Dr. Mercola Digestive Enzymes (for pets)

This is a super late post. We started having digestive enzymes in Aug 2015 as I'm 11 yrs young and Cotton 10 yrs young now (aside from out Dr. Dobias organic [ Gutsense ] probiotics) and some digestive enzymes would assist us much more.

Why are enzymes important for all living beings? Raw food are already extremely rich in enzymes so the body doesn't need to produce extra to digest food. Because the production of our innate enzymes are limited, when the body has to repeatedly produce excessive enzymes to digest cooked/processed food which are all depleted and void of enzymes, energy to produce enzymes by the body is wasted and did you also know that when innate enzymes are all used up, our lifespan is just about up too?

So for senior dogs, it's beneficial to add some digestive enzymes (and probiotics) into our diet even though we're on an organic raw diet. Take note not to add too much as that might make the body ''lazy'' to produce their own enzymes and rely on external sources overtime.

Mom chose Dr. Mercola digestive enzymes for us.

They cost S$24.52 (USD139.20 or SGD196.18 for 8 bottles) per bottle here.

Read-ups from the [ site ] :

Does your pet show signs of less-than-optimal digestive health, such as occasional abdominal discomfort and gas, occasional bad breath or vomiting?

How about less-than-optimal joint health? Minor food sensitivities? Lackluster energy and overall less-than-ideal health? You probably wouldn't suspect these issues to be connected with poor digestion, would you?
Many holistic veterinarians like me have discovered a solution that may help with all of these complaints and much more. In fact, this may be one of your greatest allies in helping to maintain your pet's total health.
What is this solution?
Enzymes.
Enzymes may drastically improve your pet's digestion and absorption of nutrients, and as I suspect you'll soon discover, contribute considerably to your pet's well-being.

The "Magic" of Enzymes

One of the vital forces and energy of life, enzymes are tiny protein molecules found in every living cell.
They're responsible for countless activities and functions involving energy production, metabolism, detoxification, and so much more.
Just to convey how powerful these molecules are…
As you read this one sentence, millions of biological reactions requiring the actions of enzymes are occurring in your pet's body.
Here are some of the many benefits of enzymes:

• Supports the immune system
• Aids the absorption of vitamins and minerals from food
• Promotes normal body weight without hunger cravings
• Promotes respiratory health
• Helps reduce minor food sensitivities
• Helps promote normal cell growth
• Supports healthy teeth and gums
• Helps maintain healthy cholesterol levels that are already within the normal range
• Reduces occasional bloating, gas, heartburn, and constipation
• Lessens skin irritation and excessive shedding
• Provides more energy due to better utilization of nutrients
• Helps remove toxins from the body
• Promotes comfortable movement of joints

As you can see, enzymes function in so many wondrous ways beyond digestion.

Why Digestive Enzymes May Be So Beneficial to Your
Pet's Well-Being

 

The two main types of enzymes most important to your pet's well-being are metabolic and digestive enzymes.
Metabolic enzymes function throughout your pet's body to help carry out the critical bodily functions of building and maintaining every cell, tissue, and organ.
Digestive enzymes work in the stomach and intestines to break down the food your pet eats.
The four basic digestive enzymes are:

• Protease – helps break down and digest protein
• Amylase – helps break down and digest carbohydrates and starches
• Lipase – helps break down and digest fat
• Cellulase – helps break down fiber

Your pet's body depends on enzymes in her digestive track to unlock vitamins, minerals, and other important nutrients from the food so they can be absorbed.

What Happens When Your Pet Lacks Sufficient Digestive Enzymes

 

What happens if your pet doesn't have enough enzymes in his digestive track?
First, his body robs critical metabolic enzymes from other important tasks, such as immune function, as digestion of food reigns as a high-priority, survival activity.
Second, a lack of digestive enzymes may result in incomplete digestion, allowing partially digested food particles to enter the bloodstream directly from the large intestine.
Less-than-optimal health may be at least partially due to your pet's body's response to undigested food particles circulating in the bloodstream.

Where Your Pet Gets the Enzymes She Needs

 

Where does your pet get the enzymes she needs for digestion and other metabolic functions?
From two sources:

• Your pet's diet
• Your pet's body

Just about every raw, fresh food – whether it is plant or animal source – contains enzymes.
However, enzymes are fragile beings. Heat, pesticides, herbicides, food preservatives, additives, artificial colorings, and flavor enhancers easily destroy them.
In your pet's body, air pollutants, smoke, excessive UV rays from sunshine, and medications can deplete enzymes.

