David (00:00.974)
When I hand someone a copy of my book, The Christian's Guide to Holistic Health, most people will turn directly to the table of contents and they find the chapter on nutrition and they start browsing there. Now, I don't mind when people do that, but the truth is my book is not about nutrition. It's about holistic health in spirit, mind, and body. But people seem to be very interested in nutrition, so that's what I'm going to be talking about today.
There's a lot of confusion out there surrounding what we should and should not eat. On one end of the spectrum, we've got the carnivores, meat eaters. On the other end of the spectrum, we've got the raw food vegans. And then there's everything in between from vegetarian to paleo to pescatarian to FODMAP, OMAD. There's a lot, there's a lot of different opinions out there as to what we should eat. Now, here's the confusing part.
Every one of those diet pundits can roll out their success stories. So who are we supposed to believe? Well, there's one thing that every one of those diets has in common. Let's talk about it.
David (01:16.674)
Welcome to the Christian Healthy Lifestyle Podcast, where I help you navigate natural health so that you can stay out of the doctor's office, age gracefully, and live a more purpose-driven, abundant life. I'm your host, David Sandstrom. Today I want to tackle one of the most challenging subjects when it comes to natural and holistic health, and that is what is a healthy diet. We all know that we are what we eat.
Our bodies have to use the food we eat to make new cells, tissues, organs, and systems. So we literally are what we eat. That's saying is true. But what are we supposed to eat? Is there really an ideal human diet? Is there a list of foods that everyone should eat and is there a list of foods that everyone should avoid? Well, the answer to that question is knowing what's ideal for each person is rather elusive. It can be challenging.
Although all people are similar in ways, and we all have, you know, two eyes, two ears, a nose and mouth, but there's a metabolic individuality that we have to take into consideration. There is no such thing as a one size fits all diet. Everyone is an individual. Now we've got to understand that the human body is very complex and the metabolism can vary a great deal from person to person. What is our metabolism?
You hear that word thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean? Our metabolism is how our bodies take up nutrients, how they make energy with those nutrients, and what it does with that energy. That's our metabolism. It's very complex and there's a lot of factors involved. So we really have to rely on one of the foundational presuppositions that I use when it comes to approaching health, and that is we've got to lean on that God-given wisdom of the body.
Our bodies know how to heal themselves. God has given our bodies a wisdom that knows how to take care of itself. So we lean on that, not modern technology. Now, of course we have our genetic makeup, we have body size and type, we have a complex microbiome to our digestive systems, we have varying degrees of stress levels. a woman who is still in her reproductive years will have different needs during different times of the month.
David (03:39.028)
And on and on it goes. You know, if you're a regular listener of this show, you know that I like to go back to basics and say, what does the Bible say about this? Well, surprisingly, the Bible has very few details as to what we should eat. Yes, there are some dietary laws and restrictions in the Torah or the Old Testament law, and we can learn something from that, but even that is very general and very generic in its advice.
Add to that first Corinthians six twelve in the New Testament, the apostle Paul says regarding food, all things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything. So people start looking at extra biblical sources as to what we should eat. When we do, we see some wildly conflicting advice. So it can wind up being overwhelming and and we just give up.
But God hasn't left us with no tools. We have some ways of navigating this nutritional landmine. In first Timothy four four we see this for everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude. So yes, according to the New Testament, we can eat anything we want. At first glance, this verse sounds like a complete open book and not very useful. But we've got to read that passage carefully.
For everything created by God is good. Don't miss the phrase created by God. That means food created in nature by God, not created by man in a laboratory. Now that's something we can sink our teeth into, pun intended. If we apply this very simple advice to our eating, we're all able to make significant changes to our eating habits and experience a health benefit as a result. So
Rule number one when it comes to healthy eating is eat food as close to its God given natural form as possible. So what does that mean? Here's the component that all of those wildly varying diet types and contradictory diet recommendations have in common. Are you ready for it? They all get away from processed food. That's why everyone can roll out their success stories because the single most important thing we can do when it comes to healthy eating is
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is to stay away from processed food. The more man gets his hands on our food supply, the worse it is for us. God's design is that we eat single ingredient foods or foods that are minimally processed. Ingredients like red dye number forty, high fructose corn syrup, sodium benzoate, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose, all of those don't qualify, obviously, right?
