The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.

Hello, I'm Kimberly King, and welcome to the mother's market radio show, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's show, enzymes can help us with digestion, so find out why they're the next big thing in helping you break down your food, plus later will tell you what's going on around town and tell you what's new at mother's market. But first up, Tom Bo Hager is the chairman of enzyme ICA, the number one enzyme company in the natural foods industry, and he holds a degree in holistic nutrition and has authored two books, and we welcome him to the mother's market radio show. Tom, how are you?

Great, thank you.

Thanks for being here, and for those in our audience that may not be familiar with your mission and your work, why don't you fill them in before we get to today's topic.

Well, enzymatic is the best selling brand of enzymes in the natural foods industry, we have been for about 10 years now, and we were 16 years old though, and we focus on enzymes and enzyme therapy, so most of our products have to do with supporting digestive issues, but we have a large number of products we call therapeutic that help with immune function, Candido control and the like. So about 35 products altogether, how? Today we're talking about enzymes, of course, and the effect that they have on us, and so... Can you explain what our enzymes... Sure, enzymes are technically proteins, they're considered catalysts, so a Catalyst is something that usually speeds up the process, so in the case of enzymes, whether it's in the soul or it's helping with digestion, it's speeding something up, it's allowing the cell to replicate... It's allowing the cell to do its job, which allows us to see here, feel think, walk, talk, you name it, without enzymes, you can do any of the above, and digestive-ly speaking, it's allowing us to benefit from nutrition in a way that we truly do benefit from it without enzymes, it would take far too long to benefit from the vitamins and minerals and our food, and so enzymes are essential for that, I was just gonna say they are an essential part of what we need in our body.

Absolutely.

What benefits do enzymes serving... Addressing digestive distress.

Well, the most obvious benefit is we absorb what we eat, assuming we're eating well, so if we're eating good nutritious food, the enzymes that we produce and the enzymes in that food will help us not just break that food down, but absorb the vitamins and minerals in that food, when it comes to distress, what is most likely occurring is that the body isn't producing enough digestive enzymes, perhaps we're over-consuming cooked and processed foods, foods that have been a radiated foods that have been boxed and canned, and without living foods, we can over-stress the body, especially if we're eating too much of it, so as a result, distress occurs, it might be gas, bloating and digestion, Harper or something with a name, a digestive issue.

And so when you take a supplemental enzyme, you're basically providing the body what it can't provide itself in stressful conditions, so you're allowing the body to still benefit from the food that you're consuming without producing as many enzymes as it should to benefit from that food. So the distress will often go away as a result of including digestive enzymes with your meal.

Okay, so you kind of talked about it just a little bit, but food intolerance is... So it makes up for those food intolerance.

Yeah, so there are food allergies, which means that there's an immune response to a food that we're eating, in the news right now, there happens to be a lot of talk about peanut allergies, and the scientists have discovered that if you feed babies or small children, small amounts of peanuts, they're less likely to have an allergy, so there's food allergies, enzymes really aren't going to play a role when we're talking about an allergy to peanuts or strawberries or something like that, where we see a real benefit is in what we call an intolerance and an intolerance has to do with, by definition, a lack of an enzyme, so the most common is lactose intolerance, which is dairy intolerance, essentially, lactose a sugar and dairy, and the enzyme lactase breaks down lactose. And so when you simply add lactase to a meal that contains lactose, something with here, then the symptoms of gas and bloating and diarrhea and everything else that comes with it goes away because now you're able to break that down.

Well, lactose intolerance is not the only intolerance, what we're seeing is that gluten intolerance is becoming huge, so many people, it's one of the fastest growing categories in the natural foods industry is... Foods that are gluten-free.

Right?Gluten intolerance is an issue. There are people that are intolerant to phenols, phenols that you find in wine, you find in bright colored fruits, and they will often get flushing as a result of consuming those types of foods, and there's an enzyme that breaks down phenols, it's called Dylan is.

So with intolerance, there are specific enzymes that can help these specific intolerance and we make products that address all of them... Well, that's interesting. Okay, so is there a common, I guess, or a connection between digestion and immunity as well, absolutely. There's a lot of research on that connection, and most of the research is focused on the flora and the intestinal tracks without the right amount of flora. If we get imbalanced, not only are we in danger of having candida overgrowth, but we can impact our immune system in a very negative way, and the reason for that is because it's one of the lines of defense for the body when we don't have enough good flora in our intestinal tract than some of the bacteria, some of the things that we don't want circulating through us, the things that do not belong, get through, but what I like to talk about... 'cause that's important, but what I like to talk about is this idea of energy allocation.

