymes, which digest food, metabolic enzymes, which run every function of our bodies, and food enzymes from raw foods, which start the digestive process.  So what enzymes are involved in digestion?

Amylase is the enzyme used to digest carbohydrate, and it is concentrated in saliva.  Protease is the enzyme that digests protein, found in concentration in the stomach.  Lipase digests fats and is manufactured by the pancreas (along with additional amounts of amylase and protease).

Exogenous food enzymes (from the outside–raw food or enzyme supplements) are critical because you need your endogenous enzyme activity (manufactured by the pancreas) to be allocated to metabolic processes.  When your body has to produce concentrated digestive enzymes because your food didn’t arrive with its own live enzymes, you’re guilty of forcing your precious enzyme activity to do the labor of digestion while also expecting it to metabolize well.  Results include all the disease effects of using up limited resources in the wrong places.

What most of us learned in biology classes when we were young isn’t totally accurate.  That is, we were taught that the 3,000 enzymes discovered (and likely many more undiscovered) are catalysts, the sparks that are needed for every action and reaction in the body.  They are, in fact, catalysts–used in chemical activities (in this case, in living beings).  That doesn’t tell the whole story, because that’s not ALL enzymes are.  They have more, biological, functions beyond the neutral, chemical catalyst role.  They contain proteins, and some contain vitamins.  Plus, they do wear out, and are routinely flushed out by the organs of elimination.  And we make a truly fatal mistake believing that we can waste them indiscriminately.

I’m going to write about the work of Dr. Edward Howell, who spent 20 years writing Enzyme Nutrition: The Food Enzyme Concept.  I confess to reading the 170-page abridgement rather than the 700-page original work with 700 sources.  I’m abridging that book and other sources I’ve read on enzymes so in reading a handful of short, daily blog entries, you’ll understand his work conceptually.  Besides the basic premises behind the research on food enzymes, I’ll tackle

n      whether enzymes can survive the acidic pH of the stomach

n      whether raw meat/dairy with all their enzymes are good food, and

n      whether you should take digestive enzymes

Howell’s book is one of the authorities on the subject, an early pioneer.  Other good reads are Enzymes: The Fountain of Life by Lopez, Williams, and Miehlki, and Enzyme and Enzyme Therapy by Anthony Cichoke.  Another enzyme enthusiast has briefly reviewed the major books here: http://www.enzymestuff.com/resourcesbooks.htm.  After this blog series, I’m going to summarize a handful of studies on the benefits of raw foods, whose foremost benefits are live enzymes.

You can’t read GSG.com or 12 Steps to Whole Foods for long without understanding that I believe LACK OF LIVE ENZYMES to be the biggest deficit in the U.S. (or Western) diet.  That is, we are eating so much dead food, which we are not designed to do, and it’s leading to all the degenerative diseases of our day—autoimmune, cancer, heart problems, and more.  Howell says that disease started when man discovered fire and began killing food enzymes with it.

The critical law of biology that Howell explains is that when we require our body to manufacture enzymes to simply digest our food, by eating food without its own enzymes, we are robbing more important needs for enzyme activity in metabolic processes.  That’s every single transaction that takes place in every organ.  And the result of stealing enzymes from where they belong is cell damage, burnout, aging . . . and early death.  This phenomena of burning out our natural resources manifests itself as disease.  And all this is ENTIRELY PREVENTABLE.

You have probably read that the average person eats 10 lbs. of bugs per year.  That’s not a fact you like to think about much, I’ll bet.  When our culture began to fear micro-organisms, we started to fear bugs, too.  John the Baptist would be so disappointed in us. J

Virtually everything we eat, processed food included, has bugs in it.  Food manufacturers have limits imposed by the FDA: maximum weight per pound of rat hair, for instance, or bug bodies. Manufacturers are allowed only two maggots per 100 grams of tomato sauce, or 60 bug fragments for 100 grams of peanut butter.

I’m here to tell you the upside.  We get Vitamin B12 from micro-organisms in the soil.  For years, people have loved to repeat that the plant-based diet is deficient because the ONLY place you get B12 is from red meat.  This isn’t true.  Animal flesh has B12 because animals eat things grown in organism-rich soil.  Indigenous vegetarian peoples around the globe have been tested to have almost universally perfect B12 stores in their bodies.  (They are eating close to the land.)  If we didn’t nuke our soils with pesticides and so many other chemicals, because we’re so afraid of bugs, we wouldn’t have a B12 problem.  The answer isn’t to gobble more animal flesh, which causes so many OTHER problems.

Eating a little dirt and a little bugs now and then isn’t a problem.  I’m not suggesting you kill some crickets to add crunch to your salad tonight, though the ULTIMATE source of B12 is . . . termites.  I’m just saying that before we introduced unnatural ways of changing our food supply, we didn’t have a B12 problem.

The best way to avoid worrying about B12 altogether may be to grow your own produce in your own organic garden, and buy organic produce when you can.  It’s not too late.  I’m growing winter greens in my covered garden right now, in Utah where it’s already snowed.  Poisoning the plants we grow as food to get rid of insects is unnatural and has unintended consequences.

Dear GreenSmoothieGirl: What about the controversy surrounding agave?