If a food comes in a box or a package or through a window, it's suspect. If a food has more than four or five ingredients listed, it's suspect. If you look at the ingredients list and see that there's names there that you can't pronounce or ingredients that you couldn't buy yourself at a regular grocery store, you're probably better off staying away from that food and putting it back on the shelf.
We should all make an attempt to eat more like our grandparents or our great grandparents ate. In the nineteenth century, heart disease and obesity were almost non existent, and chronic degenerative diseases of all kinds were nowhere near where they are today. Yes, the average lifespan is longer today, but that's mostly due to technological advances, especially in caring for premature babies. If a baby dies at birth,
Statistically speaking, that drags the average age of death down. Not only that, clean water and improved sanitation have helped to extend the average lifespan here in the US and around the globe. And things like bypass surgery are keeping people alive longer, but they don't do anything about the cause of the heart disease in the first place. So advances in drugs and surgery help us to live longer with our disease.
But it's still treating symptoms and not addressing the root cause. One of the primary tenets of natural health is that we go after the root and not the symptom. By improving our nutritional status, that'll strengthen our systems and prevent chronic degenerative diseases from developing in the first place. So how did our grandparents eat? They ate locally grown food in season. Their food wasn't picked or harvested weeks or even months in advance, but
David (08:27.67)
And shipped thousands of miles before it made it into their homes. They sometimes grew their food themselves, or they bought it from a local farmer. Their cattle was raised on a pasture and fed green grass. The poultry were also raised on a pasture and ate a natural omnivorous diet that consisted of worms, insects, and seeds. Today's factory farms feed their cows and chickens an unnatural grain based diet.
They use commercial feed made mostly of corn and soy because those products are heavily subsidized by the federal government and they're cheap. They also routinely prescribe antibiotics to keep disease at bay, and that also fattens up the cattle. And those antibiotics make it into our systems as well. We are we, remember? In order to raise farm animals properly in a natural fashion, it costs more money. If you think buying healthy food is expensive, remember this.
You can pay the farmer now or you can pay the doctor later. The choice is yours. Here's the trouble when you feed a ruminant animal like a cow or an unnatural grain based diet of corn and soy. It makes their systems too acidic. The health of the animal suffers, and the quality of the food they produce is also subpar. When you're shopping for beef, there's a lot of games being played with the labeling, so you should look for grass fed beef and
And grass finished. All cattle is grass fed at some point in their lives, but most cattle are finished on grains, which means for the last ninety days of their lives, they're fattened up with an unnatural grain-based diet, and that distorts the fat content and r really decreases the quality of the milk and the beef that they produce. Our grandparents also preserve their food naturally with salt or natural fermentation.
Naturally fermented foods like yogurt, kefir, sometimes pronounced kefir, and sauerkraut are packed with probiotic bacteria that keeps our guts and our immune systems functioning at their peaks. Raw cheese is also loaded with probiotics, but it has to be consumed raw. Once it's cooked, the beneficial bacteria die off. The bacteria start to die at about 117 degrees Fahrenheit. So if it's cooked in a pan or in the oven,
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they're as good as gone. They they're they're killed off in the cooking process. So you have to eat your cheese raw. For the most part, our grandparents ate organic. A hundred years ago there was no such thing as certified organic. Our grandparents didn't call it organic, they just called it farming. And they used natural fertilizer, natural pesticides, not chemicals. Better living through chemicals is a lie. Our grandparents cooked with butter?
Or beef tallow or pork lard. Yes, those foods are high in saturated fat. But you need to understand that saturated fat is not the enemy we've been told. Now, I don't have time to go into it here, but I went into a great deal of detail on saturated fat and seed oils in episodes one hundred forty one and one hundred forty two. Those two episodes are far and away my most viewed episodes on YouTube.
If eating saturated fat sounds ridiculous to you, I highly recommend you listen to those two episodes. Our government agencies got it wrong a long time ago in the 1950s. The lipid hypothesis has been completely debunked, and it's time we got the word out. So I recommend listening to those two episodes, 141 and 142, if you haven't listened. Even if you have listened, it's worth a it's worth a little review. They're so they're really good. So
What are the implications for us? Obviously, this means minimizing our eating out at restaurants. Fast food restaurants are a relatively modern invention. McDonald's wasn't franchised until 1955. Our great grandparents didn't eat at McDonald's. With very few exceptions, when we eat at a restaurant, we have no idea what's going into our food. Virtually every time we eat out, we should consider it a cheat.
