A digestive enzyme supplement can help you digest your food more easily.
This can lead to better absorption of nutrients and a relief from symptoms of gastrointestinal distress, like bloating, gas, stomach pain, and indigestion.
Digestive enzyme supplements may also come with probiotics to help improve the function of your gut flora, the bacteria that live in your digestive tract and play a critical role in your overall health.
Our research team has combed through a huge range of products to come up with the 10 best options, ranked according to quality.
Our advisory panel and our research team rank the best health products and supplements based on performance, label accuracy, and the efficacy of the ingredients in the products.
- Best overall: EnzymeMD by 1MD
- Best for healthy gut bacteria: Garden of Life Raw Enzymes for Men and Women
- Best for bloating: Pure Encapsulations Digestive Enzymes Ultra
- Zenwise Health Daily Digestive Enzymes
- Rainbow Light Advanced Enzyme System
Research
Rankings
Last updated: October 26, 2022
Digestive enzymes considered: 23
Hours of research: 38
Experts reviewed: 7
Scientific papers referenced: 13
| IMAGE | PRODUCT | |
|---|---|---|
Best Overall  | 1. EnzymeMD by 1MD
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Best for healthy gut bacteria  | 2. Garden of Life Raw Enzymes for Men and Women
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Best for bloating  | 3. Pure Encapsulations Digestive Enzymes Ultra
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 | 4. Zenwise Health Daily Digestive Enzymes
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 | 5. Rainbow Light Advanced Enzyme System
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 | 6. Source Naturals Daily Digestive Enzymes
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 | 7. MAV Nutrition Digestive Enzymes
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 | 8. Dr. Tobias Digest Plant-Based Enzymes
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 | 9. NOW Super Enzymes
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 | 10. Doctor’s Best Digestive Enzymes
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1. EnzymeMD by 1MD
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EnzyneMD uses a robust combination of 18 different enzymes to aid digestion, along with the probiotic bacteria Saccharomyces boulardii to cut down on gas production.
The enzymes lipase, cellulase, and lactase all help cut down on fats, fiber, and lactose that are often to blame for gas and bloating.
In addition to these common enzymes, 1MD has many other rarer enzymes hand-chosen to improve digestion and nutrition. This wide range of extremely useful enzymes makes it our top pick.
Easily the best digestive supplement on the market.
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2. Garden of Life Raw Enzymes for Men and Women
Garden of Life Raw Enzymes comes in a variety for men and women, but the differences are slight. They both have the same key enzymes, vitamins, and minerals, but just in slightly different amounts.
The real advantage of Garden of Life Raw Enzymes is the fact that the supplement provides enzymes alongside a range of probiotic bacteria and the vitamins and minerals that those bacteria need to thrive.
This way, it can serve as a reset for your gastrointestinal bacteria population, re-populating it with bacteria and enzymes that are well-suited for digesting your food and helping you absorb nutrients better.
3. Pure Encapsulations Digestive Enzymes Ultra
Pure Encapsulations Digestive Enzymes Ultra provides 13 different enzymes that target all the most common culprits of digestive issues.
It attacks dairy, fiber, fats, carbohydrates, and proteins with the enzymes provided in the supplement.
The only things missing are the “extras” you often see in the best digestive enzyme supplements: vitamins, minerals, and probiotic bacteria cultures to enhance the body’s natural digestive abilities in the long term.
4. Zenwise Health Daily Digestive Enzymes
Daily Digestive Enzymes has nine different digestive enzymes alongside a range of herbal extracts for optimal digestion and nutrient absorption.
These include ginger, turmeric, apple pectin, and peppermint, to name just a few. It also includes a probiotic mix, but unfortunately does not disclose the precise bacteria that go into this mix, making it difficult to determine how much this will help the supplement achieve its goals.
5. Solaray Super DigestAway
Solaray uses pancreatin as its primary source of digestive enzymes, which is a blend containing amylase, lipase, and protease, and adds in herbal extracts from porcine bile, papaya, peppermint, ginger, and more to boost the efficacy of these enzymes.
It’s a solid all-around option for improving your digestion of fiber, meat, and fats.
6. Source Naturals Daily Digestive Enzymes
Source Naturals has eight different enzymes, split into different categories to break down fat, protein, carbohydrates, dairy, and fiber.
The enzymes in this product are all solid, but they might work better if they were delivered alongside probiotics or a mix of vitamins and minerals.
7. MAV Nutrition Digestive Enzymes
MAV Nutrition uses special enzymes derived from fungus alongside probiotic bacteria to improve digestion of dairy, fat, and carbohydrates.
