Chapter 7: Health, Food, and the Body (1 of 2)

Stewarding Your Temple

You're standing in the grocery store. Aisles full of brightly colored boxes: "Low fat!" "Heart healthy!" "Fortified with vitamins!" You grab what's convenient, what your kids will eat, what's on sale. At home, you check the ingredients. The first item: sugar (under five different names). Then seed oils, preservatives, artificial flavors, and chemicals you can't pronounce.

Your spouse is on their third prescription medication. Your kids are lethargic, overweight, constantly sick. You're exhausted, prediabetic, and wondering why everyone's falling apart.

When did chronic disease become normal? Fifty years ago, obesity was rare, type 2 diabetes in children was almost unheard of, cancer rates were lower, and heart disease was less common. Today, 42% of Americans are obese, one in ten have diabetes, one in two will get cancer in their lifetime, and heart disease is the number one killer. What changed? The food.

God's Design: Your Body Is a Temple

Your body belongs to God

Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God with your body.

— 1 Corinthians 6:19–20 (NET)

This isn't just about sexual purity (though that's the context). It's a principle: your body is God's dwelling place. Don't destroy it with poison, don't neglect it, don't abuse it. Steward it well. You'll give an account for how you treated God's temple.

Food was created good

God created food — real food: plants, animals, grains, fruits. It's good. But processing, chemical additives, industrial farming, genetic modification — these distort what God made. Real food nourishes. Fake food destroys.

Gluttony is sin

"Do not be with heavy drinkers of wine, or with those who gorge themselves on meat, because the drunkard and the glutton will become poor, and drowsiness will clothe them with rags" (Proverbs 23:20–21). "Their god is the belly" (Philippians 3:19). Gluttony is idolatry — worshiping your appetite rather than God. This isn't about occasional overeating. It's habitual, uncontrolled consumption — food as comfort, food as god. The consequences are real: poverty (medical bills, lost productivity), slumber (lethargy, sloth), and destruction (disease, early death).

The Enemy's Strategy: Poisoning the Temple

Step 1: Industrialize food. Before industrialization, food was local, seasonal, and whole. After: food became a product manufactured in factories — stripped of nutrients, loaded with sugar, seed oils, and chemicals, designed for shelf life rather than health, and engineered to be addictive (sugar, salt, and fat combinations hijack your brain). White flour stripped of fiber and nutrients, seed oils (corn, soybean, canola — inflammatory and unnatural), high fructose corn syrup (in everything, metabolizes like poison), artificial additives — the middle aisles of the grocery store are largely poison. But it's cheap and convenient, so people buy it.

Step 2: Normalize pharmaceutical dependency. The medical model: symptoms appear (obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure), doctor prescribes medication, medication treats symptoms without addressing root cause, you stay sick and dependent. There's no money in healing you. There's money in managing your disease for life. So doctors are trained to prescribe, not to heal.

Step 3: Drugs as escape. The opioid epidemic was driven by pharmaceutical companies that pushed opioids, doctors who overprescribed, and millions who became addicted — followed by fentanyl flooding in, with 100,000+ deaths per year. Marijuana legalization, sold as harmless ("It's natural!" — so is arsenic), has resulted in increased addiction, mental health issues, and impaired driving. Pharmakeia (Greek for sorcery, Galatians 5:20) literally means drug use. It's always been evil.

Step 4: Normalize obesity and sloth. "Body positivity" started as "don't hate yourself" — that's fine. But it morphed into "obesity is healthy, don't lose weight, diets are oppressive." This is a lie. Obesity causes heart disease, diabetes, cancer, joint problems, and early death. "Loving yourself" doesn't mean staying unhealthy. It means stewarding your body well.

Your Response: Steward Your Temple Well

1. Eat real food. Real food is what your great-grandmother would recognize — ingredients you can pronounce, minimally processed. Meat, fish, eggs (pasture-raised if possible), vegetables, fruits, whole grains, healthy fats (butter, olive oil, avocado — not seed oils). Avoid processed junk, seed oils, sugar (especially high fructose corn syrup), and artificial anything. How to start: shop the perimeter of the grocery store (produce, meat, dairy), avoid the middle aisles, read ingredients, cook at home. This is harder and costs more. Do it anyway — because the cost of processed food is your health, your kids' health, medical bills, and early death.