Americans look to Jesus for diet

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4541849.stm

By Michelle Roberts
BBC News health reporter

Five loaves, two fishes and a goblet of red wine could be on the menu for Americans if a new diet takes off.

Don Colbert, a Florida doctor, believes asking yourself "What would Jesus eat?" is the best way to stay fit, slim and trim.

In his book, which gets its title from this question, he explores some of the Old Testament dietary laws and looks at foods mentioned in the Bible.

He says: "If you truly want to follow Jesus in every area of your life you cannot ignore your eating habits.
"The health of Americans is going down and it is largely down to our bad food choices.

"We have an obesity epidemic. People eat when they are stressed and eat on the run and everyone is super-sizing their meals.

"A lot of people have no desire to change their foods. Instead, they just go on medication to control their symptoms of obesity-related disease. But it shouldn't be this way.

"By getting them to look at the biblical side it allows them to slow down and make the correct choice about their diet and lifestyle," he said.

So what did Jesus eat?

At the last supper, Jesus is said to have eaten bread and drunk wine.

Luke 24:42 says: "And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, and of a honeycomb. And he took it, and did eat before them."


Round Lake Tiberias - the Sea of Galilee - fish would also have been significant

Eric Eve, a tutor in theology and a New Testament scholar at Oxford University

While Luke 10.8 says: "Whenever you enter a town and they receive you, eat what is set before you," which would seem to suggest that Jesus was not encouraging fussiness about food.

Dr Colbert said: "Jesus ate primarily natural foods in their natural states - lots of vegetables, especially beans and lentils.

"He would have eaten wheat bread, a lot of fruit, drunk a lot of water and also red wine.

"And he would only eat meat on special occasions, maybe once a month, just like the parable of the prodigal son who ate fatted calf."

Mediterranean diet

Eric Eve, a tutor in theology and a New Testament scholar at Oxford University, said: "The staple diet of a Mediterranean peasant in Jesus' day would have been bread.

"Round Lake Tiberias - the Sea of Galilee - fish would also have been significant, though for peasants perhaps only in small quantities to provide a relish for the bread.

"Grapes and olives were also grown in Galilee, but more as cash crops for the wine and oil trade than for peasant consumption."

He said food was probably scarce. "Many of them probably went hungry much of the time, or achieved only bare subsistence."

But he said: "I can't imagine many modern Americans taking enthusiastically to all the features of a "biblical" diet

Biblical dietary laws


Pork pie would not have graced Jesus' dinner table

"For example Leviticus 11.22 says 'Of them you may eat: the locust according to its kind, the bald locust according to its kind, the cricket according to its kind, and the grasshopper according to its kind.'"

Dr Colbert said: "He did not eat meats that were an abomination.

"He followed the Levitical laws. He would not have eaten pigs and rabbits or fish that did not have scales, such as crabs and shrimps.

"These foods are higher in arachidonic acid, which is an inflammatory fatty acid, as well as saturated fat that predisposes us to disease.

"So, again, it is best if we eat these animals, which were forbidden in the Old Testament, only very rarely and in smaller amounts, I tell my patients."

Gift from God

Dr Colbert said it was also the manner in which people ate in biblical times that was important.

"They would eat for hours and take their time. The disciples would be lounging around and conversing while dining, not eating fast food on the go like we do."

Reverend Dr Gordon Gatward, director of the Arthur Rank Centre, part of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, said: "Some of the stricter religious people have accused Jesus of being a wine bibber and a glutton because Jesus did like parties.

"But what is interesting is that with both Christian and Jewish faiths, the focal celebration and worship surrounds a meal. We say grace before a meal because food is a gift from God.

"But it is about more than just the physical diet. It is also about the spiritual diet. The Christian faith takes a holistic view."

this type of stuff compounded with our "elected" officials shinanigans. :crazy:

It seems to be more along the lines of "The Mediterranean Diet" than a fundamentalist push for purity.

Of course, I'm sure there are fundamentalists pushing for purity in diet. I just don't think it will be found in Don Colbert's practice.

--p!

doesn't it? I mean, if you cut out all the fast food, junk food, food with high fructose corn syrup, food with fat or sugar added for flavor, any processed food -- wouldn't you be healthier? And Jesus didn't eat that stuff, processed foods didn't exist.

Religion and Obesity
Agnosticism/Atheism Blog
December 02, 2003

Religion and Obesity

If gluttony is a deadly sin, why are higher rates of obesity associated with greater religious dedication? If America is a Christian Nation, why is America the fattest nation in the world? Should American Christians be a little more concerned about gluttony?

Jim Holt writes for the Boston Globe:

According to a 1998 Purdue University study, obesity is associated with higher levels of religious participation. (Broken down by creed, Southern Baptists have the highest body-mass index on average, Catholics are in the middle, and Jews and other non-Christians are the lowest.) When this finding was brought to the attention of the Reverend Jerry Falwell, he was unperturbed. "I know gluttony is a bad thing," Falwell said. "But I don't know many gluttons." That is one way out of the dilemma -- to deny that overweight people are necessarily sinful gluttons. But it could also be that gluttony is not really a sin.

