Summary Of Food Isn T What It Used To Be: A Biblical Approach To Health

Wellness according to the National Wellness Institute is a process of being aware of making choices towards a more successful existence (Arloski, pg. 13). Wellness is also a way of life, a choice and efficient channeling of energy, the mind spirit and body and acceptance of self (Arloski, pg. 13). Wellness also consist of and have many other dimensions such as, holistic nature of wellness and health. Wellness focuses more on helping each person reach their highest level of health (Arloski, pg. 13). A biblical worldview of wellness is that it is important to be healthy but unfortunately even Christians continue to abuse their bodies by not adhering to a healthy diet. Our bodies are a temple from God and should be taken care of.

Do you know what is in the food that you are fueling your body with? Eating locally grown food or growing your own food allows you to know exactly what is in your food and where it is coming from. Award winning author Barbara Kingsolver ditched her urban life full of pesticides and GMOs, and uprooted her family to a farm where they were going to eat all home or locally grown food for a year. The Kingsolver family documented this one-year food journey in their non-fiction book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Barbara Kingsolver wants to educate, persuade, and inspire her readers to live healthier lives by first forcing them to question the food they are consuming. She uses allusion, figurative language, and rhetorical questioning

Pollan defines the American problem as “unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.” (Pg. 3) The vast majority of consumers in our society are ones that envision themselves as striving towards a healthy lifestyle, yet many of these consumers don’t realize that in their attempts at eating healthy they are on a slow decline. A large sum of the population garners their information on which foods to eat from their daily news sources, trying new fad diets and picking up any food that Buzzfeed or the Huffington Post tells them will better their health (Pg. 1). This behavior in turn leaves those desperate for a slimmer and healthier bodies utterly confused and desolate.

In Michael Pollan’s essay “Escape from the Western Diet,” he informs Americans about the western diet and believes they need to escape from it. The reason Americans should escape the western diet is to avoid the harmful effects associated with it such as “western diseases” (Pollan, 434). To support his view on the issue, Pollan describes factors of the western diet that dictate what Americans believe they should eat. These factors include scientists with their theories of nutritionism, the food industry supporting the theories by making products, and the health industry making medication to support those same theories. Overall, Pollan feels that in order to escape this diet, people need to get the idea of it out of their heads. In turn he

Michael Pollan says in his argument that the western diet is chiefly to blame for a majority of health deceases, he says “the scientist who blame our health problems on defiances of these micronutrients are not the same scientist who see sugar-soaked diet leading to metabolic syndrome and from there to diabetes, heart deceases, and cancer” (421) Due to all this negative impact to our health Pollan says that the food industry needs new theories to better redesign processed food and the medical community to make new drugs to beget deceases.

One of the fundamental beliefs of the Nacirema is that “the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease.” According to the Christian tradition, the human body is fallen and is therefore prone to disease and weakness; so in that

"Men pray to the gods for health and they ignore that it is in their power to have it."

The Church of Christ, founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879, preached that the true practice of Christianity heals sickness; she establishes her views in the book “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures”.

Improving the health conditions of the American population ensures the increased quality of life. People eat for various reasons with the fundamental reason being for survival purposes. However, the issue of eating to live and living to eat affects people in different manners as most people develop poor eating habits that affect the body’s nutritional intake and affects their health. Being healthy involves careful considerations of what one is eating and engaging in activities that contribute to better healthy lives that do not imply daily prescriptions or

Hungry for Change is the recent documentary by the nutritional-consultants-turned-directors James Colquhoun and Laurentine ten Bosch. This

“The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth; and he that is wise will not abhor them” (Ecclesiasticus 38:4). This is one of my favorite bible quotes which summarizes my feelings (views?) about maintaining a healthy lifestyle, using food as medicine and balancing good nutrition. Throughout my life I made poor choices pertaining to my nutrition in part by cultural experiences and my personal lack of awareness. One of my biggest challenges growing up was digestive related in which, I have struggled with constipation most of my life. As I did my research in food science, I realized that much of what I ate had a direct effect on my digestive problems. Once I changed my diet, over the course of time, my digestive issues ceased. As a result of my personal experience, I gained wisdom regarding the importance of good nutrition.

The spiritual significance of illness and suffering is a topic Christians continue to grapple with, as Larchet points out in The Theology of Illness. Scripture offers a wealth of wisdom and cues for understanding illness, health, and healing from a Christian perspective. Larchet analyzes the various and often contradictory Christian positions on health and illness, revealing how attitudes have shifted over time and with changes in medical technology, practice, and ethics. For example, St. Barsanuphius presents a comprehensive analysis of the spiritual significance of illness and suffering. One view holds that illness signifies a lack of faith; another presents illness in terms of a person who is offered the opportunity to develop a stronger faith, or whose faith is being put to a test like the story of Job. Ultimately, the latter remains the most helpful way to approach illness and healing from a Christian perspective. The essence of Christian health care is that, "Healing itself, while resulting from natural processes, actually comes from God," (Larchet 116).

‘Health we must have; and health is proportion; so that when a man comes into your room and says he is Christ… …and has a message… …and threatens… …to kill himself, you invoke proportion; order rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends, without books; without messages; six months’ rest…’ (Page 110).

Grand Canyon University. (2015). Theological anthropology and the phenomenology of disease and illness [Lecture note]. Retrieved from https://lc-ugrad1.gcu.edu/learningPlatform/user/users.html?operation=loggedIn#/learningPlatform/loudBooks/loudbooks.html?currentT

Chapter four talks of another way religion ends life in the form of the risks they take on individual health. The first example he uses is that of polio vaccine. In Nigeria, the