Return to the Source

Breaking the Food Chains
It’s about freedom. God wants to free His people from the onslaught of bad information, a corrupt food and medicine paradigm, and outrageous weight loss ideals. All of this is bondage. God’s people are in food bondage. We rely on “research” to tell us what we should be eating and how we should nourish our bodies, but we have forgotten that God has given us everything we need, including instruction on how we should nourish ourselves. Truth is freedom, and God wants us to know the truth. He designed this world for us, including all of our food, so that we could know Him and know His love for us. Why on earth would God create animal meat lined with delicious fat if animal fat was bad for us? Why would He design cream to rise to the top of milk and create milk so that it makes butter, cheese, yogurt, kefir, and sour cream if He did not want us to enjoy it? I’ve heard people say, “Everything that tastes good is bad for me.” I want to challenge that idea.
We’ve been led to believe that animal fats are bad for us and that we should look to the USDA and FDA to set guidelines for us as to what we should eat and how much. We even have handy guidelines like “My Plate” that tell us what proportions of vegetables and meat to eat. These are laughable, however, because they do not discriminate between a fast food hamburger and a homemade hamburger made from local, grass-fed beef raised in humane and healthy conditions. One could make you very sick and the other is nourishing, following God’s design. Many fast food hamburgers are made from CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) beef from feedlot cows raised in disgusting conditions with little or no grass, sometimes standing several feet deep in their own manure. Local beef is raised by small farmers that take pride in raising healthy animals, out in their own fields in the clean air and sunshine. The meat, fat, bones, milk, and organs of these animals are fully nourishing and will help maintain a healthy body weight and normal blood cholesterol. Our family has lost weight and lowered our cholesterol by switching to local, fresh food. My husband no longer takes Prilosec for acid reflux and we stopped catching most colds. God’s design for food works.
God is smarter than us. We have taken the foods He designed to nourish us and have processed them until they no longer resemble what He created. Is a box of fruit juice really equal to two servings of fruit? Are yogurt covered raisins really a great source of calcium? The dark side of convenient foods is that we don’t understand how our bodies operate and we do much damage to ourselves by assuming that processed foods are equal to fresh, homemade foods. There are trillions of microscopic good bacteria living in our guts. These good bacteria and enzymes break down our food and pull nutrition from the food we eat. Our bodies can only make a portion of the bacteria and enzymes we need to digest our food. The rest need to come from our food. Did you catch that? We need to eat a certain amount of living foods, foods that are alive. High-Heat processing kills these nourishing bacteria and enzymes.
Let me give you an example. God created milk as a living food. It is full of enzymes and beneficial microflora. Lactose is a milk sugar, naturally occurring in all milk. Lactase is the enzyme needed to breakdown the milk sugar, lactose. Most people’s bodies can make enough lactase to digest milk, but some cannot. When milk is pasteurized these lactase enzymes are destroyed leaving the body with the hard work of breaking down the lactose sugar all by itself. So this poses a question: do people who are lactose intolerant truly have a sensitivity to lactose or do they need to drink fresh, unpasteurized milk with all the included lactase enzymes in order to be able to digest the milk? There are many lactose-intolerant people who have switched to fresh, local, unpasteurized milk and have had great results; not all, but many. And this is only one example of how we are destroying our health with convenient, processed foods. There are many more examples of how we are ruining our own food. The result is poor health, reliance on medicine to get through the day and much, much frustration.
This combination of lack of living foods and blindly accepting any food guidelines takes a dark twist when you take a closer look at the where the money goes. In the United States, Congress is responsible for passing a multibillion-dollar farm bill. Included are the guidelines for governing where taxpayer dollars go for subsidizing the food industry. Certain foods are subsidized by the government, causing subsidized foods to be artificially lower than the real cost of that food. Doesn’t this provide food for the poor? Yes… but what kind of food? Low quality, cheap, processed foods to be exact. The farm bill was originally formed during the Great Depression to help feed the poor, but over time, food industry interests have clouded the purpose of the bill. Corn is one of the foods subsidized by our tax dollars. High fructose corn syrup is subsidized by our tax dollars, which helps explain why soda is less than a dollar for a two-liter. The very system designed to create food for the poor is making them sick by flooding the market with cheap junk food. Small farmers trying to produce fresh foods have a hard time competing with the food on supermarket shelves. We would be far better off to eliminate food subsidies and level the playing field so small farmers can compete and flood the market with local, fresh food. This is the driving momentum behind farmer’s markets.