Food & Faith Challenge: Health

Welcome to another week of the Food & Faith Challenge! Our guest post today is by Katie Kimball,  a teacher by education, a mother and wife by vocation, and a foodie by passion.  She blogs about God’s call to stewardship of all areas at Kitchen Stewardship, where you’ll find healthy recipes, time-saving tips, green cleaning ideas, frugal encouragement and much, much more.

God spoke: “Earth, green up! Grow all varieties
of seed-bearing plants,
Every sort of fruit-bearing tree.”
And there it was.
Earth produced green seed-bearing plants,
all varieties,
And fruit-bearing trees of all sorts.
God saw that it was good.
It was evening, it was morning—
Day Three.

Genesis 1:11-13, The Message

Readings from Simply in Season:

• Globesity: Too much, too little (2005 p. 128 / 2009 p. 130)
• Ten nutrition tips (2005 p. 110 / 2009 p. 145)
• Weighing the effects of corn syrup (2005 p. 149 / 2009 p. 153)
• 2005 PAGES 120 AND 147 / 2009 PAGES 122 AND 151

“Let’s take a look,” says doctor after doctor.

I don’t watch much TV, but I’ve caught this commercial in which doctors or medicine men in various cultures and historical time periods examine a boy with stomach pains. Only the modern doc with fancy equipment can actually “take a look” at the pain.

While the commercial pokes fun at old-time medicine, I think we mustn’t forget how intuitive that medicine could be.

The Creator of the Body Knows How it Works

So often, God has written into our very bodies recipes for health:

• Foods that aren’t good for us make our stomachs feel badly or interfere with our elimination, such that we can see and feel a problem.
• When we have a cold, our instincts make us cough and sneeze, to get the germs out. We want to rest, which heals our systems.
• Before our culture-driven mind gets in on the eating game, babies and very young children are born with the ability to (1) know when they have had enough food and (2) eat a balance of nutrients over the course of a week, including what they might need to treat a particular problem, without consulting the food pyramid or the super foods list. (See a study quoted in Nina Planck’s Real Food.) Even adults can crave certain food items that their body needs, without knowing why.
• Our taste buds and cultural norms direct us to put foods together that nutritionally complement each other, like beans and rice, tomatoes and olive oil, cheese and crackers.
• Bad food – rancid oil, moldy bread, etc. – tastes and smells awful to us, protecting our systems from the sickness that would come from eating it. Fumes that are bad for us also usually smell bad, too.
• Upon a serious injury, systems often go into shock to protect us from severe pain and losing control of our emotions.

Other times, He wrote health notes to us through His Word:

• When pork was often making people sick, pork was prohibited.
• God commanded the foreskin to be removed, and it is now proven that men with foreskin have more infections and other problems.
• A person was “unclean” for seven days after they touched a dead body (Numbers 19:11). As Rex Russell points out in the introduction to his What the Bible Says About Healthy Living, this probably saved many lives from contagious diseases passed by doctors and rabbis before we understood the value of handwashing.
• Teachings on fasting truly help humans to detoxify, particularly the tradition of fasting during Lent, in the springtime, the time of year that most agree is vital for detoxification.
• Even the simple reminders of moderation, of hospitality, laughter, consistent prayer – all improve our health, when obeyed.

Certainly this God who cares for the sparrow cares for our health. He wants our bodies to be proper temples of the Holy Spirit… The most fascinating fact I’ve learned lately is the powerful connection between the gut and the mind. Did you know that 70% of your immune system is in your gut, along with more neurons than your spinal cord.? (source)

It’s like God wrote a secret code message to the scientists of our day when He created the world: “By the way, now that you’ve figured out how everything microscopic works, please take note that what people eat affects their health! And be thoughtful about it, will ya?” Actually, I don’t think the Lord would use exclamation points. That would be my influence, and one of many reasons He didn’t inspire me to write down any of His Scripture.

What is God’s Plan for our Health?

When you read Genesis, “the beginning”, it’s pretty clear that our lives now are little like God’s original intent for humanity’s existence. We were vegetarians (Gen. 1:29), without bodily shame, without toil of labor to grow our food (Gen. 3:17), and with very few restrictions other than “don’t eat the apple.” With that first sinful bite of food, Adam and Eve sent humanity into a tailspin of improper eating and resulting consequences throughout history.

Much of our health is based on what we eat (probably a bit on sleep, too, but don’t tell my body that). The brain and the gut talk to one another, the status of each affecting the other. Some say we have a second brain in our guts. Hard to believe? Consider stress-induced “butterflies” and how poor nutrition, especially lots of sugar, can impact mental acuity and cause hyperactivity. Studying God’s plan for our health comes back around to what we eat.

Can eating be a spiritual endeavor? Consider:

• The first temptation, although that of pride, used food as a vehicle to accomplish the first sin.
• Food is immediately in the spotlight again when Cain and Abel bring tithes to the Lord of different qualities.
• God’s mercy is demonstrated through the miraculous manna and quail in the dessert. The people are fed, but they don’t even realize that they still need to be fed (spiritually).
• Christ often ate with his followers, regularly sharing key teachings with them over a meal, including the Last Supper and the giving of His Body and Blood.
• After the Resurrection, Christ revealed Himself to His friends a number of times over a meal: in Emmaus, when He first appeared in the Upper Room (He asked to eat), and when He cooked fish for Peter, John and the others on the seashore.
• The early Christians met for the “breaking of the bread” in their homes.

The Many Sides of Eating

Eating is also not something that humans do in isolation, neither physically nor figuratively. Eating is an important form of community, and some theorize that it is just that, the community aspect of meal time, that makes eaters either healthy or unhealthy.

