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For example, because the live enzymes in many vegetarian foods are able to work with the body’s digestive system, less energy is used to break the foods down. The body doesn’t have to work as long or as hard to do the same job. That means that we actually receive more energy from eating less food overall!
Some of the best vegetarian foods that contain live enzymes are vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, and seaweed, as well as grains and legumes that have been sprouted. Each of these foods is able to provide exceptional amounts of vitamins and minerals, in addition to amino acids and even oxygen. The key to protecting these nutrients, along with the ever-important live enzymes, is to avoid cooking the foods.
Humans developed the process of cooking their food for very important reasons. The heat kills off bacteria and other perils that can be associated with raw food, especially meat. Somewhere along the line, we started cooking just about everything that we ingest. Unfortunately, this also killed off many of the good properties of plant-based foods. Even our juice is generally heat pasteurized, which takes away from its nutritional value.
By choosing healthy vegetarian foods, we can get more of those live enzymes back into our systems doing the job they were intended to do.
Of course, live enzymes aren’t the only benefits of adding more vegetarian foods to your diet. As we mentioned, these foods generally offer more vitamins and minerals than their counterparts. They also provide an excellent, natural source of dietary fiber. Fiber is generally made up of plant material that the body cannot digest. While it seems counterintuitive to eat something we can’t digest, it actually serves several vital purposes.
First of all, fiber slows down the absorption of sugar into the bloodstream, which allows us to keep a balanced energy level between meals. In addition, the fiber provided by so many vegetarian foods also helps to keep our digestive tracts clean and free of unwanted toxins and debris. It absorbs various waste materials that our body wants to remove while also acting to “sweep” the inside of the intestines to dislodge material that we don’t want to build up there.
It’s no secret that vegetarian foods offer a number of health benefits, but many people don’t even realize the importance of live enzymes. By adding raw produce, nuts, sprouts, juices, and even concentrated whole food formulas to our diets, we can get more nutrition out of what we eat.
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