Merry Christmas (it still is, until Epiphany (6th January)!) and a Happy New Year.
Calling January ‘Veganuary’ and using it to promote ultra-processed vegan foods has hit its peak, although supermarkets and newspaper articles are still promoting it.
Given all that hype, a new year is a good time to took at how we can eat more healthily. After all, our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit and we have a God-given duty to look after them and stay in the Lord’s service for as long as he gives us on this earth.
That is not to neglect prayer and worship, but it is to reject the modern fads of the world and return to something more simple, something more godly.
Veganism is on the slide
Launched in 2015, ‘Veganuary’ hit a peak in 2019, but has been on the slide ever since. ‘Plant-based’ meat substitutes are now struggling as well.
The Telegraph reports that last year, Nestlé withdrew its vegan ranges as “not viable” while British sausage company Heck shelved most of its vegan sausages and burgers. ‘Meatless Farms’ stopped trading. ‘Beyond Meat’, launched in 2012 with investment from Bill Gates and Kim Kardashian, announced sales had fallen from its 2019 high by almost a third. Heather Mills’s ‘Vbites’ has filed for administration. The bubble has burst.
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Don’t eat fake food!
In a well-researched article in the Telegraph, journalist Tim Spector urges us: ‘Don’t eat fake food’, by which he means ultra-processed, often plant-based concoctions.
One definition of ‘UPF’ says: ‘Ultra-processed food is an industrially formulated edible substance derived from natural food or synthesized from other organic compounds. The resulting products are designed to be highly profitable, convenient, and hyperpalatable, often through food additives such as preservatives, colourings, and flavourings.’
The problem is, UPFs don’t do us any good. See this informative article on food from British Heart Foundation. UPFs coud be shortening our lives, perhaps by ten years. That is before we consider the unseen effects of all the various additives UPFs need to give them shelf-life and make them palatable. Why do so many people today have so many allergies and mental conditions which were completely unknown fifty years ago? Could what we are eating and feeding to our children have something to do with it?
Meat is good for you!
In another article, Hattie Garlick asserts that ‘meat is better for your health than you think’. Meat and dairy products carry important vitamins like B12 which we can’t find naturally anywhere else.
Animals such as ruminants are on God’s earth for one reason. It is to turn what carnivores and omnivores cannot eat (that’ll be grass) into what we can, which is their highly-nutritious muscle-meat. They are prey animals whose destiny is to be eaten. There is also a spiritual dimension. When we eat them, we participate in the divine eco-system. All food is food ‘out of the earth.’ Not for nothing did the Lord single out all cattle, sheep and goats as ‘the beasts which ye shall eat’. (Bible references are below.)
Yesterday, on New Year’s Day, farmer and former MP Neil Parish listed all the nutrients in milk and dairy, putting Andrea Rymer of the Vegan Society on the back foot on GB News. Clearly, vegans have to jump through too many nutritional hoops.
Last month, BBC presenter Ade Adepitan aired a spectacularly ill-informed programme on Channel 4 calling on the public to eat chicken instead of beef as part of effort to curb climate change as Farmers Weekly reported. He assumed all beef is raised in US-style feed lots, ignoring grass-fed UK beef farming altogether. Naturally, there was a Net Zero angle, with Ade insisting the ‘climate cost of beef is the highest of any foodstuff’. It isn’t. 26% of the earth’s land surface is covered with grass. What does he think is going to eat it if cattle don’t? And the environmental costs of UPFs? Totally ignored. While you are here, sign our petition:
Cook more naturally
So how to avoid Ultra-Processed Food? Items like fruits, raw vegetables, salad crops and nuts are not processed at all, and we can be eating more of them. Some of us will also try to source organic fruits and vegetables to avoid possible contamination with pesticides and herbicides. And there is nothing better than growing your own. Perhaps we could even start eating fruits and vegetables in season again.
Humans are unique among God’s creatures as the only ones who cook our food. We can regard that as his gift to us. In the kitchen, whenever you take raw food materials and cook them, you are processing the food. Cooking is processing, but it is not ultra-processing, which relies on additives you will never find in your kitchen. Too many people exist on ultra-processed convenience food, and jobs depend on it, but I would call on Christians to opt out. An omelette is easy to cook, more nutritious and additive-free compared with a shop-bought pizza.