Folks in the scientific world have dubbed the superior health of the French people, in spite of their diet heavy in saturated fat and white flour, the “French paradox”. There are as many theories about the answer to that paradox as there are people trying to figure it out, but one possibility is that the French eat slowly, with friends and family, and not to excess. The French do not say, “I am full,” but rather, “I have no more hunger.” When we Americans are expected to eat until we are full, perhaps we’re destining ourselves to obesity!

Eating is an input/output system in more ways than one. Not only is our health dependent on appropriate food input and effective output, but the very act of eating food has such an impact on our community and environmental health. Like a stone tossed into a still pond, each action we choose has an effect on everyone around us, even people we’ll never know. The plastic bottle I drink from today may impact my fertility 10 years from now and Susie Q’s cancer rate 100 years from now.

Animal Health

The way in which our food is grown or raised has an incredible influence on the health of the society and God’s creation. When animals are fed what God intended for them to eat – grass for cows, for example – they are healthy, and their meat has an appropriate balance of nutrients for human consumption. When cattle are fed corn, soy, and other stuff you don’t even want to know about, their stomachs have to adjust, their fat and muscle adjusts, and the animals are more likely to be ill, just as their meat is more likely to make human eaters ill (or at the very least, not support optimal health).

Soil and Farming Health

Artificial fertilizers and pesticides are wreaking havoc on the health of our soil, yet another layer of “health” that is easy to disregard. The soil doesn’t groan with stomach pains or look gaunt from malnutrition, but it may as well have both. The minerals in most conventionally farmed fields are tapped out, to be replaced with the same artificial fertilizers year after year, requiring more each year to compensate for the dead earth.

We may never recover from the impact of genetically modified plants, especially after they start influencing the development of their organically farmed neighbors, and even the weeds that try to attack them. We are changing our ecosystem with genetic modification, playing God if you will, and I don’t think the far-reaching consequences have been predicted or examined thoroughly enough.

Add to that the damage done directly to the health of communities by pesticide clouds, manure run-off, and petroleum and ozone depletion to cart all these commodities across the country and back and package them, and our food system is becoming as anti-health as can be.

The High Health Costs of Cheap Food

To complicate an already complicated food situation in America, we need to acknowledge the fact that our food system changes are all aimed at the goal of increasing production and reducing cost. That makes it even easier for the uninformed or unintentional consumer to overeat, particularly foods that will ultimately damage their health. We generally grow cheap food that will kill you early instead of expensive, worthwhile, nutrient-dense food to sustain good health.

The Problem of Medication

The common solution to the various health problems we have created is to throw some more chemicals in the mix, whether they be more fertilizer, sanitizers, irradiation, antibiotics or other medications. We are putting medicinal band-aids on bleeding hearts instead of looking for preventative measures and simply returning to the life God has created us for.

Not only is this perpetuating the diseases from which the modern world (and the modern world only!) suffers, like diabetes, cancer, and heart disease, but also the chemicals, either after passing through our bodies or by taking up residence in the soil, pollute our air and water supply. We are all drinking the estrogen, for example, that users of the Pill and hormone supplements excrete, because it cannot be filtered out of our water. How many more occurrences of disease are we causing in our fight to take control of our health, unnaturally?

What’s a Christian to Do?

Can we really use our faith to influence the choices we make about our health and our food consumption? I truly believe that God wishes us to consider the overall health, both physical and spiritual, of the world when we make our food choices. The Father of all wouldn’t want His children sabotaging each other and harming themselves for some momentary convenience or pleasure of good-tasting food. Our health is tied into our care of creation, our day-to-day eating, and our sense of community. Let us make conscious choices to be good stewards of all God’s creation when we sit down to the table and break bread. We may be hosting angels unaware.

The Challenge

Questions for Reflection (share your response below for any one of these for an entry in this week’s drawing)

What else do you see in the natural world that points to the author of life writing good health into His Creation? What are people doing to fight against this, and how can we make a positive impact?

Challenge to Action (post on your blog and add a link below to the specific post about this challenge or email me before Friday to be included in the round up post and for an additional entry into this week’s drawing). Choose from one of the following:

• Brainstorm ideas for healthy eating from your own experiences. Are there particular recipes, approaches to meals, etc., that have been helpful in your family?
• Grow something! Whether it’s herbs in a pot on a windowsill or rows and rows of neat vegetables, celebrate the joy of gardening.
• Get local: Look into local opportunities for enhancing community health, such as community or school gardens or nutrition teaching programs. Learn what health issues face local farmers and farmworkers.

The prize: This week’s drawing is for Katie’s brand new ebook, Healthy Snacks to Go. I got to sample some of the treats at a local blogger meetup . . . let me tell you, they are AWESOME!

Complete with time-saving tips, frugal options and allergy notes, Healthy Snacks To Go will become your “go-to” cookbook to keep your cupboards filled with nourishing yet quick choices.  Grain-based recipes include soaked versions, and you’ll find healthy fats like butter and coconut oil throughout.

When you’re trying to avoid processed food, coming up with something quick can be a challenge. Healthy Snacks To Go features diaper-bag friendly snacks that are toddler-approved and will help your household be prepared for the classic call of, “Mom, I’m huuuuungry!”  You’ll also find sophisticated recipes like Wheat Thin Style Crackers and Spelt Biscuits, along with two bonus sections: “Basic Snacks for the Absent-Minded Eater” and “Lunch Packing Tips to Save the Earth (and your Sanity)”.

Order your copy today!

This post linked to Fight Back Friday