What Does the Bible Say About Food?

God has given us His word as a resource for Christian living, so surely our Creator has left us some guidelines as to what or how to eat. The Bible says a lot about food, and if we study it comparing our modern diet, we may see that our western culture has gotten our eating habits quite wrong.

I will show today what the Bible says about certain kinds of foods, and what you can to best implement them into your diet.

Fruits and Vegetables

Genesis 1:29 Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.

We know that God made the Garden of Eden and placed man and woman there so that may live and have dominion over the earth. This scripture tells us that God gave them fruits and vegetables to be their food.

This is a great place to start if you want to live a healthy life. Fruits and vegetables are full of micronutrients; the vitamins and minerals that are essential for our bodies to function correctly. These should be 90% of your diet if you want a long, healthy life.

Some people would argue to keep fruit consumption low as it has lots of sugar, but as long as you keep your fat intake low, you should be able to eat as much fruit as you want. Vegetables can be consumed without any worries. Vegetables are typically low in carbs, especially the leafy green variety (cruciferous). I would recommend making these the foundation of your diet; they really are the healthiest foods you can eat.

If you have it available and can afford it, organic produce is the best option available. Produce from these giant food corporations is grown in poor conditions with depleted soils, sprayed with toxic chemicals, genetically modified, and has a fraction of the nutritional content that it used to. Local, organic produce is an even better option and can sometimes be cheaper, especially in season. If cost is a factor, I would check out the dirty dozen list to see which items to make sure to get organic.

Meat

Genesis 9:3 Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.

This is the first concrete occurrence we can find in scripture of man eating meat. After the flood, the only thing that Noah and his family would have had to eat was on the boat. When the waters resided, there would have been no fruits or vegetables left for them to eat. So God gave them meat to eat so that they can stay alive as they re-inhabit the earth.

In Leviticus, God outlines a lot of steps to take for the people to prepare and eat meat. It should be killed in a certain way, have its blood drained, and should only come from clean animals. This is what we would term today as being “Kosher”. This has been scientifically studied and declared to be a lot healthier than non-kosher varieties. Seems that God knows what He is doing.

From these two examples, we can see that meat is clearly okay to eat according to the Bible. But what is the problem with meat?

1. They did not have grocery stores, restaurants or refrigerators in the Bible. Their consumption of meat would usually only occur for special occasions such as feasts or holy days. They would not have consumed it daily like we do, as they did not have a way to store it.
2. Conventionally farmed meat is very unhealthy. These animals are kept in confined spaces, pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics, and live sad and sick lives. You are only as healthy as the food you eat, and these animals are mostly very sick.
3. Animals today are fed gmo- soy, corn, and grains to fatten them up. This causes them to be a lot less nutritious and have an unhealthy balance of fatty acids, like omega-6 and omega-3. Opt for organic, grass-fed meat whenever possible. It can be expensive but a lot healthier for you.
4. It is difficult to digest and can sits in your digestive tract around 72 hours. If it is not expelled quick enough, it can rot and inevitably stick to your digestive walls.

Bread

Ezekiel 4:9 “Take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt; put them in a storage jar and use them to make bread for yourself.”

This passage is synonymous with the famous “Ezekiel Bread” found in the freezer section of your grocery store. It doesn’t exactly sound like the most appetizing bread to eat. Did they really make bread out of this stuff? Yes.

The bread we know today is very different from the bread they would have eaten in the Bible. They used healthy grains to make their bread from and sprouted them to make it more digestible. As this verse states, they had wheat(better ancient varieties) spelt, and other grains like rye.

Our modern grains have been hybridized so much that the gluten content has gone up tremendously. Many people are not able to tolerate this wheat, whether they have celiac or not. There are many compounds in wheat gluten that can damage us, including gliadins, glutenin, lectins and more. Sprouting the grains helps to break these compounds down so the body can better digest them.

Then there is the beloved white bread. This is the worst of them all. It has all of these issues and is so processed that it is hardly recognized as food. It is basically sugar in your body.

They would not have eaten a lot of wheat in the Bible, but it was still common. Today, wheat seems to be a staple in our diets. It is one food that I would recommend staying away from; most people tend to feel better when they don’t eat it.

Unclean Animals

Leviticus 11 gives us a long list of animals that God considers unclean. That list is to exhaustive for me to layout here but to paraphrase, it included pigs, shellfish, certain types of fish and birds and reptiles. So what makes these animals so bad?

Pigs for example are natures garbage disposal. They will eat anything and everything; from rodents, to maggots, dead carcasses and even garbage. They are highly toxic as they do not efficiently eliminate these toxins.

The shellfish and fish included are usually all bottom feeders. Similar to the pig, they eat off of dead matter and other toxic substances. Clean fish eat a diet strictly of algae.

It seems that God knew what he was doing in outlining these guidelines. It’s not just some religious tradition to follow, or that God just wanted people to suffer and live without certain things. He designed these animals to help clean the environment, so for people to consume them is a bad health decision.

Here is a great article on this topic: https://www.cbcg.org/booklets/what-the-bible-teaches-about-clean-and-unclean-meats/chapter-three-the-dangers-of-unclean-meats-a-medical-perspective.html

Final Thoughts

The Bible contains a lot of wisdom, and I would expect nothing less when searching the scriptures to find information on a healthy diet. God designed our bodies to operate in a certain way, and when we discover and study just what that looks like, it can take a lot of the guesswork out of how we should live. I know that our culture has a certain standard of living that it adheres to, but I, for one, want to live the way that God has designed. This way will lead to a long, disease free life, and I’m sure that is something all of us would want for ourselves and our loved ones.