I need to continue a bit more on “how we know things about food.” In this post I am going to wax a bit autobiographical, and I hope that’s all right with everybody. This is not so that I can talk about me, but rather because I can’t talk about how I figure things without talking about I how figure things.
When it comes to matters of health, God has been extraordinarily kind to me. I have been preaching for the same congregation for thirty-one years, and haven’t once been out of the pulpit because of sickness. For that same stretch of time and a bit longer, I have been confined to bed once — a case of the flu — and that was for one day. I don’t take any of this for granted, and I thank God for His mercy to me in it.
And let me hasten to add something else — I know that saying anything like this while doing a touchdown dance is just asking for a heart attack tomorrow, and so I am refraining entirely from the touchdown dance part. This is all grace from God and so I am not saying this as a boast. But I am using it as a premise in an argument. If I have been making myself deadly sick for all these years, shouldn’t I be sick by now? Does anyone see why I am dubious when I am confidently told by someone that my food is making me feel terrible when I feel great? I don’t deserve to feel great, but that does not change the fact that I do.
Now I am aware that someone could come back at me and say that it doesn’t matter that I am eating all this poison because I obviously have the constitution and character of Rasputin, and that’s not a good thing, he hastens to add. Well, okay, but shouldn’t it also be reasonable to think that I might not take up this line of argument myself?
Now at the same time, over the years, some of the sickliest people I know are people who have positively hovered over their diets. I know that correlation is not causation, and that there are a number of ways this could go. There are people who do this on doctor’s orders, there are people who do this because doctors can’t help them and they are desperate, there are people who do this because get religious reassurance and comfort through what they put in their mouths, there are people who do this because all their friends are doing it, there are people who do this because they read an article, there are people who do this because they have a deep gnostic loathing of their bodies, and there are people who convince themselves that they must be sick and then proceed to make themselves really sick through a self-treatment regimen that centers on eating a lot of something I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. I am not saying that everyone who differs with me on this topic is in this last category — not even close, please note — but I can say that as a pastor I have dealt with a fair number of people in this last category — people who have done serious damage to their careers, their bodies, and their marriages. Put another way, I am not at all convinced that “heath food” is healthy in any exceptional way, and I am convinced that too much emphasis on it, just like too much emphasis on regular food, is unhealthy.
Cigarettes got their name coffin nails long before the surgeon-general did his thing. This is because people have eyes in their heads. We can do the same thing with food. Be reasonable and moderate, and use your head.
To be responsible we don’t have wait from some ultimate decree from Science on High, or, to use the pattern of what we usually do, treat the latest decree of Science on High as though it were the ultimate decree. Butter, bad, margarine, good. No, wait . . . Cholesterol, bad. No, wait, except for the good kind of cholesterol. Fiber good for heading off colon cancer. No, wait . . . guess not. And the one thing you must not do in this topsy-turvey world of constant transition is act like you remember what we were all avoiding like crazy this time last year.
I am not saying this to disparage medical research on what is good for us — I like the fact that scientists are willing to correct themselves and change. And when they do, I think that we, generally, for the most part, should go along — as we feel like it. We need to hold these things gratefully . . . and loosely. The thing we have stop doing is treating these provisional judgments as though they were an infallible dogma from the Baltimore Catechism. And that is a standard we should have no trouble with . . . provided we stay full of gratitude and common sense, and free from fear.
Someone might tell me that if I don’t stop grilling carcinogens into my meat, then I will die. And so my question would be, “If I stop, and do everything you say, what will I die of then?”