Thursday, January 20, 2011

Christian Paleo?

The Paleo diet advocates are frequently evolutionists, who take the stance that our bodies evolved to meet the conditions during the paleolithic era, and have not evolved significantly since.  Does my belief in the word of God contradict the Paleo diet?  I don't think so.

On the eighth day God created technology.  Wait, no, I don't think it says that anywhere in the Bible.  We were created for living in the Garden of Eden, and have since then turned to technology to increase the availability, quantity, and desirability of our foods gained from a cursed ground. 

Our first major venture into technology was agriculture, invented when we were forced from the Garden of Eden:
"Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
We know some additional detail of the lives of two of Adam and Eve's sons, Cain and Able.  Cain worked the soil, and Able kept flocks.  Neither lived the hunter gatherer role portrayed in the paleo theory, but that does not mean they ate anything like a modern diet.

Let's look at several food related technologies and when they first appear in the bible.
  • Gardening - From the very beginning, there was a garden for Adam and Eve to supply their needs from
  • Animal Slaughter - Performed by God at the time of leaving the garden
  • Boats - Noah
  • Baking - Tower of Babel
  • Flour - Abraham
  • Knife - Abraham
  • Spear - Moses
  • Arrow - Moses
  • Flour Mill - Moses
  • Olive grove - Moses
  • Oil Press - Moses
Most of these technologies do not have their invention dates documented in the bible, but the order of their first mentioned uses line up with the archaeological evidence of their order of invention.

Other modern foods with archaeological/historical evidence:
  • Refined Sugar, discovered in India prior to 550 AD, spread to China in the 600's, then to the Arabs, then to the rest of the world
  • White Flour - developed in Europe in the 1800's
  • Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil - 1911, Procter & Gamble
  • Soybean Oil - 1930's
So no matter whether you believe in evolution or in creation, it is clear that many foods are the result of technology and not the pristine state of the world.  Although Christians may find some of the logic in "Paleo" diet books incorrect, the recipes and diet guidelines could be in line with what we might guess as the original diet of Adam and Eve and the way God designed us to eat.  Agriculture was thrust upon us as a curse, and we are only starting to learn what other food related technologies have hidden curses under their benefits.

10 comments:

  1. Thanks for making some great points. As a Christian who has adopted the Paleo lifestyle, I often find it difficult to explain to other Christians how I can follow an eating plan when I don't agree with the foundational beliefs. You provide a well thought out explaination and I will be stealing it in future discussions. (or sending them here)

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  2. I am following the lifestyle that Mark Sisson lays out (Primal Blueprint). Not to a tee but I am crafting my life around it. I am a full fledged believer, so my questions lies in this. How do we respond to someone who asks, "why not grain the Bible mentions grain?". I don't buy into evolution so how do I answer that Biblically?

    Keep in mind I've been studying this way of life for only 3 weeks. I have a background in it but am really pressing forward these days.

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    1. Look up Heritage Wheat. Not only do we eat way more grains than our ancestors did, we eat an entirely different grain than they did. Some people who are allergic to wheat can safely eat some heritage wheat strains.

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  3. In the beginning there was animal slaughter as sacrifice, the meat of an animal wasn't give to us to eat until AFTER the flood "Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things." Genesis 9:3.
    We know Noah was 600 at the time of the flood so for at LEAST 600 years there was no meat given for food, however in Genesis 2:16 we are given the fruit of the trees "...of every tree of the garden thou may freely eat..." then on in chapter 3:19 "by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread til you return to the ground.."
    There's no golden key to unlock this 'food mystery'. You already said it, we were created for the Garden of Eden. No one knows what it was like then, except what the bible tells us. There was still a lot of disease because Jesus spends most of his time healing the sick. It seems to me a lot of bread WAS eaten. They break bread, pick wheat in the fields, and Jesus' miracles multiply bread.
    For me the Paleo diet is wrong on many levels. The main one being evolution. Sorry, Daniel didn't eat what the others did. He knew better.

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    1. confused a little ...in the book of Leviticus wasn't there a list of unclean meat and clean meat was that before or after the flood

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    2. Leviticus was after the Flood. However in preparing for the flood, reference was made to clean and unclean animals, so it may not be the first time such rules were given.

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  4. But the world was in no where perfect condition when Jesus walked the earth. He was not a chef, during his ministry he ate whatever his hosts brought him. He multiplied fish and loaves that were given to him, but the only food he made from scratch was wine.

    We can agree that Adam and Eve ate a lot of produce in the garden, the sticking point is at what point did they start eating meat. Wheat is a field crop, and gathered, threshed, and ground by the sweat of the brow, probably not a Garden of Eden food.

    Genesis 7:2 says "Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate" but there is no mention prior to this of what an unclean animal is. These rules for what is clean and what is unclean are not listed until Leviticus 11, which lays out the rules for which animals may be eaten. Could these laws have been in existence prior to Noah and just not yet written down so that he would have known what a clean and unclean animal were?

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  5. I think we need to utilize the incredible brains given to us by God and utilize what science tells us. The two concepts of science and religion are not mutually exclusive concepts. Science and religion should utilize one another to better understand each other. If you don't believe in the evolutionary aspect, Paleo can be summed up as an anti-inflammatory diet based on the elimination of foods, chemicals etc which cause inflammation and other complications which lead to so many preventable diseases and cause the expression of those which are genetic in nature. Please check out Dr. Terry Wahls on Ted talks who is a Dr who has recovered from MS through a paleo diet. It is amazing stuff! I can speak to its effects as my ADD symptoms have stabilized, anxiety has reduced and familial tremor disappeared. And if anything Paleo has given me a greater belief. Really I think we are being prideful to say that we know God and to disregard evolution as a pathway. All things are possible through the man above. If anything, the bible says he created man above all other creatures, which if you look at evolution, we are the only animals who can express ourselves through speech. I would definitely refer to that as dominion over all others. And if we look at the second creation story man did come after the all other animals.

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    1. I've never seen any scientific evidence that evolution is real. And I wasted a couple weeks of my life reading abstracts that folks sent me on the matter. They hadn't read them themselves, but someone told them that this paper proved evolution was real, and that was good enough for them. No, they prove things like mutation, things like chromozone swapping, but there's never been a proven instance of species creation. People believe that evolution is "more scientific" than faith in God's word, but they are simply putting their faith in today's scientists rather than the prophets and apostles. It's still a faith in a theory.

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