What I am about to say is not new, it is a body of well established facts that are rarely considered simultaneously.  Yet, when all of these facts are known and applied together, they result in enabling our bodies to move positively in the direction of optimum or perfect health. These facts are the answer to some key questions we should all be asking.   

How good is our digestion? How well do our bodies detoxify?
Our bodies are composed of the very foods that we eat.  Our individual cells, about 100 trillion of them, can be no better than the raw materials from which they are built.  Besides water (a wonderful story all of its own), food consists of a complex of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, fiber, minerals, vitamins, and enzymes. 

The first six items are all building materials, the seventh vital factor, the enzyme, is unique and, is the only component that has the capacity to do work in any living system. Dr. Edward Howell, Dr. Weston Price, and Dr. Francis Pottenger have all agreed upon the importance of good nutrition and of digesting and delivering that good nutrition (amino acids, glucose, fatty acids, minerals and vitamins) to our cells.  The bulk of that work is supposed to be done by the enzymes that are supposed to be in, or accompanying, our food.  As is evidenced by the bowel's waste material, we either do a good job of digesting our food, or we end up with "toxic" waste, (i.e. putrefied protein, fermented carbohydrates, and rancid fat).    

Toxic waste should absolutely not be a part of our experience.  If we don't digest our food and deliver the breakdown nutrients to our cells, we've got digestive leucocytosis and a toxic waste problem that taxes our immune system, liver, kidneys, lungs, colon, heart, and many other tissues, while they most certainly are not being nourished properly in order to cope with such abuse.  Any volunteers for a job with unreasonable work demands and inadequate pay?  Our bodies haven't had much choice since we got off mother's milk!

Now that we've got the nutrients delivered we need to oxidize them in the Kreb's cycle.  Without oxygen we can die in minutes or simply degenerate over a period of many years.  Oxygen availability is a pre-requisite to ATP (Adenosine-Tri-Phosphate) production.  Dr. Otto Warburg, two time Nobel Laureate who discovered the prime cause of cancer, was recognized with the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1931 for that discovery.  He said, "Cancer has only one prime cause.  The prime cause of cancer is the replacement of normal oxygen respiration of body cells by an anaerobic cell respiration."  What's the connection here?  Oxygen?  ATP?  Lack of oxygen?  Fermentation?  Cancer? Lack of oxygen reduces the oxidation rate and production of ATP in the mitochondria.  Oxidation produces 12 times more ATP than fermentation.

How can a cell function at about 50% efficiency and still stay healthy? Warburg demonstrated that aerobic-oxidizing cells would consistently dedifferentiate into anaerobic-fermenting cells after two cells divisions at about 50% efficiency of oxygen delivery to the cells.  It is ATP production that determines whether a cell thrives or not.  As long as the immune system is functioning better than the proliferation of anaerobic-fermenting cancer cells, the cancer cells are destroyed.  When the proliferation of cancer cells exceed the immune system's ability to eliminate them, tumors form and cancers spread. As important as ATP is and the incredible amounts of it we need to supply the energy for all of the work the body must do - much of the ATP we produce is used up in the ribosome synthesizing enzymes.  This protein synthesis is so important that in a cell's ribosome more than a million chemical reactions produce an estimated two thousand molecules each second.  In fact, ATP is useless without ATPase, the enzyme that activates it!  It is enzymes that catalyze all of the work in the body, the sum total of all the chemical reactions in the body that we call metabolism!

The father of enzyme nutrition, Dr. Edward Howell stated that, "There is no other mechanism in the body except enzyme action to protect the body from any hazard.  It is ambiguous to say that nature cures, when we must know the only machinery in the body to do anything is enzyme action.  Hormones do not work.  Vitamins cannot do any work.  Minerals were not made to do any work.  Proteins cannot work.  Nature does not work.  Only enzymes are made for work.  So it is enzymes that cure.  Therefore the ability of the body to make any of the numerous enzymes needed for good health and long life must be kept at a high level by the methods incorporated in The Food Enzyme Concept."    