Answer: I have seen a couple of people with clout on the internet say that one should be careful with agave.  They make a decent point that since much of the product imported into the U.S. is from Mexico, we don’t always know what we’re getting.  Sometimes imported product can be pretty wild and woolly, especially from developing countries.  An allegation has gone around that high fructose corn syrup is cut into the agave.  That would certainly be a way to increase your profit margin, if you’re an agave manufacturer.

The agave I use, that I buy in huge bulk for my local buying group a couple times a year (66 cases of 4 gallons each sitting in my garage right now), I know does not contain corn syrup.  Personally, I react very negatively to HFCS, and I feel great when I use this agave.  I required the company I buy from wholesale to produce their organic certification.  I checked into the importer’s reputation and didn’t find anything amiss.  I got the nutritional sheet on both the light and dark, and compared (overall, no big difference).

You can get agave RAW or not.  I don’t believe there’s any way the product is literally cold-pressed from the cactus straight into the bottle.  I don’t personally believe it’s truly raw.  So I use agave sparingly, as a replacement for items that are more processed and more destructive to your blood sugar.

Agave has 1/3 the calories and 1/3 the impact on your blood sugar that other concentrated sweeteners do, like HFCS, sugar, and honey.  That’s pretty brilliant.  Don’t take that as a license to go crazy with it, though.

If you want to be an absolutist or purist, don’t use any sweeteners at all.  Just eat fruit and dates.  Even most raw foodists do use maple syrup, which is never truly raw, and agave.  If you want to use occasional sweeteners for baked goods, etc., a good brand of agave is probably the best or one of the best sweetener options.  (Madhava, a brand a few of you have mentioned, does have a good reputation.)

Locals, I bought some extra agave, so let me know if you want a case: 4 gallons for $130 (raw, organic).

I don’t know if you all noticed this comment to a blog entry a couple of weeks ago.  Please inform us all of your opinon!

–Robyn

Hi my name is Liz and I work with the Corn Refiner’s Association. I wanted to share some infromation about High Fructose Corn Syrup.

Both sugar and high fructose corn syrup contain 4 calories per gram, and your body metabolizes them the same way. Like sugar or honey, high fructose corn syrup has calories. Excessive calories, from whatever source, can promote weight gain. But replacing high fructose corn syrup with sugar will not reduce obesity or improve health. They are the same.

The American Medical Association (AMA) recently concluded that “…high fructose corn syrup does not appear to contribute to obesity more than other caloric sweeteners…”

It can be confusing trying to buy the right foods for your family when there are so many choices and so little time. When reading food labels, you can have peace of mind in knowing that high fructose corn syrup is no different than sugar or honey – your body handles them the same way and they all have the same number of calories.

There’s a lot of solid research and information at http://www.SweetSurprise.com and http://www.HFCSFacts.com.

Thank you for your consideration.

Thinking about the questions lately about acai and maca, I was checking out today at The Good Earth.  The woman and her daughter in front of me had clearly never been in the health food store.  It was also clear that they were from the very lower middle class and of extremely limited means.  On the conveyor belt were $25 worth of acai packets, and $70 worth of vitamin supplements.  They had an envelope full of cash, which they counted and recounted to make sure they weren’t overpaying.

Someone had convinced these poor people that acai is worth the very little money they had.  These people had NO FOOD on the conveyor belt for their $100 purchase, in a store full of food.

I put my dates, greens, sprouted wheat tortillas, and a few other items on the belt and was outta there for under $20.

To answer a question a couple of days ago, maca is an ancient food, a root, used by the Incans.  It’s touted by its marketers to have many benefits, including improving sexual function and aiding in building muscle mass.

It’s one of what I call the Designer Foods, like acai, goji, chlorella, pomegranate juice, and other fruits you’ve never heard of before that compete for our attention.  These $30+/lb. foods are a consequence of the confluence of three things.  And those are, (a) the epidemic of health problems, (b) the people suffering in that epidemic wanting a cure that doesn’t demand much of them, and (c) a lot of discretionary income in the economy.  In a capitalist economy, someone (like David Wolfe) will always step in to meet the demand.

Anyone who wants to try them should feel welcome to do so, of course.  They’re interesting foods and very nutritious.

However, what I am always concerned about is keeping the focus on the basics.  Are you eating 60-80 percent raw plant foods, and have you replaced refined foods with all whole foods?  THAT is a much more important step than buying some kind of designer food with marketing sizzle and the lure of a better sex life or high energy.  (Your libido and energy will improve with the foods that cost under $1/lb., too, especially as you bump out the bad stuff.  I promise.  And I make $0.00 telling you this.)

So, those with money, those on a quest for the ultimate health, those who are already well down this path and getting an A- or higher on the GreenSmoothieGirl nutrition quiz:  http://www.greensmoothiegirl.com/nutritionQuiz.html

Buy maca, and “hemp hearts,” and acai extracts (in bars of naturally sweetened, free traded, organic, raw dark chocolate).  Just PLEASE don’t do that for an outrageously expensive little “health kick” and then say,

“I can’t afford to eat right.”

I don’t want anyone struggling to feed a family, learning about whole foods for the first time, to feel overwhelmed because she can’t afford the Designer Foods.  I rarely eat designer foods myself, though I’ve tried many of them (including maca).

You can just do the things in 12 Steps to Whole Foods and then if you want more, undertake a cleanse.  Designer foods are less important than those things.  My advice, even for those of you with chronic health issues, is to stay the path.  Be patient because it took you a while to get into the poor health, and it’ll take a while to get back to good health.