We hear often that everything belongs to God and we are the stewards. Tithing our earnings, for instance, is good stewardship and thus could be considered a form of worship. God tells us that when we fail to bring our tithes into His storehouse, we are robbing God. That doesn't sound good.
By the same token, He designed and put our bodies into motion so we are stewards of our physical selves. Perhaps the most critical path to good stewardship of our bodies would be through our food choices. Can we be seduced into wrongful worship of God by a course of eating that robs Him of our best energy and service, causing disease and hardship that are virtually preventable?
We all have a set of belief systems, one of them being what we hold dear about food. Whatever truth exists about food and what it does to us or for us, we may or may not hear it because we are blocked by food addictions, labels that we don't want to be a part of (food snobs, vegan/vegetarian) and mindsets (food choice is not related to disease).
Can you, just for the next few days, plug your belief system about food into a new outlet? That means looking at research that you don't want to hear, believe or implement.
I am galvanizing a ten-year search into a few sentences, but know these sentences are data-driven and lifesaving.
Though sources abound, let me set you on a course if you are willing. Dr. Neal Barnard (M.D.) is the president and founder of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. He writes in Breaking the Food Seduction:
In Western countries, people become habituated to diets rich in cheese, meat, sugar and fat as easily as they might to tobacco, alcohol or drugs...Dr. Dean Ornish's program for reversing heart disease [came through his patients having] broken their addictions to unhealthy foods, and their bodies healed on their own. The same is true with diabetes. The condition is rare among Asians who continue traditional plant-based diets, and similarly rare among vegetarians. But, once Asians move to Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago or Atlanta, and trade traditional rice and vegetables for Western fare, diabetes rates climb 400 percent.Here's the kicker, again from Dr Barnard's book:
Heroin, cocaine, alcohol, nicotine, and, in fact, all recreational drugs work on the brain's pleasure center, triggering a greatly exaggerated dopamine response. [In fact], dopamine is what powers the brain's pleasure center...chocolate bars, wedges of cheese, cookies and doughnuts...are capable of stimulating precisely the same part of the brain that responds to heroin. And that is why they can be addicting...it turns out that meat stimulates a surprisingly strong release of insulin, just as a cookie or bread does. In turn, insulin is involved in the release of dopamine.That crunches a crazy amount of information into a few sentences. Let it digest.
Bottom line: we are hooked--with drug-like reason--on meat, cheese, sugar and fat. We've heard the sugar and fat thing long enough to look the other way...yada, yada, yada.
But we can no longer ignore the truth about animal protein--meat, cheese, eggs and dairy.
I know...it's like a death in the family.
So for today--measure your resistance. Are you willing to read about, ponder, let go of ill-fated worship of God through foods that slowly deteriorate our bodies, our vessel?
You can shoot the messenger...or listen to Jonah 2:8:
Those who worship hollow gods, god-frauds, walk away from their only true love.
