Biblical Health Laws
There are 759 statutes, laws and judgments in Scripture (this includes the 10 Commandments), which can be divided into 133 areas of subject matter for convenience. Today we'll be covering the Biblical Health Laws, with a special eye on diet and disease.
A common belief in our society is that sickness and disease are the result of luck. If you're lucky, you stay healthy. If you're unlucky, you get sick. At the turn of the century, medicine divided into two main camps: allopathic and holistic. The allopathic camp won the struggle, and our society, as a whole, subscribes to the allopathic theory of diseases and their cures. The only problem with this is that allopathic medicine is a reactive, not a proactive, form of treatment, i.e. it treats the symptoms, not the cause.
Now, in order to treat the cause of a disease, you need to know what caused it in the first place. At the risk of sounding simplistic, I contend the primary cause of disease is sin. In this case, I'm defining sin as the transgression of the Law. (see Leviticus 26:14-46 and Deuteronomy 28:15-68 for the causes of disease; John 3:4 for the definition of sin; also see Leviticus 26:16, 25 and Deuteronomy 28: 21-22, 27-28, 35, 45, 59-61)
In many cases, disease is caused by a nutritional deficiency, a toxic buildup in the body, or some combination of the two. In the case of nutritional deficiency, our failure to practice the land sabbaths and Jubilee years (among other things) has lead to a gradual lessening of the nutritional values of the food we eat - a lessening which has been so long in coming that, in most cases, even the experts don't notice the differences unless they're specifically looking for them. Think of it like a hillside being eroded 1/10 of an inch a year - to see any difference, you'll need pictures taken decades, even centuries, apart. For people who say "Nutrition is important, but lack of nutrition can't cause really major, life-threatening diseases" I point to scurvy (caused by lack of Vitamin C) and rickets (caused by lack of Vitamin D) as just two examples of nutritionally-based diseases which even allopathic medicine acknowledges. If you look at the list of diseases which can be alleviated or completely cured by proper nutrition, or carefully administered nutritional therapy (it's a lot harder to stop being sick than it is to get sick in the first place), it's a pretty long list. As for toxins causing disease, you need to look beyond the obvious cases of poisoning to see the scope of the problem. Nutritional deficiency is caused by not putting something into your body that it needs to survive and/or be healthy. Toxic buildup, on the other hand, is caused by putting something into your body that will prevent it from surviving and/or being healthy. Such things range from tar and nicotine (which cause lung cancer), meat that comes from carnivorous herbivores (this can cause new variant Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease AKA the human version of Mad-Cow Disease), fat (how many articles have you seen telling you to cut down on the fat in your diet because it causes heart disease?)... well, the list could go on indefinitely. The interesting thing is that Scriptural dietary laws forbid the taking into our body of such poisons... yet, each and every day, people blithely smoke while eating greasy hamburgers from McDonald's. And yet they wonder why they're sick? Those dietary laws were put there for a reason: to prevent disease. If you look at those groups which adhere (knowingly or unknowingly) to most, or all, of the Scriptural dietary laws you'll see significantly lower rates of the common degenerative diseases, and a higher life expectancy in general.
When you deal with the subject of communicable diseases (ranging from the common cold through plague) you'll find most people get sick not so much from the disease as from a weakened immune system, which can't protect you. When I talk about disease in this sense, I'm not talking about the one or two day sniffles, I'm talking about the one or two week, flat-on-your-back flu... or worse. And even allopathic medicine recognizes (to an extent) the importance of nutrition in fighting disease. Look how they've pushed Vitamin C over the past 30 years. But having and keeping a healthy immune system requires more than just popping a few vitamin capsules every day and saying "Well, I'm protected now... guess I'll go out for that shrimp and hamburger special down at Captain D's." No amount of vitamin popping is going to protect you from yourself - and from the penalties for eating poorly and in violation of the Law.
