Even though cooked-food takes longer than raw food to digest, according to anecdotal RVAFer reports, the digestion of such cooked-food by the body's own  enzymes hardly needs to take weeks or months so there's no reason to assume that the enzymes in raw foods take that long either! If enzymes really took so long to digest any foods , a lot of people, on raw or cooked-diets, would presumably face chronic constipation all the time. 

 

The harvest issue doesn't seem meaningful given modern practices. After all, most foods, however raw, are either heavily chilled(within a couple of degrees above 0 celsius or so) or fully prefrozen, between slaughter/harvest and sale, and enzyme-activity slows down dramatically in such low temperatures.

 

That said, many cultures, such as the Eskimoes, would deliberately age their meats so as to increase the rate at which enzymes predigested the raw meats, thus making digestion for them  even easier than with just raw, fresh meats - a  number of RVAFers who go in for aged, raw meats have similiarly noticed that such foods are more easily/quickly digested than others.

 

(Incidentally, I do not claim that fresh, raw foods necessarily contain all the enzymes necessary to predigest them as otherwise there would be no reason for us or other wild animals to have any  digestive-enzyme-producing capability at all, but it's clear that enzymes in raw foods do help ease the burden on the body re predigestion of (raw) foods).



Geoff

 
> Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 10:46:22 -0400
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: PALEOFOOD Digest - 29 May 2009 (#2009-126)
> To: [log in to unmask]
> 
> This pre-digestive process of enzymes in raw foods I assume begins right 
> after harvest?
> 
> Later, when you eat, how much real benefit would you derive during the time 
> the food in your mouth until your own system takes over destroying the 
> food's enzymes in the lower stomach? A couple of hours?
> 
> You would have to know the rate of predigestion effected by the enzymes of 
> the food since harvest and then apply that rate to the time period of that 
> food in your system (between mouth and lower stomach), I would take it? It 
> doesn't strike me that their activity would have the time to be of much 
> significance. More significant would be the time period between harvest and 
> ingestion, a period of days/weeks/months in vegetables/fruits and weeks in 
> meat? I am under the assumption these digestive enzymes begin reacting right 
> after harvest.
> 
> Marilyn

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