Because cooked food can be digested with apparent ease by most people, it is maintained by some authorities that cooking is relatively harmless to food, depleting only a little from its nourishment. It is also maintained that the destruction of food enzymes by cooking means nothing because the enzymes are supposedly destroyed anyhow in the acid medium of the stomach before the food reaches the intestine. Dr Howell describes how the digestive enzymes secreted by humans eating cooked foods, are much stronger than those secreted by animals eating raw food, and how the human pancreas is hypertrophied due to overwork. It was evolved specifically to pre-digest food by food enzymes before the body's digestive enzymes come into contact with the food. Raw vegetables do not contain a great quantity of enzymes and so salads do little to compensate for the destruction of enzymes in cooked food.
Fruit is high in enzyme content.
Fruit will ripen rapidly then decompose rapidly in hot weather, while vegetables may only wilt and shrivel. Dr Howell describes experiments which show that it is possible for unsplit, complex substances such as bacteria, yeast cells, proteins and fats to be absorbed into the bloodstream and lymph. The experiments showed that enzymes in the blood serum, if adequate, complete the digestion of these substances. It was shown too, that when enzyme levels were low and symptoms of allergy were present, these symptoms subsided and enzyme levels returned to normal after large doses of pancreatic enzymes were administered orally to the patient. Nuts, considered generally as health food, are seeds and contain enzyme inhibitors which must be neutralized before they can be digested.