Free radicals produced during periods of increased activity and even normal cell activity also diminish your pet's enzymes.

If your pet consumes mostly processed or cooked food, she likely receives little or no enzymes from her food, and must rely on her body to manufacture many or all of the enzymes she needs.
Your pet's pancreas produces protease, amylase, and lipase, but likely not enough to completely digest her food.

What We Can Learn from Pottenger's Cats

 

A half century ago, Dr. Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., a California physician, studied the effects of a cooked meat and pasteurized milk diet on over 900 cats.

During his ten year study, Dr. Pottenger discovered that diets containing raw milk and raw meat produced optimal health, good bone structure and density, shiny fur, and successful reproduction.
Changes noted with the groups of cats receiving cooked meat and pasteurized milk included:

• Less-than-optimal physical function and reproductive health, increasing with each generation
• Bone health was not optimal
• Adverse personality and behavioral changes
• Less-than-optimal thyroid function

To what factors did Dr. Pottenger attribute his results? The absence of naturally occurring enzymes in the cooked diets was certainly one important factor.

The Natural Process of Digestion in the Wild

To better understand the role enzymes play in your pet's digestion, let's take a look at what happens when your pet's ancestor – whether it be a wild dog on the prairie or a wild cat in the desert – eats a meal.
When he slaughters his prey, he receives small amounts of grasses, fruits and vegetables from consuming some of his prey's digestive tract. However, by the time he consumes them, these foodstuffs are already partially digested, mixed with the prey's rich secretions of pancreatic enzymes.

Predigestion of any vegetable matter found in the prey's GI tract is an important part of carnivores being able to assimilate the vitamins and antioxidants found in these foods, unlocking their nutritional benefits and allowing them to be passed up the food chain.

The fresh raw muscle meat from his prey also contains the natural, live proteolytic enzymes needed for its digestion.

Further, when coyotes and wolves hunt prey in the wild, they devour organs rich with enzymes, such as the prey's pancreas, which provide supplemental, live digestive enzymes.
Because they receive sufficient enzymes from their prey for digestion, their own metabolic and digestive processes are not taxed. Their bodies are able to readily supply ample amounts of metabolic enzymes to carry out other important bodily functions.

Your Pet's Digestive System

For many reasons, most pet owners don't consider their pet's ancestral diet when deciding what to feed their pet.

However, you may be surprised to learn that, even after thousands of years of selective breeding, not much has changed with your pet's digestive system.

Dogs and cats are still carnivores with bodies designed to eat fresh, raw meat and bones.
And, thirty years of studies confirm that the natural diet of both cats and dogs doesn't contain grains or seeds, unless they are pre-digested by small prey animals.

Just take a glimpse at your pet's teeth – the first step of her digestive process. You'll find she clearly lacks suitable tooth surfaces to grind grains so common in today's pet diets.
However, it's not just her teeth keeping her from naturally eating grains…

Her body isn't designed to digest them.
Meat-eating animals, such as cats and dogs, naturally produce more protease to handle their high protein requirements.

They don't naturally produce much amylase because their ancestral diet doesn't consist of grains nor does their body have a nutritional need for grains and starches.

Adding to a lack of appropriate enzymes, dogs and cats' digestive tracts are shorter than humans' are and simply not designed to digest starchy foods effectively.

Here's the real issue… Consuming these foods on a regular basis can result in less-than-optimal metabolic function.

The Problem With Today's Pet Diets

As we've already seen, for a food to maintain its natural enzymes, it must be uncooked and unpasteurized, non-irradiated, and untreated with any source of heat.

To be frank, today's commercial pet foods lack healthy natural enzymes. In essence, the food is dead, over-processed and in-organic.

Production of both canned food and dried kibble require very high temperatures, which destroy any live enzymes present in the food.

If the manufacturer adds enzymes, they often break down when exposed to air, light, and the processing needed for the food's long shelf life.

Additionally, pet food processing can cause food nutrients to become chemically trapped, which can cause them to pass through your pet's digestive system unutilized. Enzymes are needed to help unlock these food nutrients and aid in digestion.

The Truth Behind the Enzyme Depletion Theory

Unlike humans, dogs and cats in the wild do not produce enzymes in their saliva. However, studies reveal an interesting phenomenon when researchers switch dogs' diets from enzyme-rich raw food to a high carbohydrate, heat-processed diet. They begin to produce the enzyme amylase in their saliva within a week.

Commercial pet food proponents highlight this as a good thing. But is it really?

