The importance of enzymes. You are what you eat, right? Wrong. What you eat is useless to you unless it can be broken down into vitamins, minerals, nutrients and fats that can be absorbed by your body.
A great deal of the work of your gastrointestinal system, including everything from your mouth, salivary glands, stomach, liver, gall bladder, pancreas and intestines, is directed at exactly this goal. And a lot of this work is carried out by digestive enzymes.

Why Supplement Enzymes?
When it is in its natural state, raw and unprocessed, the food you eat, along with its many nutrients, contains some of the enzymes you need specifically to break down that food. But many of us exist on a diet of primarily cooked food, and digestive enzymes are extremely sensitive to heat. In fact, they are more sensitive to heat than vitamins are and are destroyed by any heat above 118° F, so imagine what cooking does to digestive enzymes and to your digestion. Not only cooking, but also pasturization, canning and microwaving destroy digestive enzymes. When the food you eat does not contribute some of the enzymes needed for its own digestion, your body has to contribute more than its share, diverting enzymes from other necessary functions and contributing to all manner of health problems.

Why Plant Enzymes?
Our Plant enzymes enjoy four major benefits over enzymes derived from the pancreas of animals. Obviously, they are suitable for vegetarians. Secondly they are active over a broader range of foods than animal derived enzymes. Thirdly, they begin their work earlier in the digestive process than animal enzymes. Plant enzymes begin working in the stomach; animal enzymes begin working only later, in the intestines. So plant enzymes spare the body a lot of work by predigesting food before it is exposed to your body's own pancreatic enzymes. Finally, plant enzymes avoid the possible risk inherent in animal derived enzymes that your body will recognize them as its own pancreatic enzymes and diminish its own production.

What are the Different Kinds of Digestive Enzymes?
There are four major types of digestive enzyme, each responsible for its own type of food component.

Cellulase
Cellulase breaks down fibre and is found only in plants and plant enzymes: it is absent from both the pancreatic enzymes produced by your body and from the pancreatic enzymes found in animal source digestive enzymes.

Amylase
Amylase breaks down carbohydrates. There are many types of amylase. Lactase, for example, breaks down the milk sugar, lactose, and Maltase breaks down the malt sugar, maltose. Invertase helps digest sugar, and pectinase helps breakdown the fibre, pectin.

Lipase
Lipase is responsible for digesting fats. Without lipase, we would not only poorly absorb fats, but also all of the fat-soluble vitamins, like vitamins A, D, E and K and all the carotenes.

Protease
Protease, as the name suggests, breaks down proteins. Without proper protein digestion a whole host of health problems from food allergies, to leaky gut syndrome, to toxicity and even skin diseases like psoriasis become possible. And that's not all. The proteases play a very large part in keeping the small intestine free from yeast, including candida, bacteria, protazoa and other parasites. The well-known digestive aid, Bromelain, is derived from pineapple and is actually a mixture of a number of proteases and small amounts of other enzymes. Bromelain is an excellent protein digester and is able to do its work in both the stomach and the small intestine.

Help your body make the most of the food you eat, and use New Roots' comprehensive Plant Digestive Enzyme and ensure that you are, in fact, what you eat.