It’s a strong supplement if those are your only goals, but if your digestive issues include fiber, you may struggle to have success with MAV Nutrition Digestive Enzymes.
8. Dr. Tobias Digest Plant-Based Enzymes
Dr. Tobias Digest provide a wide range of enzymes for digesting the most common causes of digestive issues, but the dosage is not always on par with what the best digestive enzyme supplements offer.
9. NOW Super Enzymes
NOW Super Enzymes provides a fair mix of enzymes and natural extracts to boost enzyme activity, but it’s mostly targeted at breaking down fat, protein, and carbohydrates.
With fiber from beans or vegetables, it struggles, and it doesn’t include lactase, so dairy could still cause problems.
10. Doctor’s Best Digestive Enzymes
Doctor’s Best has produced a solid, full spectrum digestive enzyme to help support healthy digestion and promote good gut bacteria.
Along with some additional enzymes to help with the digestion of vegetables, beans and grains, this supplement also contains some probiotic bacteria to promote optimal intestinal health, though the dosage isn’t great.
Category winners
Best digestive enzymes overall: EnzymeMD
EnzymeMD from 1MD features a precision blend of enzymes (plus no additional ingredients!) that fight a wide range of digestive problems. What’s more, it even features probiotic bacteria to cut down on gas and bloating. An easy pick for the best overall digestive enzyme supplement.
Best digestive enzymes for bloating: Pure Encapsulations Digestive Enzymes Ultra
Pure encapsulations offers the broadest range of individual enzymes of any supplement on the market. With several proteases, as well as lactase and lipase, it’s great for cutting down bloating, regardless of what kind of food in your diet is responsible for the cause.
Best digestive enzymes for weight loss: EnzymeMD
Weight loss diets can result in a surprising amount of digestive problems, which in turn inhibit your ability to stick with the diet. Go for EnzymeMD to fight these problems—with its broad-spectrum enzymes, it can tackle the foods in pretty much any weight loss diet.
Best digestive enzymes for irritable bowel: Pure Encapsulations Digestive Enzymes Ultra
Pure Encapsulations contains high doses of the most important enzymes for breaking down foods that can aggravate IBS. It’s a precise and powerful digestive enzyme supplement that’s well-suited for bowel irritation.
Best digestive enzymes for healthy gut bacteria: Garden of Life Raw Enzymes
Garden of Life pairs over a dozen enzymes with bacillus coagulans probiotics and several essential vitamins and minerals to foster a healthier gut microbiome. To boost enzyme and probiotic levels in your gut, look no further.
Best digestive enzymes for lactose intolerance: Pure Encapsulations Digestive Enzymes Ultra
For better digestion of dairy, Pure Encapsulations is a clear winner. It has much higher levels of the digestive enzyme lactase than other digestive enzyme supplements (in some cases, over ten times higher!).
Who should buy digestive enzymes?
Digestive enzymes are specifically designed for people with gastrointestinal problems caused by poor digestion. Thee issues fall into a few specific categories:
People who get bloating and gas after meals. Bloating and gas are typically caused by poor digestion of fiber, protein, or fat in your diet. A digestive enzyme can provide specific enzymes that helps digest these compounds, stopping digestion at its source.
People who want healthier gut bacteria. Having a healthy population of a probiotic gut bacteria is helpful on its own, but these bacteria work in concert with your body’s digestive enzymes. Supplementing your background enzyme levels with a digestive enzyme can help keep your probiotic bacteria population in a good spot.
People with irritable bowel syndrome or other digestive conditions. Much of the research into the uses of digestive enzyme supplements has focused on people with specific medical conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, who seem to benefit from increasing digestive enzyme levels.
People looking to lose weight. Digestive enzymes are also useful when on a restricted diet, because dysregulated digestion and gastrointestinal health have been associated with obesity.
How we ranked
To make our digestive enzyme rankings, we first trawled the market for a wide range of enzyme-focused supplements. Then we separated the legit products from the low-quality imitators with a series of stringent criteria.
Digestion-focused. Our first criteria to weed out low-quality products was to mandate that digestive enzymes be a central focus of the supplement, not just an afterthought.
Generic “digestion” supplements that included small amounts of one or two enzymes did not make the cut. We also did not consider primarily probiotic-focused supplements that had a few digestive enzyme ingredients.
Able to assist with the digestion of all three macronutrients. Next, we eliminated products that did not have at least one enzyme to help digest each of the three primary macronutrients (carbohydrates, fats, and protein).