So now we are back to enzymes.  First we had "food" enzymes, now we have "metabolic" enzymes, which include every type of the more than 80,000 enzymes our bodies make to do all the thousands of kinds of work there is to do in our bodies.  Thus, it takes enzymes to make enzymes.  The more rich our diets are in enzymes, from live food or supplements, the more efficient and productive our ribosome can be in producing the very "workers" that keep us alive and hopefully thriving.  The minute we become enzyme deficient in our diets, we lose digestive efficiency and thus lose our ability to: deliver nutrients to our cells, aerobically produce ATP, and ultimately produce enzymes of the Food Enzyme Concept. When the ability to make our own enzymes begins to diminish on the day we are weaned and begin the fatal process of consuming enzyme deficient diets, we are losing our very ability to make enzymes in every cell of our bodies.  It only takes about 60 years between our weaning and the first years of our sixth decade of life and we've lost, on average, about 80% of our metabolic enzyme production capability!  Salivary enzyme content studies have shown that by an average age of 81 years the strength of salivary amylase is only about one thirtieth of people in their twenties.  Our bodies have only been compensating for our denial of the natural laws that we have often unwillingly been breaking. We are not designed to live in an oxygen deficient atmosphere or on enzyme deficient diets. 

Some scientists now are convinced that we have only about half the amount of oxygen in our atmosphere and about have the atmospheric pressure that we used to have long ago.  If that were the case, anyone familiar with the benefits of hyberbaric oxygen can easily understand the increased cellular metabolic efficiency that would result from such favorable conditions.  Everything that enhances our production of ATP and enzymes promotes good health and long life. On the contrary, everything that impairs our production of ATP and enzymes promotes poor health and early death.     Efficiency is what we need to focus on and that leads us to a brief discussion of essential fatty acids and sulfur containing amino acids as they affect oxygen transport. 

Each individual has a different ability to attract, transport, and utilize the available oxygen.  That is due to several factors, chief of which is the proper amounts and balance of the essential fatty acids and sulfur containing amino acids in our cell membranes.  The lipoproteins which contain linoleic acid and sulfur rich protein help maintain fluidity of these membranes and are necessary for the creation of electrical potentials across these membranes as well.  Perhaps most important of all is the strong affinity that oxygen has for these lipoproteins that enable each and every cell in our body to efficiently attract, transport, and utilize our available oxygen.    

Dr. Budwig has demonstrated that without the essential fatty acids, the respiratory enzymes cannot function and that even the red blood cells lose their ability to efficiently attract and transport oxygen.  Udo Erasmus elaborates, "Of the 45 essential nutrients discovered so far (there may be as many as 75-100 in all ), linoleic of ... " the importance of essential fatty acids cannot be overstated.  Yet they must be understood in context as a vital link in the chain of life.     Even a rudimentary knowledge of minerals and vitamins would attest to their necessity and vital importance as coenzymes in the production of energy (ATP) and enzymes. 

So, for the sake of brevity, I trust your own studies have served you well in these context as you see all of the pieces of this puzzle come together.  Oxygen, enzymes, essential fatty acids, minerals, and vitamins - the lowest common denominator recipe for the production of energy and enzymes.  And work it does, each and every time it is applied appropriately.  When you carefully examine each and every organic ailment to which the human body can be subjected, you will find whatever reason - toxicity, excess, deficiency, imbalance, etc. - you will find something that has compromised the very  foundation of cellular function, the ability to produce energy and enzymes.  When you can optimize your cell's ability to produce ATP and enzymes, you have begun the process that leads to optimum health.  You must build a proper foundation before you can build your house or you do labor in vain!

References:
Howell, Edward.  Enzyme Nutrition.  Wayne NJ: Avery Publishing Group, 1985.
Howell, Edward.  Food Enzymes for Health and Longevity.  Wilmot, WI: Lotus Light Publications, 1980
Pottenger, Francis M., Jr..  Pottenger's Cats:  A Study in Nutrition.  La Mesa, CA:  Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, 1983.
Price, Weston, A.  Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.  La Mesa, CA:  Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, 1970
Carrel, Alexis.  Man the Unknown.  New York and London:  Harper Brothers Publishers, 1935
Warburg, Otto.  The Prime Cause and Prevention of Cancer.  Revised lecture at the meeting of Nobel-Laureates on June 30, 1966 at Lindau, Lake Constance, Germany.  English edition by Dean Burke, N.C.I. Bethesda, MD.
Konrad Triltsch, Wuzburg, Germany, 1969.