NS, Docta Dennis and I differ a bit here, but I'll give you my reasoning:
PRObiotics and enzymes are absolutely essential to good health, but I get mine from eating raw fruit, veggies and greens. You body incubates and grows PRObiotics from what you eat when you get an alkaline environment going! If not, it gets lazy, you can recover this the same as any other dis-ease in the body. There are 3 types of enzymes essential to good health - digestive, metabolic (and for the life of me, I can't remember the 3rd one) ... enzymes come from the digestive organs that digest your food, if you eat raw food, the enzymes are literally in the food (ain't God smart???? :D ... I just love HIM!!) Again, if you supplement, your organs get lazy. Encouraging organ laziness doesn't strike me a good thing to do.
I'm just about finished reading David Wolfe's The Sunfood Diet Sucess System. The chapter on enzymes made the book worth it's $40 price tag. It seems that when we eat a cooked diet, our body has to mutate our own enzymes in order to digest foods that are enzymatically dead. This in and of itself wears out the pancreas, voila!! ... diabetes. Raw diet reverses this mutation very quickly (other sources imply 30 days), reversing type 1 and type 2 diabetes!!! selah!
I've gone from a period of 4 months of not digesting anything I put in my mouth to today, digesting everything I eat and I've never once taken any probiotic or enzyme supplement.
Docta Dennis, I have a 77 yr old mama that's teaching me quite a life lesson ... I believe that when I'm to the point of not learning new things, I'll be "outta here." She reads, she does sudoku puzzles, she plays jeapordy with 'em 5 nights a week.
My passion of the moment is nutrition and I'm trying to learn enough to help folks where I can. I'm readReadREADing on raw foodism and nutrition ... in bed at night, on this computer and getting several newsletters that are awesome.
Each food has the enzymes and probiotics necessary for proper early stages of digestion ... ain't God smart?? The digestive system makes more ... example, insulin is an enzyme. If you use Rx insulin instead of correcting the problem in the body, the pancreas makes less insulin.
When I was a kid, if you went in for abdominal surgery of any sort, they went ahead and took out your appendix, considering it a useless organ (we have NO useless organs). The appendix is the incubator of friendly flora, you literally will grow your own if you are eating plenty of raw, fresh fruits and veggies.