The Lord gave us everything we need in the Garden of Eden: fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. That's why we call the way we eat the `Hallelujah Diet.' We celebrate its true creator.
- The Rev. George Malkmus
Let's see: I tried Atkins just for the experience, and that lasted all of four days (one can only eat so much eggs, bacon, and cheese before one wants to vomit at the mere smell). I'm really not much of a dieter, so this is a bit of out of my frame of reference, but here is yet another entry in the never-ending American quest to eat "properly"- whatever the hell THAT means.
Malkmus' vegan diet is one of a batch of Bible-based eating plans flooding bookstores and health food stores. Last summer's What Would Jesus Eat?, by Dr. Don Colbert, encourages eating non-animal-derived "living foods" and eschewing most "dead" or processed foods.
The Weigh Down Diet by Gwen Shamblin offers few food restrictions but encourages following "God's perfect boundaries of hunger and fullness."
Malkmus' diet -- which draws, he says, from Genesis 1:29 -- bans all animal products except honey and promotes an 80 percent raw diet.
And there's the newest addition to the growing Christian health genre, Jordan S. Rubin's The Maker's Diet. Drawn from the book of Leviticus, Rubin's diet encourages eating certain meat and dairy products and warns against an all-raw, vegan regimen.
"The healthiest diet is to consume meats, poultry, dairy, fruits and vegetables and to consume them in a form the body was designed for," Rubin said.
He advises eating foods in their most organic and least-processed forms. Dairy, for instance, should not be pasteurized and defatted and pumped with hormones but rather taken as a yogurt drink derived from raw, fermented milk.
Meat or vegan? Raw or cooked? The abundance of allegedly godly guidance is enough to make the would-be dieter pray for divine intervention.
Indeed. While I admire the convictions and commitment of the folks who may have written these (supposedly) divinely-inspired eating manuals, I'm wondering if any of them recognize that they are working at cross-purposes. Just as one can often find Scripture to support either side of a theological debate, we not have dueling divine theories of cuisine.
Only in America....