There is some fascinating work done on longevity and a lot of research on how much energy the body needs to stay healthy, metabolic energy, what they found is, is that what absorbs or consumes the largest amount of energy is the digestive system, so when we're digesting meals and we can all relate to this. If we have a large meal, let's say at Thanksgiving, we typically become lethargic after the meal, we just lay on the couch and watch football, and we fall a slave, some of us do at least from all that to... Exactly.

So we're over-consuming, the body is placing a priority on digesting that food and all of the available energy is used to try to break it down. That's why we get so tired.

So what I like to talk about when it comes to immunity is the fact that when you're eating less food, when you're restricting calories, for example, or when you're eating live food like raw food, or when you're taking enzymes with your meals, you're reducing that demand, and by reducing that demand on the digestive system, you're allowing other systems of the body, such as the immune system to work more efficiently, so there's a real connection to what we eat, digestive enzymes and immunity.

This might be a silly question, but you're talking about being able to decipher or the different... You've talked a little bit about the gluten and times are the back to see how many enzymes... Are we talking about here, right? Well, there are 5000 enzymes have names in our body, there's probably another 4000 waiting for a name, but by my estimates, and I'm not a scientist, but I've been looking at this for 17 years now, and I believe there's well over 100000 just based on what we know we don't know or what we don't know, we don't know if we wanna put that.

This remarkable, it's absolutely remarkable how many enzymes are now in the natural foods industry and formulas, there's less than 30, more than 20, probably around 26 or 27 enzymes that we can deliver orally that can have an impact both on digestion, immune health and all the other things. That go on with it. My goodness. And more researching in Spain.

Absolutely.

What's the difference between probiotics and enzymes?

We get that all the time.

In fact, I was just at an event where the speaker was talking about enzymes for 45 minutes, and at the end of the speech, one of the very first questions that was asked was, Are you talking about probiotics? And then she was talking to doctors, so I really... I couldn't believe it because probiotics and enzymes are very different, however, it's a common mistake, so probiotics are living bacteria that populate or intestinal track that support immune function and digestion, they make an enormous amount of enzymes, but they're not enzymes, enzymes are, as I mentioned earlier, proteins and these proteins are not alive, they're active, which allows them to break foods down into smaller pieces, like proteins into amino acids and fats into essential fatty acids, but they're not living bacteria. They're much, much smaller than that. And they have a very specific purpose, so they work exceptionally well together, they work great together, you need good probiotics, you need good enzymes, but they are clearly not the same thing.

Let's talk a little bit about more. Let's dig deep into... Deeper into longevity.

Well, I'm glad you asked about longevity more because in 2009, there was a two scientists that won the Noble prize in science because of a project they were doing on longevity, and what they discovered was an enzyme called telomerase.

Now, this enzyme telomerase is an enzyme that protects something called telomeres, so science has known for a very long time that the chromosomes in the nucleus of our cells, as the cell divides, the chromosome gets shorter and shorter in the chromosome, it contains our DNA. And so as those chromosomes gets shorter and shorter, it gets to a point where the cell can no longer divide and it dies, in fact, by some definitions, aging has to do with cellular death, some people can only explain aging by describing cellular data.

So the longer you can keep cells alive, the healthier you are, the longer you live, what they discovered is that there's an enzyme that our cells produce that protects the chromosomes from getting shorter, it's called telomerase, and what it's protecting is the tip of the chromosome called a telomere, now that sounds... I'm listening to myself say this and it sounds incredibly confused, I think a little bit... It is a little bit complex. I think if I were to simplify it, I'd simply say that the enzyme telomerase, which was discovered in 2009 by two Nobel Laureates, has been proven to help with longevity, help to lengthen the life of cells in our body, proven over and over again, and enzymatic, one of the projects we've been working on since 2009, since they won their award, is a way to influence that enzyme, and we have spent a lot of time and a lot of money on trying to determine the best way to improve and increase the enzyme and ourselves, and only recently have we been able to do that? And that's one of the reasons we're here in Anaheim this week, is to show people the research and that we have that will improve telomerase activity within the cells, thereby letting the cells live longer, so we're very excited about it, and this is another angle on longevity that very few people may be aware of, but something that is very interesting and very modern because it's in a lot of the magazines round... In fact, Time Magazine just had an article featuring telemann, at what point can people start taking this enzyme at what age... Actually, at any age. So the ingredients in the formula are found in lots of nutritional products, rodeo, for example, is in the product, we have a botanical in the product and Herb, which... A struggles. Thank you for that. I couldn't remember the name of the Astragalus and a couple of other components of vitamin D3, so these are just nutritional products or ingredients that we've combined in a way that clearly influences this, and we tried multiple combinations before we had something that were... Well, this is really interesting, and we're right at the tip of the iceberg with this, so we're gonna talk more about this when we come back, Renata, a quick break more with Tom Behar. Let me come right back.