First, it's not a natural occurrence for the species.
Second, producing these extra enzymes may be robbing animals of precious enzymes for metabolic functions elsewhere in their bodies.

When fed grains, the pancreas must produce large amounts of amylase to deal with the starch, cellulose, and carbohydrates, which is something it's not designed to do.

What's more, a carnivore's pancreas does not secrete cellulase to split cellulose into glucose molecules. Dogs simply have not become efficient at digesting and utilizing grains or plant material as a source of high quality protein.

Here's the problem with this ramped up need for extra enzymes: As your pet ages, production of enzymes declines. And this can lead to unwanted consequences for your pet.

 

When Declining Natural Enzymes and an Enzyme-Deficient
Diet Collide

Many holistic veterinarians recognize that a lack of enzymes – both digestive and systemic – may be a major factor in less-than-optimal health.

Think about it. If your pet's cells, tissues, and organs can't function without enzymes, then might a shortage have a negative effect on his body and speed up the aging process?
Feeding your pet supplemental enzymes may not only boost digestion, but can also spark improved cellular function throughout his body. Supplemental enzymes can also help with tissue and cellular structure.

Most importantly, supplemental enzymes take the load off your pet's body to produce enzymes, unleashing a tremendous boost to his natural health.

 

Using Naturally Occurring Enzymes to Boost Your Pet's Digestion

 

The first step in providing your pet with the enzymes she needs for both digestion and metabolic functioning is to provide the foods appropriate for her species.
I recommended switching your pet over to a diet containing as much living, raw ingredients as possible.
Raw meat is an ideal food for your cat or dog, but I understand that some pet owners are hesitant to take that step. The next best thing you can do for your pet is to feed very finely chopped or pureed raw, enzyme-rich vegetables.

How you feed the raw foods is very important. When handling raw foods, you must take extreme care to avoid contamination. And the variety of foods you include determine whether or not you're providing your pet with a well-balanced and healthy diet.
I recognize that this takes some special know-how. Many pet owners simply feel overwhelmed when starting to prepare homemade food for their pets.
That's why, together with Beth Taylor, we put together Dr. Becker's Real Food for Healthy Dogs and Cats.
Our book shows you how to prepare the freshest, most wholesome species-specific food for your pet.

• Contains easy-to-follow recipes and complete buying and preparation guidelines for providing your cat or dog with a safe, nutritional diet.
• Based on your pet's ancestral diet, every recipe meets NRC and AAFCO nutritional guidelines.
• Offers a rotational feeding plan complete with vegetables, fruits, and supplements, including digestive enzymes.

To discover how Dr. Becker's Real Food for Healthy Dogs and Cats can help you get your pet started on the path to good health, click here.
Preparing your own pet's food not for you? Look for frozen raw, species-specific diets at your natural pet grocer. I believe it's a far superior option to any canned or kibble food, even if it isn't homemade.

Why Raw Food May Not Be Enough When it Comes to Enzymes

Raw food certainly supplies more digestive enzymes than processed (canned or kibbled) pet food, but don't be fooled, many animals consuming raw foods still benefit from enzymes.

All raw food diets attempt to mimic, as closely as possible, what our carnivorous companions would be eating in the wild.

Cats catch and kill mice, dogs eat rabbits and other small prey.

However, there are three parts of the whole prey model no manufacturer will add to their commercially available raw foods: fur (fiber), guts and glands.

Why? Frankly, it's gross. And there are risks.

Entrails – the stomach and intestines – are where parasites are found. To keep raw food diets parasite free manufacturers wisely elect to not include entrails.

Pancreas and other small glands are also not included because ensuring a steady source of supply is difficult. This means even animals eating a raw food diet can lack these beneficial substances.

 

Your Pet's Best Insurance for Protecting Her Fragile Enzyme Bank

Whether you feed your pet a healthy homemade or frozen species-specific diet, a canned or a dried kibble diet, she will likely benefit greatly from supplemental enzymes.

Supplementing with enzymes helps ensure she can completely digest her food without dipping into that fragile bank of metabolic enzymes.

When you feed your pet enzymes with her meals, they aid in digestion. When you feed the exact same enzymes at other times, they work systemically for metabolic purposes.

When used this way, after meals, the enzymes circulate throughout her body via the bloodstream, helping to:

• Support the healthy circulation of blood through arteries
• Maintaining normal immune function
• Clear cellular debris while cleansing tissue
• Stimulate healthy new cell growth
• Promote normal cell growth
• Promote a healthy immune response
• Support normal detoxification processes
• Clear away undigested proteins, cleansing the lymph and blood

Using enzymes for total body systemic use is not new. Many holistic veterinarians have been employing this secret arsenal for years.

