I am a biochemist at a research university and involved in structural biology work – we investigate the structure, function and physical properties of several proteins and characterize their enzymatic activity. I’m not a specialist in nutrition and I can’t speak to everything mentioned in this posting or book, but please realize much of what is suggested here is not factually accurate and does not appear to be supported by empirical evidence.

Significant alteration of diet does help relieve the symptoms of several diseases – but it is not necessarily through the action of enzymes. In the case of coeliac, fibromyalgia, and diabetes – the alleviation of symptoms through diet has nothing to do with ingestion of enzymes. The best effective treatment of Coeliac’s disease is to avoid gluten, thereby avoiding the immune response to gliadin – a wheat protein. MSG has been noted to reduce the symptoms of fibromyalgia, and we’re all familiar how monitoring of blood sugars is a critical part of controlling diabetes. In the case of type 2 diabetes, though a largely unknown mechanism excess fat cells reduce the body’s sensitivity to insulin – critical in signaling the body’s response to blood glucose levels. Any dietary strategy here is going to be targetted at helping maintain stable levels of blood glucose.

Most proteins are extremely sensitive to changes in environment and become denatured when entering our body. Enzymes (which are just catalytically active proteins) often require specific conditions to function properly and most are extremely sensitive biomolecules. Variations in temperature, pH levels, ion levels (just to name a few), will influence their function – digestion of most protein and enzyme results in their breakdown to amino acids – little (if any) remains catalytically active. The difficulty here is in quantitating how much from a dietary source makes it into an organism – i’m not familiar with how the author and his company have measured this, but it wasn’t readily apparent from a glance at his company’s website.

I apologize for my criticism/skepticism, but a quick glance at pubmed (an electronic database of journal articles run by the Us. national library of medicine and the National Institute of Health) returned no articles published by Bohager or his company. Diet does play a significant role in our health and ensuring we are eating responsibly is critical to staying healthy.

Sorry for the little rant! You guys are great, keep up the good work.

Natural Health Guy, thanks for your opinion on the book. Fascinating, isn’t it? If you do write that enzyme article for your website, email me the link so I can check it out, won’t you? Thanks.