And welcome back to the mother's market radio show. And we wanna remind you that if you missed any portion of today's show, you can find us on iTunes by searching mother's market radio or download the show from our website, mother's market dot com, click the link for radio and listen to past shows. Plus download our Healthy Recipes and money savings coupons, all available at mother's market dot com. And now, back to our interview with and domenica, Tom Bahar, and we're talking about enzymes, so Tom, we were just talking a little bit about the difference between probiotics and enzymes and can they be taken together?

A great question, a lot of people wonder that, and the reason they wonder that is because enzymes by nature break things down, they make things smaller, and so they wonder if by taking an enzyme with a probiotic, will it somehow break down the probiotic, making it less impactful? On the body, the short answer is absolutely, you can take them together, in fact, we combine probiotics and enzymes and some of our most popular formulas, the reason being is that the enzymes will not break down living bacteria unless it's been tagged by our bodies to be removed so it's a mechanism within the enzyme that prevents us from happening.

The other thing to keep in mind is that probiotics manufacture hundreds of enzymes, different types of enzymes, and many of the enzymes that they manufacture the same enzymes we're providing in a supplement, so there's just no reason not to take them together. In fact, I constantly encourage people to consider that taking them at the same time, it's fascinating, all the research that your company is doing right now, and I think one of the most interesting things that you said is the amount of enzyme Center there are now and the research with the aging. It is remarkable, really.

And you know what is a little eye-opening for me is with all this research taking place and all the benefits that enzymes have on the physiology and on health is how few people actually know what they are and what they do, and the benefit... And that's why we're constantly being asked, Are you talking about probiotics?

We learn about enzymes at a very young age in school, and we're told that they help our digestion, but that's the last we ever hear of that... Yeah, it's just that one sentence, it exactly.Atassi think I know what it is people say, but I'm not sure, and so I believe that in the next few years, we'll see a similar trend with enzymes that we've seen with probiotics. Nobody knew what a probiotic was five years ago now, people can't really describe what they are, but they know they're good for him. I think the same thing will happen with enzyme.

Well, good, you're opening the doors for a lot of folks in our generation to come... Can intimately impact other supplements... Yes, in a big way. So supplements, in general, are designed to benefit our physiology, either replace things that are founded, food that we're not getting... Or they are food.

So as an example, most of the nutrients or vitamins and minerals that we consume today as individuals at CHOP and health food stores are isolated nutrients, which means they don't have the matrix, the connections to all of the beneficial proteins and fats that are available in Food for example, when we eat an orange, vitamin C is a combination of ascorbic acid and hundreds of other things.

When we take vitamin C, Generally speaking, in a vitamin, it's just ascorbic acid, one of the things it's missing is a protein and enzyme, and it's the enzyme that will allow the body to identify that ascorbic acid is beneficial, it will help the body absorb that ascorbic acid to the soul, and enzymes actually play an instrumental role, an essential role in delivering these nutrients into the cell, so one of the things I like to recommend with individuals is to combine enzymes with our supplements, whether we're taking herbs or vitamins or minerals, there's a huge benefit and at enzymatic, we came out with products called enzyme nutrition, and these are whole food vitamins that contain the attachments, all the attachments naturally found in whole food, along with the addition of enzymes that enhance the absorption of those nutrients. We also included in that a substantial amount of good probiotics, billion CFS, which is a way to determine potency and some really interesting botanicals as well that have a wonderful effect on our health, and so it's a complete multivitamin with everything that you need.

How do you take enzymes and when do you take them out? Typically, two ways, The first way you take enzymes in the most popular way is you take him with your food, okay, so you're gonna benefit from your food, you're gonna have less gas, less bloating, less of the digestive issues common to people who need digestive enzymes. You're also gonna be more regular, as a result, people that are constipated along can take enzymes with their meals and they're gonna take them at the beginning of the meal.

You want the enzymes present in the digestive system when the food enters, and so when the enzymes are present and active and the food comes in behind it, it's starting to break that food down right away, if it follows the meal, then you run the risk of it not really breaking down as much as it could have if you didn't take it at the beginning of the meal, the other way you take enzymes is without food, and the reason you would wanna take enzymes away from food is because you want a therapeutic effect. So if we're trying to support immune function, we might take a blend of enzymes that are called proteases, and these proteases which break down proteins get absorbed into our bloodstream and help break down things that really don't belong there that are made of protein such as bacteria and other things, just things that don't belong... We don't want that competing with food, in other words, we don't want those produces is going in there and breaking down food because they're only active for a short period of time, and the more they work on proteins, the less effective they are where we need them, so by taking them on an empty stomach, if we get full potency as it circulates through our body, so kind of like a cleansing in between meals.

Yeah, yeah, I can have that. Absolutely, that impact by taking it away from meals, and more than half the products we make are designed to take away from food, but the most popular products we make are designed to take with food... If that makes any sense.