Here's what I advise my patients' owners for the systemic use of enzymes:
Feed the recommended dosage (not more) of a high quality animal-based enzyme on a morsel of food one or two hours after meals. Giving enzymes in between meals ensures the enzymes won't be utilized for digestive purposes.

What to Look For in a Good Digestive Enzyme for Your Pet

You have three choices when it comes to choosing a supplemental enzyme for your pet. Enzymes can come from three different sources: plant, animal, or fungal.

Over the years in my practice, I have worked with all three types and have seen the effects, both positive and negative, of each. Consequently, I have some strong opinions of what I believe works best for most cats and dogs.

I prefer animal-sourced enzymes, by far, for the following reasons:

• Most closely mimics what you find in the ancestral animal's prey's GI tract
• Provides pancreatin, replacing some of the pancreas of prey
• Because your pet is a carnivore, they respond best to pancreatic enzymes

Enzymes from fungal sources can be especially problematic for many pets. I've seen huge problems with fungal enzymes, especially with pets who suffer from allergies.

Based on my experience, I don't find plant-based enzymes to be powerful enough for cats and dogs. In my opinion, for carnivorous pets, plant or vegetarian enzymes aren't as efficient for digestive purposes as are animal-sourced enzymes. I recommend vegetarian enzymes for vegetarian pets (rabbits) and animal sourced enzymes for carnivorous pets.

Because animal-based enzymes are more biologically suited for animals that naturally eat other animals (carnivores) I believe they work more efficiently for cats and dogs.

 

Healthy Pets Enzymes – One of the Smartest Choices
for Your Pet's Overall Health

Unable to locate the perfect enzyme for my patients, I decided to formulate my own, using the ingredients I consider most effective for cats and dogs.

And now I'd like to make my Healthy Pets Digestive Enzymes available to you, too.

Using only the finest ingredients available, I've selected these enzymes to include in my Healthy Pets Digestive Enzymes:

• Betaine HCl - breaks down proteins into peptides and amino acids and fats into triglycerides
• Bromelain (pineapple) – one of the safest and most powerful enzymes to help break down and digest protein
• Papain (papaya) – a natural plant-sourced enzyme that works together with bromelain to digest protein
• Pancreatin – an animal-based pancreatic enzyme providing all three of these enzymes:
  • Protease – helps break down proteins into amino acids for digestion
  • Amylase – for splitting and breaking down long-chain carbohydrates, including starch and glycogen (the energy-storage molecule in animal tissue) for digestion in the small intestine
  • Lipase – helps break down and digest fats

 

A Source You Can Trust

When selecting any enzyme – for human consumption or for use with your pets – you want to ensure the source of the enzymes is pure and from a reliable source.

I have selected a manufacturer that I wholeheartedly trust. Not only do they exceed the highest industry quality standards, they test and retest the original raw food sources from which the product is made, to make sure they conform to their rigorous standards.

Unlike so many animal supplements available today, the ingredients used in my Healthy Pets Digestive Enzymes are human grade – meaning, they're not any different than those you or I would take. Most importantly, they're manufactured by a human supplement company in their own human products lab.

These are the same enzymes I recommend to my patients' owners – and the enzymes I feed to my own pets. In my opinion, you simply can't find an enzyme supplement better suited to – or safer – for your pet's needs.
Below you'll find answers to some frequently asked questions I receive from my readers and my patients' owners.

From another [ site ] :

End Your Pet’s Ugly Digestion Problems, Once and For All…

Do you have an enzyme-deficient pet? Dr. Karen Becker reveals why enzymes are such a crucial part of your pet’s digestive health.

Dr. Becker's Comments:

All living things, both plants and animals, depend on enzymes to function. In fact, animals (including humans!) may contain 2,500 or more different enzymes, which act as catalysts for millions of different chemical reactions that take place in their bodies every day.

Enzymes are essential for every metabolic process in your dog or cat, from their immune system processes to the functioning of their internal organs. There are also specific enzymes necessary for your pet’s proper digestion.

These digestive enzymes include:

• Protease: Helps break down protein into amino acids
• Amylase: Helps break down carbohydrates
• Lipase: Helps with digesting fats
• Cellulase: For breaking down fiber

Your dog and cat produce these digestive enzymes naturally, however they do not produce enough of the enzymes necessary to process their food completely and efficiently.

