Good Food by John McKenna

Author:John McKenna [McKenna, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780717154265
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan

Dry eyes

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Difficulty seeing well in dim light (night blindness)

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Dry skin

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Recurrent infections

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In children in Africa, poor growth and development (failure to thrive).

Many people know that vitamin A is important for vision and for the skin (beauty therapists use it to treat damaged skin and to rejuvenate skin). What is less well known is its ability to protect against infections. A clinical trial carried out in Papua New Guinea in the late 1990s (Shankar, 1999) showed the protective effect of vitamin A supplements when children contracted malaria. Vitamin A was able to significantly reduce the parasite load, thereby preventing serious complications, including death. Malaria is the biggest killer worldwide and is estimated to have killed half of all humans who have ever lived.

Vitamin A is one of the fat-soluble vitamins. It’s stored in the body, so it’s possible to overdose on it. The recommended intake of retinol for adults is approximately 1,000 mg a day. Pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers require a little bit more – up to 1,200 mg a day. It’s possible to use higher doses, but remember that it’s stored in the body and so can be toxic at very high doses. It’s best to eat lots of foods rich in vitamin A, which is what Nature intended, rather than take pills.

ENZYMES

If I had written this book 20 years ago I probably would not have included a section on enzymes. The study of enzymes and the role they play in Nature is relatively new in the field of nutrition. Today we have identified thousands of enzymes, which seem to play a role in just about every chemical reaction that happens in the body. They basically speed up chemical reactions by bringing all the components together to allow reactions to happen.

To help bring the components up close and personal, so to speak, enzymes employ minerals and vitamins. When a vitamin or mineral attaches to an enzyme to help it speed up a chemical reaction, the vitamin or mineral is referred to as a co-factor. This is a principal role of vitamins and minerals. For example, zinc is known to be a co-factor in over 200 enzyme reactions in various parts of the body. When glucose enters the cell it’s broken down in a series of enzyme reactions to carbon dioxide and water. Magnesium and the B vitamins play roles as co-factors in some of these reactions. Enzymes could be regarded as facilitators of chemical reactions and they employ the help of micronutrients as co-workers.

You’re probably quite familiar with the digestive enzymes in your digestive tract that break down your food to facilitate absorption across the gut wall. This is one class of enzyme, but there are two other classes as well: metabolic enzymes, which facilitate all the chemical reactions in the cells of the body; and the third class, called food enzymes, which is what I wish to discuss now.

Raw foods sometimes contain enzymes that help the process of digestion. The food is giving you a present of digestive enzymes to ease the burden on your pancreas.

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