Yeah. Wow. Goodness. Yeah, this is... You're an enzyme specialist, so that's... That is, yeah. This is very interesting information. The next question I have is about hydrochloric acid, which is otherwise known as HCL hydro-clerk acid. A lot of people take it, as we age, we make fewer and fear enzymes, so people over, let's say 40, have the most pronounced symptoms of poor digestion, typically, they find that they need to eat less food and foods begin to bother them. Some of that is the digestive enzymes, the lack of producing them, some of it is the lack of hydro clerk asset as we get older, we also make less hydrochloric acid, an acid in our stomach is what also creates that burning effect for heartburn.

And so the asset is simply there to liquefy the foods, and then when they become liquefied enzymes come along and break them down into small molecules, the challenge is, is that people that are taking hydrochloric acid and enzymes, they may be inhibiting their enzymes.

And the reason I say that is because enzymes only work in certain environments, and some of the enzymes don't like acid, so when you're adding acid to your diet with food, people that take hurler asset, typically take it at the beginning of the meal.

You're creating a much more acidic environment and some of the enzymes you would be consuming with that meal would be inhibited in that very acidic environment, and so what we suggest is, if you're going to take hydrochloric acid, take it at the beginning of the meal, take your enzymes in the middle of the meal.

However, what we have found is, and this is why I like this question, is that most people that are on 100 cleric acid, once they take a digestive and time, they don't need it anymore, so I would suggest they try first just taking a digestion, I'm at the beginning of the meal, see how they feel after just a few days, chances are, they're not gonna need HCL and all because the body will then begin making more HCL because of the reduced stress, digestive.

So it's naturally... Yeah, having to do without that.

Yeah, can enlist help with cardiovascular health or... Inflammation, yes, absolutely. So there are enzymes that are known to support healthy inflammation, I think that's the proper way for me to say that, but there are also enzymes that have been studied for cardiovascular health, so Brolin, for example, it's been around forever, and it has been fantastic for people with sports injuries for poor circulation, people that have inflammatory responses, and so as a result, Bromine is a popular enzyme that can support inflammation in a healthy way, however, a few years ago, there were studies done on an enzyme called NATO-kinase, and it's fascinating. I would encourage your listeners, anybody that's looking for cardiovascular support, to just simply look up at Okie and all that it does, it not only improves circulation, but it literally breaks down fibrin, and fibrin is a protein that circulates through our arteries and veins with the blood that allows us to create a scam, but also forms clots, it can be instrumental in clogging arteries as well, and reducing or restricting circulation when you take niacin as the NATO Cannes goes in and breaks that down, but it only breaks down what we don't need, in other words, it's not gonna prevent us from clotting, it won't do that, it simply clears much of the sludge, if you will, from the system and increase circulation that way, it's phenomenal for cardiovascular health called naoki.

And how do you spell out in a tin... As E And enzymatic makes a product called NATO is nataka.

Thank you. Well, that's... Yeah, so that's naturally a very good end time for that, so that... Thank you.

How about women's issues? Let's talk about that.

Very important.

Well, women's issues like men, and we have... Men and women have common issues, so obviously digestive distress, we would handle the same way, however, we have on our advisory board, a woman by the name of Ashley cough. You know, she has a title America's dietitian, she's been on numerous TV programs, and she's been working with us for a couple of years on PMs, and she developed a product with us, she partnered with us called by by PMs, and unlike other products, it's not intended to balance hormones.

Now, when people think of the symptoms that PMs... People with PMs, women with PMs exhibit, they typically think of an imbalance and hormones and that's what's contributing to it, that is true, but it's incredibly hard to influence that, especially over the period of five to 10 days. So what Ashley does is Ashley provides digestive support, and she provides magnesium and she provides a B-vitamin, and it's this combination that reduces the food cravings, reduces the bloating, even has an impact on mood as a result of having better digestion.

So I would encourage anybody that wants to look at a different way at PMs is to consider this new product that we've developed, well, this is very interesting, and I wanted to find out, one last question, how does the best person best choose an enzyme supplement from the last question.

We could take 20 minutes and then we don't have that. I would simply say, look for a company that specializes in enzymes, there are vitamin companies that make 300 products and they have an enzyme product in that line, enzymatic, this is really all we do, and there's very few companies that can say that, so I would just simply say, look for someone who specializes in enzymes to buy the best supplement you can.

Excellent, well, thank you so much for your time, Tom, and we look forward to having you on again. In the mean time, you can learn more about Tom on his website and domenica dot com, and I'm gonna spell that out for you if you're at home and you're wondering... It's E-N-Z-Y-M-E-D-I-C-A enzymatic dot com, and learn more about how you can stay healthy. We look forward to our next visit. Thank you, thank you.

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Mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition,