The Bible Diet

As I was getting dressed last week to go to a funeral, I was forced to admit that the dark suit I had worn on such occasions for the past twenty years was becoming uncomfortably tight. When therefore I scanned the Amazon site to find some interesting reading material for the Kindle my son gave for Christmas, I was intrigued to find a book entitled "Waist Disposal", by Dr John Briffa who had been helping people successfully lose weight for some years. His methods, which couple diet with exercise and a positive mental attitude, clearly work

What the good doctor claims, somewhat along the lines of the Atkins diet, is that it is OK to eat a lot of fat and protein, but sugar and other carbohydrates, even in fruit and vegetables, should be avoided. Apparently any sugar triggers the accumulation of fat on the body and must therefore be eliminated from the diet. Furthermore, because carbohydrates are converted to sugar in the digestive process, they must also be banned. All calories are therefore not equal in their effect. I found the whole thing very convincing, especially as the principles had been tested out on the poor old laboratory mouse. However...

This cannot be right!

Thinking I must take action and do something different with my daily diet, I decided to take Dr Briffa's advice and have some scrambled egg breakfast, a good source of protein. Unfortunately, immediately realized that bread or toast to accompany it, even with Marmite rather than my usual marmalade, were no allowed. Likewise, of course, fried potatoes, baked beans, rice and my usual breakfast porridge were also excluded. This, I thought, is crazy. After all I know a lot of people, even skinny ones, who happily consume all those forbidden items. There was clearly something not right.

Evolution's influence

I have often thought of trying to write a diet book based on principles found in the Bible, assuming it to be the inspire word of God. Dr Briffa, however, is clearly an evolutionist, and his ideas owe more to Charles Darwin's claim that man is advancing from the cave man stage, when he had not yet learned to cultivate crops and so had to be a "hunter gatherer" and supposedly very "fit". Like many people, the good doctor therefore regards the hunter-gatherer diet as the ideal. I suspect that the idea of a diet based on the word of God, would probably be nonsensical to him, which may explain why he never responded to my email.

I decided therefore to compare his diet with any relevant scriptural information. It immediately becomes clear that all carbohydrates cannot be bad for us. Many accounts, from the Days of Unleavened Bread in the Old Testament, to Jesus being the "bread of life" in the New Testament, make it clear that bread has to be good, and is intended by God as human food.

White stuff

What, however, constitutes real "bread"? In "Bread Matters", Andrew Whitley makes it clear that most bread is more akin to chemical rubbish than food. As he points out, even the grain from which the white "stuff" is normally made is sadly depleted in nutrients even as it grows in the field, containing about half the amount of key minerals such as calcium and magnesium and other trace elements compared to crops a century ago. If you consider also, not only the removal of the vital wheat germ, but the arsenal of dubious chemicals that are then added by the bakers for a variety of economic and cosmetic reasons, such as colour and crumb texture, or simply using several times the normal amount yeast to speed rising of the dough, it becomes clear that most bread should not be classified as food. As Whitley points, out it is little wonder that so many people find themselves allergic to this stuff they mistakenly thought was bread.

Of course, it is not just bread that is suspect, as is pointed out in "The Real Origin of Species" (atwww.gaptheory.net ), but virtually any and every item of food to be found in the supermarket, with even a bottle of water containing traces of undesirable elements.

That said, however, from a scriptural point of view, whole carbohydrates, from cereals, fruit and vegetables are obviously intended for human consumption and any diet that excludes them is clearly in error.

Meat and fish

Likewise, numerous scriptures sanction the eating of meat and fish. Jesus ate fish and fed the multitude with fish along with bread. And meat from the temple sacrifices, obviously formed part of the daily diet of the priests. So the Bible agrees with Dr Briffa, that meat in general is good, although the Old Testament does say that large amounts of fat should be removed and not eaten, and that some kinds of animal, bird and fish flesh were prohibited.

The land flowing with low-milk and honey?

Having led the people of Israel to the "land flowing with milk and honey", not "low-fat milk and honey", Moses would also agree with Dr Briffa in approving the consumption of full-fat milk, cream and cheese.

Nevertheless, the shelves in the dairy section of my supermarket are stacked with low-fat milk, low-fat "spreads" and low-fat yoghurt. The western world has clearly been duped by the ignorance and faulty conclusions of well-meaning scientists, of whom it was claimed in one famous court trial that they could not tell the nutritional difference between corn flakes and the carboard box they were packed in! What utter madness has overtaken us!

Moderation

Although Dr Briffa disapproves of sugar in all forms, even in fruit, God clearly approves of honey as a sweetener, although, again, I doubt if most modern honey would match up to the genuine article of earlier centuries - with the poor bees themselves being fed on refined sugar. Although honey is approved by the scriptures, the Proverbs, Solomon do warn against over-indulgence.

But what of "natural" or unrefined sugar? I recall reading about children who had grown up on a sugar plantation and eaten raw cain sugar on a daily basis - yet their teeth were perfect. So, as with white bread, what is this white stuff we call "sugar"?

Dr Kellog

What I do know is that refined sugar is found in all manner of food, from bread to baked beans and yoghurt. An interesting TV program revealed that after Dr Kellog has invented cornflakes, the real marketing breakthrough came when his colleague discovered that the addition of sugar made them far more enjoyable. And so a massive business was born, with 70cents' worth of corn able to be peddled to the gullible public for $12!

As part of my own quest to find out why I was slowly gaining weight, I realized that the utterly delicious cherry yoghurt I was happily consuming contained not only "sugar" but also "glucose syrup". Bye, bye yoghurt. Incidentally, as with the cornflakes, it was the addition of refined sugar to the humble yogurt, that turned an obscure European healthfood into a multi-billion breakfast food, especially the low-fat versions.

We are, in fact, fighting a life-and-death battle for our health against a group of powerful multi-national corporations - and we are losing! We are literally paying them to destroy our health.

Physical degeneration

In his classic work, "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration", Weston Price describes how, over century ago, peoples living in remote locations such as Alaska often enjoyed perfect dental health. He cites the example of Eskimo mothers in isolated groups who had perfect teeth even after having given birth to twenty or more children in some cases - unlike others who had been in contact with the "trading post" for a few years who suffered the same dental cavities and tooth decay so familiar in our modern societies.The the key difference in their diets, of course, was down to the refined, denatured and sugary foods the trading post made available. However, despite the consumption of a lot of very fatty fish, even whale blubber, the incidence of heart disease in the men was very low indeed.

Although we can become overweight from simply over-eating, from gluttony, its seems that one vital key to weight control is the elimination of refined sugar from your diet. And good luck in trying to do that!