Feel Better with Digestive Enzyme Supplements

It isn’t always easy to prepare healthy meals with trusted ingredients like farm raised meats, organic produce, whole grains, carefully measured oils and fresh spices. Eating right can sometimes get sidetracked, especially when consuming food from a restaurant or at an event like a wedding or business affair. Add in compromised food combining and any of these scenarios could result in gastrointestinal challenges such as bloating, indigestion and flatulence.

Using digestive enzymes as an adjunct to your natural digestive process could relieve some of the discomfort that may be affiliated with subpar dietary choices. It is an easy way to support your gastrointestinal health and avoid reaching for over-the-counter or prescribed conventional fixes that may only relieve but not quell the root cause.

Dirty Food

Your digestive process could be having a hard time dealing with “dirty food”. Dirty food is not unclean or contaminated food it is just stepped on food with ingredients meant to heighten taste. Things like butter, milk, sugar, fats and various oils that could end up negatively affecting your stomach and intestines.

Supplementing with digestive enzymes may help avoid digestive discomfort. Digestive enzymes are easy to find, fairly inexpensive and are a real digestion booster shot that may have you waking in the morning with way less gastrointestinal issues.

Anytime you are eating food you did not prepare yourself think of it as dirty food. Use a few digestive enzymes before, during or after a dirty food meal to help your body deal with breaking down rich or unknown ingredients it may otherwise have a hard time doing by itself.

The Enzymatic Players

Picking a digestive enzyme supplement requires making sure it has the proper ingredients to do its job. Some are more expensive than others but when it comes down to it you will want to make sure your choice has all the enzymatic components. This combination is essential to help breakdown the variety of compounds you consume, namely proteins, fats, carbohydrates and lactose.

Look for these enzymes to gain full advantage of using a supplement to help reduce the enormous amount of energy your body uses to digest your food.

• Protease or Papain – Breaks down complete proteins
• Amylase – For starches and carbohydrates
• Lipase – For fats
• Lactase – For dairy
• Cellulose – For fibers

Conventional Medicine Teeters

As with many home remedy attempts, conventional medicine response flounders. Some doctors will recommend or see no harm in a patient using a supplement for various attempts at bettering their health. Others stick to their high training and research numbers to weigh in on how something like digestive enzymes are a moot attempt when perfectly good medicines are available to do the job.

It is important to rule out more serious digestive problems so letting your doctor know of any chronic digestive difficulty before taking enzymes is important. Once tests determine that nothing serious is happening, then trying a digestive enzyme may help.

New York-based gastroenterologist Eric Goldstein comments to US News on non-enteric coated digestive enzymes,

“You’ll digest them well before they’ll be able to help you digest anything,”

Dr. Goldstein is somewhat correct as enteric coating on many medicines and supplements can help delivery to surpass the stomach digestive process so looking for a digestive enzyme that has enteric coating may be beneficial. However, many report that non-enteric coated enzymes work just fine.

Integrative nutritionist Liz Lipski and author of the book, “Digestive Wellness,” also comments,

“If someone tells me they consistently feel bloated or gassy two to four hours after eating, or that food feels like it just ‘sits there’ hours after a meal, I’ve found that support from digestive enzymes in these cases can make a real difference.” Ms. Lipski does recommend that it is “important to first rule out causes that would require conventional dietary or medical treatment—like celiac disease or Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO).”

Digestive enzymes show potential as a healthy digestive assist but more research is coming to light of how these enzymes may actually help gastrointestinal disease. A 2016 Italian study  published in the journal Current Drug Metabolism concluded that,

“New frontiers of enzyme replacement are being evaluated also in the treatment of diseases not specifically related to enzyme deficiency, whereas the combination of different enzymes might constitute an intriguing therapeutic option in the future.”

 

Try a digestive enzyme supplement to see if your digestive experience becomes easier. It may be the best choice you make to deal with the variety of compounds your body has to deal with on a daily basis.