True, maybe gluttony shouldn't be a sin, but at the very least one might wonder why Southern Baptists aren't sending more of the calories to people who don't have enough to eat. Even if gluttony isn't a sin, arguably eating more then you need while others go hungry could be.

Read More:
http://atheism.about.com/b/a/046342.htm

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Today's Christian, January/February 2005
One Church's War on Obesity
Texas pastor Ed Young Jr.'s mission to change his congregation's eating habits.
by Randy Robison

One Church's War on Obesity
Ed Young, Jr.

Congregants at Fellowship Bible Church in Grapevine, Texas, used to feed on Krispy Kremes before and after feeding on the Word of God. But these days, you'll be hard pressed to find a doughnut in the church.

Last year, senior pastor Ed Young, Jr., preached a series called "Body by God," in which he taught that our spiritual and physical health intersect to reflect the true body God desires for us.

"People loved the Krispy Kremes," Young says, "but the more we started thinking about this, we were saying, 'We can't talk about this on the one hand and on the other hand have all these unhealthy doughnuts.'"

Now Krispy Kremes are out, and health is in. The 18,000-member Fellowship Church practices, for the most part, what their pastor preaches. But like any church, there are still those who haven't quite caught the vision. A Sunday lunch visit to one of the many restaurants surrounding the church provides insight into an ongoing battle.

More:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/tc/2005/001/5.25.html

Why take a teacher, ignore all his wisdom (the Beatitudes, the cleaning of the moneylenders from the Temple, the camel through the eye of the needle) and focus on the diets of Romanized Judea?

Because the greatest crime in this irrelevant world is to be overweight, by some arbitrary and capricious standard imposed by others upon total strangers, with or without their consent.

\followed by the second crime: thinking for oneself.

(Mark 7:14-15)
"there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are
what defile."

(Mark 7:21-23)
"For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come..."


peace,
dp

Or is it where he says sodomy is OK, but not (I guess) peeing on someone?

This answers an old question: Just what is Concerned Women for America really concerned about?

The answer is that they are concerned about who and what you put in your mouth.


Concerned Women for America
Coming Out of the Pantry 9/23/2004
By Brian Fitzpatrick

So what do obesity and homosexuality have in common?

<snip>


It's time for me to come out of the pantry, Pete -- as New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey might put it, "I am a fat American." I've been fat ever since I was four. Family legend has it that I was skinny until my brother went to kindergarten, and I chose to respond to the trauma of separation by drowning my sorrows in peanut butter and jelly.

I never chose to be fat, I've been that way ever since I can remember. However, I see now that being fat is the natural result of my love affair with food, both garden-variety gluttony and my lifelong habit of using food to medicate emotional hurts. Early on, I adopted the destructive behavior, and over the years I unwittingly cultivated it, until it became a life-corrupting monster. As a child, I learned to identify myself as the fat kid, and grew comfortable in the uncomfortable role. I never knew what I was doing, never understood what obesity would do to me. Regrettably, I'm now suffering the consequences of obesity, the culmination of those thousand little choices I made over the years: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, painful joints, increased risk of cancer.

The good news is, I don't have to play this role forever. Every time I open my mouth, I have a choice over what goes in. Dealing with the emotional problems, transforming my self-image, and losing the excess weight, is a very, very tough battle, but it is possible to make progress. So far, I've lost 40 pounds, and I still have 40 to go.

No analogy is perfect, but the parallel to homosexuality here seems clear. The best psychiatrists and therapists (check out Charles Socarides and Jeffrey Satinover) acknowledge that same-sex attraction is a deep-seated emotional disorder, often triggered by a traumatic event, but shaped largely by choices made even as a child in responding to the trauma. In this respect, homosexual attraction is chosen, though unwittingly.

More:
http://www.cwfa.org/articles/6411/CFI/family/


Brian Fitzpatrick is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.

Concerned Women for America
1015 Fifteenth St. N.W., Suite 1100
Washington, D.C. 20005
Phone: (202) 488-7000
Fax: (202) 488-0806

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He would have eaten:

Matzo (un-leavened bread).
A hard-boiled egg dipped in saltwater.
A piece of lamb, probably from the neck.
Apples with walnuts.
Horseradish.
Parsley
Wine. :Lots of wine. Probably Manaschewitz.
And maybe some chicken soup with matzo balls.

And some macaroons for dessert.

I hear that Paul found The Afikomen, but only because Judas blabbed and told him where it was.

If he had fish, it was probably gefilte fish.

You know this joke?

Q- How do you share 5 apples between 100 people?
A- You make applesauce?

Well...

Q- How do you share 5 fish between 100 people?
A- You make gefilte fish!

QED: Miracle solved.

How would Jesus shower and shave? Take a dump?
I mean, shouldn't literalists be paying attention to that too?

Please include *no more* than four paragraphs of the cited article, with a link back to the original. Thank you.

DU Moderator