While there’s a place for supplements that focus only on a single enzyme, such as lactase for people who are lactose intolerant, the scientific evidence on digestive enzymes is clear: if you want high quality results, you need a supplement that delivers multiple different enzymes.
Versatile for different diets. Digestive enzymes that focused primarily on just one type or category of enzyme, lipase (which digests fat) got cut, since they wouldn’t be very useful for people on a low fat diet. Ditto for protease-only supplements.
Breadth and depth of key ingredients. More enzymes were better, as long as they contributed to digestive health and didn’t dilute the key ingredients and their dosage too much.
Cellulase, lipase, and lactase content were critical. These three are the enzymes which many users will benefit the most from, since they digest the lion’s share of the food you eat.
Effective formulation and no unnecessary additives. We required that our final products had a clean, minimal supplement design, without any unnecessary binders, fillers, stabilizing agents, or coloring agents.
FAQ
Q: Can digestive enzymes help with weight loss?
A: While there’s no direct evidence thus far that shows that a digestive enzyme will generate weight loss, there is a connection between digestive enzymes and probiotic bacteria, which in turn have been implicated in causing or preventing weight loss.
However, there are some key questions that we don’t have answers to yet: how do probiotic bacteria benefit from the presence of certain digestive enzymes? Does a lack of specific enzymes in sufficient amounts lead to a disruption in the gut microbiome? Would these changes lead to weight loss or gain?
Soon, we’ll likely have research that answers these questions, but until then, the connection between digestive enzymes and weight loss remains unclear.
Q: What are the best digestive enzymes?
A: The best digestive enzymes for gastrointestinal health are the ones that are linked directly to digesting the kinds of nutrients you encounter most often in your diet.
For most people, these are lipase, lactase, and cellulase, which (respectively) help your body break down fats, lactose, and fiber.
If you notice that foods that are high in fat, dairy products, or fiber tend to aggravate your indigestion or other gastrointestinal symptoms, that’s a sign that you might stand to benefit from a digestive enzyme supplement that provides at least one of these key enzymes.
If protein-heavy meals (like steak) cause digestion problems, you might also benefit from a protease-containing digestive enzyme.
Evidence indicates that the best strategy is to take a multi-ingredient digestive enzyme supplement, vs. one that contains just one enzyme (1).
Q: How do you use digestive enzymes?
A: If you are taking digestive enzymes specifically to deal with a particular kind of food (like taking lactase for dairy), you should take your digestive enzyme right before your meal (within ten minutes).
However, the latest research on using digestive enzymes suggests you should do this every day, not just before a meal high in the problematic compounds (e.g. a high fat meal).
Research has found that, for at least up to 60 days, this strategy can create significant improvements in symptoms of indigestion compared to a placebo (2).
Q: How long does it take for digestive enzymes to work?
A: In terms of digesting a single meal, digestive enzymes should start working within five to ten minutes.
Enzymes don’t need to be absorbed by your body at all; they are already prepared to break down food as soon as the capsule breaks open, which (in a high quality digestive enzyme supplement) should only take a few minutes.
However, when it comes to actually improving symptoms of indigestion and other gastrointestinal problems linked to digestive enzymes, it may take up to 30 days for digestive enzymes to start working (3).
Q: How do digestive enzymes interact with probiotics?
A: Probiotics are possibly the hottest research topic in nutrition right now, and the connection to digestive enzymes is easy to see.
Once you eat something, digestive enzymes start to break it down, but so do probiotic bacteria. Sometimes, the interaction is synergetic, like when both lactobacillus bacteria and lactase act on the sugars that are in dairy products like milk.
However, the interplay between these two methods of food digestion is complex and, so far, poorly understood.
It does seem that having a healthy and robust population of healthy bacteria is good for your digestive enzymes, and vice versa, but beyond this it’s difficult to state specifics.
Related articles
Recap
A good digestive enzyme can be a lifesaver if meals rich in dairy, fat, or fiber are giving you digestive issues.
If you’re plagued with gas, bloating, and indigestion after consuming dairy, make sure your digestive enzyme supplement contains lactase.
If you think it’s high fat meals that are causing problems, a supplement containing lipase is a good bet. And for fiber, cellulase appears to be the enzyme of choice.
Beyond this, there are also many other helpful enzymes which can break down carbohydrates, protein, fat, dairy, and fiber, which is why the best digestive enzymes on the market have a broad range of enzymes included and will be equally useful for different digestive problems.
For BodyNutrition’s #1 digestive enzyme recommendation, click here.