Now, some people will say "This is BS. People are living longer today than they ever have before." Well, I know life expectancy in the industrialized countries (i.e. North America, Europe, Japan, etc.) today is longer than it's been in the past 2,000-2,500 years... but there isn't any real knowledge about how long people lived prior to that. Remember, the Bible and the histories of various peoples the world over note some pretty impressive life spans. In addition, scientists (the honest ones, at least) will note the vast majority of the lifespan increase over the past 100 years has been because of the significant lowering of infant and child mortality rates (mostly due to increased sanitation, emergency treatment, etc.). The chance that a person who makes it to 40 these days will make it to 60 or 80 isn't substantially different than it was in 1900 (the majority of the difference is due to trauma care). Besides, if you're like George Burns and live to be 100 while smoking cigars and eating who knows what, can you imagine how long you might live if you took care of yourself and avoided both acute (short term) and chronic (long term) diseases?
I know this runs counter to the conventional wisdom that everything is bigger and better these days, and that there's more of it. But face it, the majority of our 'improved' health care really comes down to the single big shining success of allopathic medicine - trauma care. There's no disputing you have a much greater chance of surviving a traumatic injury now than you would have even 20 years ago. But much of what passes for improved 'modern' medicine is simply the application of trauma care to everything. How do most doctors and hospitals treat a cold (assuming they don't try to pump you full of antibiotics - a practice roundly condemned by both the AMA and the Centers for Disease Control as it creates so-called super-germs)? They send you home with a recommendation for bed rest, plenty of liquids, some vitamin C and chicken soup. Not too different from what Grandma used to do, eh? And for the really nasty diseases, like plague? The usual course of treatment is to simply try and prevent you from dying, and let your body do the healing. And if your body isn't up to the task? Simple - you die. Even if you're in the biggest and best hospital in the world, if your body won't do the healing, you die. If you don't believe me, break out some of the articles on the people who died during the recent anthrax scare. The ones who made it to the hospital were given the best of everything... and in spite of all their knowledge and effort, the doctors would usually come out in a few days and say there wasn't anything they could do because the anthrax had made it to the lungs.
Ok, you say, why would my body, nourished by the fruits of the 'Green Revolution' and the best diet in history, just give up? Glad you asked that, because do I have some information for you. The 'Green Revolution' is pretty much a fake, the agricultural equivalent of puffed wheat. If you go back to 1880, the protein content of Kansas wheat was 24%. By 1950 (generally considered the start of the 'Green Revolution') it had dropped to an average of 18% (a 25% loss). Right now it's running between 7% and 13% (a 50% to 75% loss over a 120 year time span). This is directly attributable to two things: 1) the overuse of the land (i.e. the failure to practice the land Sabbaths and other land stewardship laws) and 2) the use of hybrid or genetically modified seed. Look to Leviticus 19:19 and Leviticus 25 for more information on this. And, don't just take my word on it... listen to what Acres USA has to say on the matter: "Some of the successes that have attended corn production may have been the result of distorted accounting procedures. In terms of nutrients, open pollinated still has an enviable record. Adolph Steinbronn of Fairbanks, Iowa put the matter in perspective by having samples of corn tested for ingredients usually added to commercial feeds... Compared to some 4,000 samples of [hybrid] corn tested in ten Midwest states in a single year, Steinbronn's OP corn contained 75% more crude protein, 875% more copper, 345% more iron and 205% more manganese. The same trend has also been seen in the content of calcium, sodium, magnesium and zinc... In the opinion of many eco-farmers, hybrid corn merely masks poor farming by producing bins and bushels without the nutrients that are really corn's reason for being." (An Acres USA Primer by Charles Walters, Jr. and C.J. Fenzau). Every commercial food crop in this country has a similar nutritional deficiency. As for us eating the 'best' diet in history, I might ask why, if it's so good, that the government, doctors, etc. are trying to get us to change our eating habits because we suffer from so many diet related diseases like heart attacks? Everywhere you look you run into the same Catch-22: are they lying about the American diet being the best, or are they lying about the risks inherent from eating that diet? Well, if you look at the statistics of men who suffer from heart attacks, the monthly reports on the newest food not to eat, the increasing number of incidents involving hospitalization, even death, from tainted food, I'd say the answer is pretty obvious.
While you can't completely escape the damage done by this diet (after all, you've been eating it your entire life) and the American lifestyle, you can prevent the damage from getting any worse. "How?", you ask. Well, for starters, the Mosaic Law contains a detailed listing of not just dietary laws, but health laws in general. Some have been followed in this country for years but many of them will be new to you. For more information all the laws pertinent to health are in the mosaic law class.