We should shop your farmer's markets, talk to your farmer, try to find someone who's knowledgeable and conscientious about producing quality, health-producing food. Buy single ingredient foods whenever possible and prepare those foods yourself at home. I like to prepare foods in batches so that I have leftovers for the next two or three days. You can bring your lunch to work, get away from plastic food containers, store your food in glass.
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Nowadays it's really easy to find glass vacuum seal containers. I have a set of glass containers and a really handy vacuum sealer called the Chef Preserve. It's a handheld vacuum sealer, and the the glass is very strong and durable with a lid that fits the the vacuum sealer. It's it's excellent. It's a really great way to store food and keep it fresh. I use mason jars extensively. I've got a vacuum sealer that seals the lid on top of the mason jar.
And that dramatically extends the life of the the shelf life of the food. Just do a search on Amazon for mason jar sealer and you'll see all kinds of choices. I also recommend using a slow cooker. Slow cookers are excellent at extracting all the nutrients from the food. There's all kinds of recipes available online, especially on YouTube. Another handy kitchen appliance is an Instant Pot. If you're not familiar with an Instant Pot, it's a small countertop pressure cooker.
That cooks food rapidly and also breaks down some of the naturally occurring plant chemicals that act as anti-nutrients. That makes some foods like legumes and root vegetables easier to digest and makes the nutrients more bioavailable. So slow cooker is a really good way to go. The last piece of advice I have for you today is you've got to cut back on seed oils. Seed oils are oils like canola oil, soybean oil, cottonseed oil.
Rice bran oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, and a and a bunch of others too. They call them vegetable oils, but that's a marketing term. Those oils are not sourced from vegetables. They come from seeds, and they're highly processed and highly toxic to our bodies. Don't believe the government recommendations that say in order to reduce your risk for heart disease, you need to cut back on red meat and and saturated fat and replace those fats with
Polly unsaturated fats in the form of vegetable oils. That's probably the worst nutritional advice that's ever been given in the history of nutritional science. I know that advice can make many people feel uncomfortable. That's totally understandable because for the last sixty years we've been told that saturated fat is our enemy. Again, listen to episodes one hundred forty one and one hundred forty two and you'll hear the truth about saturated fat and seed oils. It'll shock you.
David (15:43.906)
I can't emphasize this enough. Drastically reducing polyunsaturated fatty acids in the form of seed oils is probably the most important change anyone can make to their diet. When we get away from processed foods, we'll naturally reduce the amount of seed oils we're consuming, and I believe that's a big part of why everyone that switches to nonprocessed foods experiences a health benefit. If the recommendations I'm making here sound like they're going to be too difficult, then
I want you to consider this. Going through life with compromised health and worse yet, dealing on a daily basis with some type of chronic degenerative disease is far more difficult than making the changes I'm recommending here. Another objection I hear many people have is eating that way is going to be too expensive. I would suggest that eating out at restaurants is expensive. Shopping for food yourself and preparing it at home is far less expensive than eating out.
I hope this information has helped you. if you find this information useful, I would appreciate it if you'd share this podcast with a like-minded friend. Health from a biblical perspective is hard to come by. And if you share the show with a friend, I'll bet they'll thank you for it. I appreciate that in advance. Also, you might have noticed that I've changed the frequency of when I'm releasing episodes. you might not know this, but I've gone back to flying airplanes full-time and flying air aligners again all around the country.
And my bandwidth for producing these episodes has just gone way down. So in order to do a little self-care and a little bit of self-love, I've decided to go to producing episodes once a month. I hope you understand when I when I retire, a little over a year from now, I should be able to pick up that frequency again. But for now, it's gonna be once a month. We're gonna be releasing new episodes. So after this, I'm gonna be starting a series on my nine pillars of health. I think you're gonna really enjoy that. I've also I'm talking to some guests I haven't been doomed.
Too many guest episodes lately, but I'm talking to some great people, some really knowledgeable, fantastic guests I've got lined up for you in the future. So don't go anywhere. episode's gonna be coming out once a month, and stay tuned. I think you're gonna really enjoy it. That's it for now. Thank you for listening. I appreciate you. Go out there and live abundantly. Be blessed.
