Are the inhibitors bad ? Haven't seen evidence of them being bad, but the nuts and seeds sure taste better after 8 hours of soaking in cool, fresh water and then rinsed and drained.
What really means this enzymes inhibitors is that to break the food the pancreas has to produce much more enzymes, that if they were not to digest the food they are controling and cleaning our blood, this is very controversial these days because there are clinics who are curing there patients using this enzyme therapy with I may say very sucess, that´s why we need to eat more raw food that way we don´t destroy the enzymes in the food that will going to do the vast job in the stomach, leaving the pancreas to produce lees enzymes which is great for us...
Nuts and Seeds do, olive oil to a much lesser extent.
Enzyme inhibitors are a bit of a buzz word in current Health Food circles. The idea is, that because certain foods contain "enzyme inhibitors" this automatically makes them hard to digest -- they are supposed to resist the enzymes needed to break down the nutrition in them. You are supposed to do various things to help break down the enzyme inhibitors before eating the food.
Nuts and Seeds are supposed to be a big culprit, because mother nature wants seeds to store until conditions are right for germination, not rot on the forest floor.
Fruits and vegetables would have much less enzyme inhibitors -- you know for yourself how these things rot out of the fridge. Fruit+Veg are basically leaves (functional parts of plants) or fruit meant to be digested by animals to transport the seeds somewhere else.
Personally I think the thing about enzyme inhibitors is a load of hooey, though. Humans mostly digest our food by chemically frying it (stomach acids), which breaks down all sorts of things in our food. I really doubt these so-called digestion-inhibiting molecules can withstand it; our digestion system is designed to crack any such molecules open.
And anyway, we know that people can get good quality nutrition out of eating nuts, seeds, olive oil and lots of veggies. We have the empirical proof.
For that matter, many enzyme inhibitors are good things -- they include "antioxidants" and "anti-cancer drugs".
