What Are Digestive Enzymes?

Addition of digestive enzymes to pea and rice protein blends has been shown to increases time to peak and peak concentrations of amino acids in the blood.¹ Put simply this means the digestive enzymes help your body breakdown and absorb the protein more quickly.

Plant proteins such as pea, rice and hemp vary in a number of ways from animal proteins, for example cholesterol, fat, amino acid levels and speed of digestion or adsorption. Digestive enzyme research in particular has looked at how consumption of digestive enzymes, alongside these plant based proteins, can affect differences in amino acid appearance in the blood between plant and animal proteins.

Dairy proteins such as whey are higher in simple sugars such as lactose, while plant proteins are higher in complex carbohydrates and fibre. This makes them an intermediate digesting protein, somewhere in between whey and casein, commonly known as fast (whey) and slow (casein).

This study¹ looked at measuring time to peak total amino acid levels in blood after taking whey protein, rice protein and rice protein plus digestive enzymes. Time to peak total amino acid levels were, as expected quicker for whey than rice. However when digestive enzymes were combined with the rice protein the time to peak total amino acids actually became quicker than whey. This is one of the reasons we include digestive enzymes in our proteins Superblend Protein and Performance Protein.

¹ http://www.jissn.com/content/12/S1/P26#