Why Your Pet May Lack Crucial Digestive Enzymes

Your pet’s pancreas, which is the organ that secretes amylase to process carbohydrates, simply cannot secrete enough digestive enzymes to do so effectively.
Dogs and cats don’t produce a lot of amylase because their natural, ancestral diet is primarily meat -- not grains (carbs).

Further, your pets were designed to get some supplemental enzymes from the foods they eat. When cats kill mice in the wild, for instance, they eat the whole mouse -- including the animal’s digestive tract and all of its digestive enzymes.

Likewise, when wolves and coyotes hunt and kill animals in the wild, they eat some of the entrails -- the guts -- to meet their digestive enzyme requirement.

Of course, we typically don’t feed our dogs and cats those entrails they’d be getting in the wild, so most pets in the United States are enzyme-deficient.

Adding to the problem is also the processed diet that most pets eat. While raw meat and vegetables contain live enzymes that can greatly help your pet’s digestive process, those valuable enzymes are killed with heat.
Enzymes begin to be destroyed at temperatures above 110-115 degrees, so if your pet’s diet is cooked (as all canned foods and dry kibbles are) they are also completely devoid of any enzymes.

What this means is that your pet is probably lacking in the enzymes it needs to digest its food properly. This puts extreme stress on his digestive system, which can ultimately interfere with nutrient absorption and cause recurrent digestive issues.

How Your Pet’s Digestive Process Should Work

When dogs and cats consume a meal, the hydrochloric acid in their stomach mixes with the food as a “pre-digestive” step to help facilitate the initial breakdown of proteins.

The food then moves into the small intestine, where the digestive enzymes amylase, lipase and protease mix with the food. The gallbladder also secretes bile to help process fat.

In an ideal digestive process, there should be a rich blend of gastric acid, digestive enzymes, and bile in your pet’s small intestine to facilitate excellent digestion and absorption of nutrients.

However, if your pet does not have enough gastric acid, digestive enzymes or bile to effectively digest its food, maldigestion and malabsorption occurs.

Unfortunately, this happens very regularly in dogs and cats.

Symptoms of Digestive Enzyme Deficiency in Pets

If your pet is not getting any supplemental digestive enzymes from its diet, it must rely on its own supply to break down food. Unfortunately, since many pets are already deficient, this often means “robbing” enzymes from other metabolic processes, such as immune system functioning.

As these enzyme reserves become depleted, it can lead to a range of health issues in your pet, not to mention malabsorption of nutrients and improper food digestion.

Signs that your pet may be lacking in digestive enzymes include:

• Acid reflux
• Belching and gas
• Vomiting undigested food (four or five hours after eating)
• Bad breath
• Bloating
• Diarrhea
• Abdominal pain, cramping and gurgling
• Foul-smelling stool
• Undigested food in your pet’s stool

All of these symptoms come together to let you know that in one way or another, your pet is experiencing maldigestion or malabsorption, likely due to a lack of digestive enzymes.
In time, this inability to effectively digest its meals can lead to more serious conditions in your pet, as well.

Eating Processed Foods Affects Dogs’ and Cats’ Digestive Health

As I said earlier, the majority of pets in the United States are not only enzyme-deficient on a biochemical level -- again because their pancrease simply cannot secrete enough enzymes -- but also on a dietary level.
Most dogs and cats eat an all-canned food diet or an all-dry food diet, made up of dead, over-processed ingredients. This means the enzymes that were once present in living food are killed during the high-temperature processing, and provide your pet with absolutely none of the digestive enzymes they so very desperately need.

It’s like a double whammy of enzyme deficiency, and it can cause serious disturbances to your pet’s digestive and overall health.

What Can You do to Help Your Pet’s Digestion?

First, transition your pet to a living, raw food, species-appropriate diet. This will help to provide some supplemental enzymes via their food.
Next, if your pet is not eating an all-living and raw diet, he will most likely benefit from enzyme supplementation.

In fact, even if your pet is eating a high-quality, species-appropriate raw-food diet, he can actually benefit from digestive enzyme supplementation as well, because you’re probably not feeding him enzyme-rich entrails and guts.
Digestive enzymes are so important for your pet’s health that I wholeheartedly recommend them for all animals, regardless of their diet.

In searching for a digestive enzyme for your pet, look for one that has gastric acid support, amylase, lipase and protease as well as gallbladder support all in one product.

So, again my recommendation, not only for the pets that are having digestive problems, but for all of you who are interested in creating abundant health in your animals, is to consider adding digestive enzymes to your pet’s diet.

The addition of digestive enzymes will allow your pets to process food more efficiently, and give them the extra support they need to not just survive, but thrive!