Jana Eagle wrote:
>
> However, I understand that parasites only eat
> decayed tissue, they do not harm living tissue.  So in other words, if
> your body hosts parasites, they are helping you by consuming decayed
> tissue in your gut.

Jana, I think you've been exposed to some raw-foodist propaganda, which
is probably well-meant but misinformed. Maybe that idea about eating
dead tissue was borrowed from the fact that maggots (fly larvae) can be
used to clean out an infected wound because they eat out the dead tissue
and stop at living tissue, but it's just not true of parasite worms.
Hookworms attach to the wall of a normal, healthy small intestine and
live off of the host's blood. Various other roundworms, such as ascaria
(the big ones) and pinworms, as well as tapeworms, live off of
intestinal contents: pinworms in the large intestine and most of the
others in the small intestine. If you have decayed tissue in your gut
then you are not long for this world. (Peritonitis.)

> The way to prevent parasites is to
> clean up and heal the gut so there is no place for them to lodge and
> no undigested food in the colon for them to eat.  cooked food is often
> undigested because the enzymes are destroyed.

Again, it's not that there is something wrong with one's digestion. They
are just adapted to living off of normal intestinal contents, and most
of these worms live in the small intestine, not the colon. The stuff
about them getting lodged, and gut-cleansing, is based on a whole
industry of misinformation: the colon-cleansing industry. The entire
lining of living cells of the intestinal tract is sloughed off and
replaced every three days (these are some of the fastest dividing cells
in the body) and are constantly putting out fresh mucus, so how can
anything get lodged (except hookworms, who sink in their three teeth!).
Which is not to say that a lot of people don't have unhealthy guts that
need healing because of unnatural diets, it's just not at all the way
the colon-cleansing people describe it. On enzymes, the enzymes in food
are supposed to have a very minor role in digestion. Food generally has
no built-in interest in being digested. Most of us produce plenty of our
own enzymes to do the job, starting with pepsin in the stomach, then on
to various pancreatic enzymes, and enzymes secreted by the cells that
line the small intestine. Does anyone have reliable information that
there are significant amounts of enzymes such as protease, lipase, or
amylase in any raw foods? Not to my knowledge.

> that parasites have a
> job to do and that is why they exist.

Yes, in Protein Power Lifeplan the Eadeses say that they think we
evolved an efficient mechanism for absorbing iron to make up for the
blood lost to intestinal parasites, and that is why many people who take
iron supplements have too much iron in these days of fewer parasites, or
something like that. So we are adapted to living with some parasites,
but I don't think they actually benefit us in any way. Most of these
worms don't usually harm you much, but they can sometimes cause some
very serious problems beyond plain old anemia. Here's an interesting
site on parasites:
http://www.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~parasite/home.html

By the way, most parasite worms are not gotten through eating raw meat
anyway. I think trichinosis is the main worm gotten from eating infected
meat, and it's killed by freezing. My dad used to feed me raw hamburger
when I was a kid--it was one of my favorite foods. I think some raw food
is good for you, but there is a huge amount of misinformation put out by
raw-foodists. www.beyondveg.com has some good information about all
this.