What Are Digestive Enzymes?
What is digestion?
On the surface, digestion refers to the process of breaking down food into small enough pieces so that the nutrients can be absorbed by our digestive tract. This means turning that amazing meal you just had into molecules so tiny you’d need a high-powered microscope just to see them. How does the GI tract accomplish this incredible feat? Well, it uses a few different tools, but the ones we are most interested in at the moment are all those enzymes.
What are digestive enzymes?
In short, enzymes are super cool molecules that assist in making chemical reactions happen. Our bodies make a ton of different enzymes to do all sorts of jobs, but digestive enzymes specifically are tasked with breaking down food. You can think of them almost like little microscopic scissors cutting our food into tinier and tinier pieces, until they are small enough to be absorbed.
Different digestive enzymes for different foods
Something some people may not realize about enzymes is that they have extremely specific jobs. Think, assembly line workers who are stuck doing the same exact task day in and day out. Because each enzyme is so highly specialized and not so great at the whole multitasking thing, it’s of course necessary that there are a huge variety of them to make sure all the digestive work can be completed.
Broadly speaking, digestive enzymes can be broken down into three separate groups depending on the type of macronutrient (protein, fat, and carbs) that they work on. Check out the table below to get an idea of what each of these categories of enzymes are up to, and some examples of digestive enzymes made in the human body.1
Incomplete Digestion
Healthy incomplete digestion: fiber
So far we’ve talked about the digestive enzymes our body makes, but it turns out that there are quite a few others we don’t actually make. This means that there are going to be certain types of foods that don’t actually get broken down completely, and go partially undigested. But don’t freak out! In most cases this is totally normal. I mean, ever heard of a little thing called fiber?
Put in the simplest terms, fiber is just plant material that goes undigested in our GI tract and has a ton of health benefits. 2 Even though we don’t have the enzymes to turn fiber into energy, it’s really important to our short- and long-term health that we eat fiber every day.345
Problematic incomplete digestion: maldigestion & malabsorption
While a certain amount of incomplete digestion is normal and healthy, there does come a point in which it can become a problem for some people. This is where the terms maldigestion and malabsorption come into play.
- Maldigestion is where someone has some sort of issue breaking down food in the digestive tract
- Malabsorption refers to an issue with the digested food being absorbed by the gut.6
Although these terms can sound rather scary, in general, these conditions only become a problem when symptoms become intolerable and/or they result in inadequate nutrient absorption.
Do Digestive Enzymes Help With IBS?
2 reasons to take digestive enzymes
There are a couple situations where supplementing with enzymes may be helpful for some people with IBS.
- When there is an actual enzyme deficiency, in which replacing the enzymes may resolve the symptoms of concern.
- When someone doesn’t necessarily have a diagnosable enzyme deficiency, but still benefits in some way by the addition of extra enzymes, or supplementation with enzymes that the body doesn’t normally make.
Which enzymes have been studied in IBS?
To date, only a handful of digestive enzymes have been studied to some extent in IBS. These include:
- Lactase (beta-galactosidase)
- Sucrase (invertase)
- Pancreatic enzymes (amylase, lipase, proteases)
- Alpha-galactosidase (more commonly referred to as Beano)
We’ve done deep dives into each of these enzymes, so feel free to head over to each of those articles to learn more.
What about all the other enzymes?
What about all the other enzymes on that long list on the back of your digestive enzyme supplement label?
We hate to break it to you, but it turns out they haven’t been studied. More precisely, they have not been individually studied in IBS (or any related conditions) and published in scientific, peer reviewed journals. At least not any we could find (and boy did we look). Now, does a lack of research mean they don’t help? No, not necessarily. It just means we really don’t know what they’ll do, and can’t make evidence-based recommendations just yet.
In the table below we’ve listed a few of the unstudied enzymes we’ve seen in various digestive enzyme blends on the market and a basic description of what they do.
Based on our research, the risk of adverse events from taking digestive enzymes is pretty low for most people, making them a relatively safe supplement to try out.
With that said, we definitely do still recommend that you get the okay from your doctor before starting a digestive enzyme supplement, whether or not it has been studied yet.
Summary & Verdict
- Digestive enzymes are molecules that help break down the food we eat into particles small enough to be absorbed by the gut
- Enzymes have very specific jobs, so numerous types of enzymes are needed to complete the work of digestion
- The human body does not make every single type of digestive enzyme, so it is normal, and even healthy, that certain foods (like fiber) are not fully digested when eaten
- Maldigestion is where someone has some sort of issue breaking down food in the digestive tract, whereas malabsorption refers to an issue with digested food being absorbed by the gut. If severe enough, maldigestion and malabsorption can result in intolerable symptoms and/or inadequate nutrient absorption.
- There are certain conditions in which supplementation with enzymes may be helpful in relieving symptoms of maldigestion and/or malabsorption.
- Enzymes that have been studied in IBS and may help to relieve symptoms for some people include lactase, sucrase, alpha-galactosidase, and pancreatic enzymes. Since all other digestive enzymes have not been studied in IBS, evidence-based recommendations cannot be made at this time.
- If you are thinking of trying a digestive enzyme of some sort, whether or not it’s been studied, we always recommend getting the okay from your doctor first.