In our house, we eat as naturally as we can. We eat butter, never, as actress Emma Chambers had fun with here: ‘I can’t believe it’s not butter’. We bake our own bread, from organic flour. A ‘ready-meal’ never crosses the threshold. We always cook from scratch. Left-overs come back the next day, or the day after that. Best-before dates, even use-by dates, we treat as advice, not gospel truth. There is almost zero waste. And as the Lord commands, we enjoy our food and drink. It’s doable.
Check the ingredients!
When shopping, check the ingredients listed. If there are more than five, or if there is anything which you can’t find in your kitchen, leave it on the shelf.
That rules out anything calling itself ‘milk’. In fact you’ll often find these hyper-processed foods pretending to be something they are not. You’ll see vegan labelling with the word ‘chicken’ highlighted but negatived or crossed out, as in the Aldi fake nuggets above. The ‘plant-based’ brand ‘Beyond Meat’ is still pretending there is a nutritious sunlit upland ‘beyond’ waiting to be discovered. But there isn’t. It’s all additives and E-numbers and ultra-processing.
For example, there’s a new plant-based ‘milk’, called M!LK, from brand ‘The Coconut Collab’. The packaging makes it look like real milk, but it has to claim it is ‘surprisingly un-coconutty-tasting!’ Who is paying £2.25 for a litre of something with twelve ingredients including additives, stabilisers, emulsifiers, esters, flavourings, regulators and salt, which cannot even make up its mind what it tastes like?
Aldi’s ‘No Chicken Nuggets’, by the way, contain over twenty ingredients: SEE HERE.
Bible Diet?
You might be tempted to think a plant-based diet is a ‘Bible diet’ if you read no further than the first chapter of the book of Daniel. But Daniel refused the king’s meat not because it was physically unhealthy but because it was spiritually tainted, having been sacrificed to idols.
Daniel refused to be defiled. That is the teaching we are meant to absorb, along with obedience and the power of God. A modern-day application, a ‘Daniel Diet’, if you like , would be to refuse halal meat in a shop and to avoid Muslim restaurants and take-aways with a halal sign in the window.
Nor is a plant-based diet taking us back to the Garden of Eden. We agree that in the beginning, God gave mankind and all animals herbs ‘for meat’. With the fall of mankind, that ship has sailed. Going on, after the flood, God told the sons of Noah: ‘Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you’. We can never again achieve the innocence of the Garden. The blood of Jesus does not take us back to an Edenic paradise, it restores fallen men and women to fellowship with God. Eden is gone forever, but replaced in God’s providence with something far better.
Stay healthy: Eat a balanced diet
This is the take-away, although not in order of importance:
(1) Eat and enjoy healthy food in a balanced diet,
(2) Avoid anything ultra-processed,
(3) Forget modern godless food fads,
(4) Cover yourself and those you love in prayer for health and protection,
(5) Give thanks constantly for God’s mercies, new every morning,
(6) Exercise as you can, for this while on earth,
(7) Confess and speak good to yourself and those you love,
(8) Seek the Lord in his word. Start our Bible Reading Plan.
Find all our supporting Bible links below. There are some which will really open your eyes. But they are all good!
Read and Pray
READ: Gen 1:29,30, 9:3; Exod 16:23; Deut 14:4,5; 1Sam 9:23,24; Psa 104:14; Prov 25:27; Eccl 3:13, Eccl 9:7; Hosea 4:6; Matt 26:7; John 6:9; 1Cor 3:17, 1Cor 6:12,19, 1Cor 10:31; 1Tim 4:3,4.
PRAY: That the Lord will keep you in good health, body, soul and spirit. That you pay greater attention to what you are eating. That unhealthy, ungodly food fads will perish. That you as well as those in power will seek the Lord. That God will both sustain and increase his people. That the name of Jesus Christ, King of kings and Lord of lords, will be exalted in the earth. That his will be done in earth as it is in heaven.
Previous articles
King Charles preaches NetZero at COP28 →
Halal Meat the Christian position →
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