Enzyme Nutrition

Rating:
Summary: The Missing Link in Nutrition
Review: For anyone interested in health and disease, THIS book will open your eyes to a vital, yet overlooked nutritional element that is the single largest deficiency in the world. Startling examples of how traditional diets are lacking in enzymes, and the relationship to degenerative disease processes.

I utilize this book in my professional nutrition work and patients are able to read and understand the plain language used to describe the facts. This helps them become personaly involved in improving their health!

Rating:
Summary: SMALL; BUT, TOUCHED THE VITAL POINTS.
Review: In this "Enzyme Nutrition", Eddie Howell and May Murray managed to squeeze a lot of information into a compact space. A good effort indeed!
The book is small; but, touched every vital point. Its outline good, and includes: the catalytic nature of food enzymes; their individual sources; stability; instability; as well as other biochemical and physiological characteristics.
This book will be of great benefit to nutritionist/dieticians, biochemists, pharmacologists, and many others. Its theme is simple and straightforward. Still, I will advise any non-science biased enthusiasts (like: bodybuilders and fitness [people]), who would like to venture into it, to keep a biochemistry dictionary at hand. "Enzyme Nutrition" will assist its readers in assessing and selecting healthy natural foods. It is an ideal and affordable advisor, which diabetics and other persons with limited food choice would enjoy reading.

Rating:
Summary: A waste of time, unreliable, out of date
Review: This book is flawed. It should be read critically because Howell was not a responsible scholar. His logic and his use of references cannot be relied on. His thinking was also extremely out of date. This might be explained by the fact that he himself was 87 when this book was published. Despite the hype, he was not a noted researcher. He was not an enzymologist and did no published research. He is unknown in the biochemical world.

Howell's main idea about enzymes can be seen in the excerpts provided here. He believed that the proteins in enzymes were mere carriers for a 'vital energy' or 'life principle' which he called the enzyme potential. He also believed that we were born with this enzyme potential in a limited lifetime supply. Why did he believe in this bizarre theory? The excerpt provided gives a clue: in a book written in 1985 he was arguing against the enzyme theories of 1880 and 1890. He had missed the huge development in the knowledge about enzymes which had happened after 1950. He was stuck in the past.

Much of the material in this book is similar to his first book, "Food Enzymes for Health and Longevity" which was written in 1939 when he was 41. In his first book, he gave some references describing experiments where the enzyme activity appeared to be separated from the protein molecule. If he had stayed in touch with enzyme research he would have known that these crude experiments were disproved with more accurate equipment. In fact, the enzyme activity IS completely explained by the protein molecule. He would have learned about DNA and its role in enzyme production. He would have learned about ATP and its role in providing energy to enzyme activity. There is no 'enzyme potential' needed to explain the workings of enzymes - his theory was based on misinformation. If he had been a true scientist he would have discarded his enzyme potential theory and moved on many years before this book was written.

In this book he used faulty logic, drawing unjustified conclusions from bits of information from other people's research. The way he presented information from other sources is also questionable in several cases. It is easy to read his book and get the impression that he had supported his ideas with good references. But if the actual reference is read, it can be seen that he sometimes omitted details which would have weakened his case. For instance he talked about an old experiment by 'Jackson' where rats were fed a diet of 80% sugar and the pancreas size increased. He commented that this was an enzymeless diet, and he exclaimed about the calamitous effects of an enzymeless diet. But he didn't mention the fact that the control rats' diet was also enzymeless cooked food (containing 40% sugar). The difference between the rats on the two diets had nothing to do with enzymes in the food. He also ignored the fact that the paper's authors thought the change in the pancreas weight of those mice might not have been related to diet but to another factor in the experiment.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable but too technical at times.
Review: This book turned my conceptions of food, nutrition, disease, disorder, and digestion up-side-down. If you have doubts about *why* a raw food diet is a good idea, and why in many cases it can save a person's life, then this is the book to start with. "Enzyme Nutrition" is pretty much a scientific book. It is not a manifesto, or a how-to book, but rather a presentation of one man's life-long research into the role that food enzymes play in human digestion. Don't let that scare you away, however, because the language is very easy to understand, and the book is easy to read. In fact, this book is a condensation of the author's unpublished 700 page book, a book that supposedly took him 20 years to write.

It is really a shame that this book is not a bestseller, and that Dr. Howell's theories are not more widely known. The ideas in it are, pardon the possible hyperbole, revolutionary. Many of the ideas that you read in other raw food and enzyme books are based on Howell's research (although, to be accurate, not all raw food advocates are advocates of Howell's ideas). I can not recommend this book highly enough. I hope I live to see Howell's theories accepted by the mainstream "medical establishment," just as the discoveries of vitamins and minerals (which are only two-thirds of the equation) have.

Rating:
Summary: A waste of time, unreliable, out of date
Review: This seminal work by Dr. Howell fills a much needed void in the nutrition paradigm. With abundant clinical research to back his findings, he explains the critical importance of consuming foods rich in natural enzymes and how these life-sustaining molecules are destroyed by our modern methods of cooking, sterilizing, and processing foods. Written on a level basic enough for people with little nutrition background, yet comprehensive enough to take a doctor like myself to a new level of understanding regarding the power of raw foods in both health and disease. He even takes one quote from the standard "bible" of anatomy for all U.S. medical schools, Gray's Anatomy, which points out that the human stomach is actually similar to the well known ruminant animals in having two seperate divisions for digestion. This book, which took over 20 years to compile and originally spanned over 700 pages, was written by a man who dedicated his life to patient care and research. This is an excellent primer for anyone interested in learning the value of unadulterated food in its natural state for health maintenance, as well as the ultimate natural weapon in conquering disease.

Rating:
Summary: The Missing Link of Essential Nutrition
Review: This seminal work by Dr. Howell fills a much needed void in the nutrition paradigm. With abundant clinical research to back his findings, he explains the critical importance of consuming foods rich in natural enzymes and how these life-sustaining molecules are destroyed by our modern methods of cooking, sterilizing, and processing foods. Written on a level basic enough for people with little nutrition background, yet comprehensive enough to take a doctor like myself to a new level of understanding regarding the power of raw foods in both health and disease. He even takes one quote from the standard "bible" of anatomy for all U.S. medical schools, Gray's Anatomy, which points out that the human stomach is actually similar to the well known ruminant animals in having two seperate divisions for digestion. This book, which took over 20 years to compile and originally spanned over 700 pages, was written by a man who dedicated his life to patient care and research. This is an excellent primer for anyone interested in learning the value of unadulterated food in its natural state for health maintenance, as well as the ultimate natural weapon in conquering disease.