What Are Plant-Based
Digestive Enzymes & What Do They Do?

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A bowl of tropical fruit in afternoon sun: pineapple, papaya, mango, passionfruit, dragon fruit, rambutan and bananas

What are digestive enzymes?

They are proteins that break the food you eat into pieces small enough for your body to absorb. They are named after what they work on: amylase on starches, lipase on fats, protease on proteins.

Your body makes its own, mostly in the pancreas and along the digestive tract. Food carries enzymes too, which is part of why traditional food cultures so often served something raw or fermented alongside the cooked part of a meal rather than instead of it. Cooking largely destroys them.

What makes an enzyme plant-based?

Where it was sourced from, and nothing else. Amylase is amylase whether it came from a pineapple, a fungus, a pig or your own pancreas. It is not a different kind of enzyme, it is the same job done by a molecule with a different origin.

That is worth saying plainly, because the label rarely does. Plant-based on a box is a sourcing statement, not a description of what is inside.

The ones you will see named

Bromelain comes from pineapple and papain from papaya, and both are proteases. Beyond those two you will see enzymes drawn from fungi, from koji and aspergillus in particular, which is where a great deal of the category actually comes from.

Which brings up the thing nobody says out loud: fungi are not plants. Most products sold as plant-based are fungal, or a blend of fungal and fruit-derived. That is not a scandal and it is not dishonest, it is just an industry convention that reads as something more specific than it is. Worth knowing when you are comparing two boxes.

Plant-derived & animal-derived are genuinely different

Animal-derived enzymes are drawn from the pancreas of pigs or cattle, and are usually described as pancreatin. Plant and fungal ones are grown by fermentation. Some are fermented over a very long time, which is what the kits in my week with the seven day Rainbow are built from.

If where a thing comes from matters to you, and it does to a great many of us, that is a real distinction and it is one you can actually verify. Vegetarians and vegans in particular will want to read past the front of the box, because manufacturers are not always loud about the source.

Where I would start & it is not with a supplement

Give these three or four weeks before you spend money on anything. If it works, you have saved yourself the money. If it does not, you will at least know the basics were not the problem.

None of this means something is wrong with you. It means digestion is not only about what is on the plate, and that is worth knowing before you go looking for something to take.

Chew properly

Slowly, properly. Digestion begins in the mouth and most of us swallow half-chewed food while answering an email. This is the most simple advice in wellness and for sure the most underrated.

It has been one of the most effective things I have done. Taking my time over a meal, making the time for it, slowing down and eating with presence, rather than with the television on or in front of the computer.

Eat something raw or fermented alongside your cooked meals

A simple salad, or something fermented beside the cooked part of the meal. This is the traditional pattern and it costs almost nothing.

Pineapple and papaya are the fruits named most often, and mango, kiwifruit, ginger, banana, avocado and raw honey all bring their own. On the fermented side, sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir and miso. None of it needs to be a project. A few slices of something fresh beside a cooked meal is all it is.

The five flavours of Chinese medicine come at this from another direction, if that way of thinking speaks to you, and food combining is where I would look next if you want to go further with how a meal is put together.

Eat when you are calm

Your body has to feel safe enough to digest. When you are stressed it quietly moves digestion down the list and sends its attention elsewhere, which is why a meal eaten in a hurry, on a day you have spent braced, can sit very differently to the same meal eaten slowly on a calm one.

Standing at the kitchen bench between two meetings is not a meal, however good the food is. This is really intuitive eating territory, and it is slower, kinder work than it sounds.

Notice which foods sit heavily & which ones do not

Let that inform you more than any protocol will. You have far better data about your own body than any article does. Wind and bloating across the month are part of that data, and worth listening to rather than being embarrassed by.

If digestion has been difficult for a long time

Please have it looked at properly.

Persistent bloating, pain, changes in your bowels, blood, or unexplained weight change are worth a doctor's attention, and no amount of chewing or supplementing replaces that.

I say this as someone who spent years trying to solve on my own what I should have had investigated. I am not proud of that stretch and I would rather you skipped it.

A word on microbiome testing

Try not to reach for a random probiotic off the shelf and hope. More is not always better, and adding something without knowing what is already there is a guess dressed up as a plan.

If you want to stop guessing, testing is one way to find out. Complete microbiome mapping is the panel I point people towards, and I am an affiliate for i-screen, who run it here in Australia without a referral. It is a comprehensive one, and it is the kind of result to go through with a naturopath or a functional health practitioner rather than to interpret on your own, because what turns up is very often not the thing you would have picked.

If your digestion has been hard for a long time, that is the conversation I would want you to be having, with someone qualified to have it with you.

If you are still thinking about a supplement

The free parts come first. Chewing, calm, something raw beside something cooked. Give those a real go, and if you still want one afterwards, you will be choosing from a much steadier place, and you will know what you are choosing it for.

ZenCleanz is the range I am an affiliate for. They have a number of different kits as well as daily products, and you can explore the whole range on their website. I have written a separate piece on the kits if you want to see how they differ before you look.

Please read the label and the instructions on anything you buy, and decide whether it is right for you with your doctor or your own health practitioner.

I hope this has been supportive, and that it saves you a little money and a lot of guessing.

With love,

Jodie Louise