Digestive Enzymes Are Beneficial to Your Pet's Well-Being

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. Many holistic veterinarians 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 contribute considerably to your pet's well-being. Here are some of the many benefits of enzymes:

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

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 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 does your pet get the enzymes she needs for digestion and other metabolic functions?

From two sources: Your pet's diet and your pet's body.Just about every raw, fresh food – whether it is plant or animal source – contains enzymes. However, enzymes are fragile. 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.

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

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 his/her species. Holistic veterinarians recommend switching your pet over to a diet containing as much living, raw ingredients as possible.

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 ensures 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

Healthy Pets Digestive Enzymes  uses only the finest ingredients available 

Betaine HCl - breaks down proteins into peptides and amino acids and fats into triglycerides
Ox Bile Extract – safely used for many years in human and pet enzyme products to support the liver's production of bile and offer supplemental bile for bile-deficient pets, critical for digesting fats
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

Mercola Healthy Pets Digestive Enzymes (5.26 oz powder )

Mercola Digestive Enzymes for Pets (3 Pack)