Food for Thought

Our next topic in Ambassadors ABF will be all about food. Food plays a very large role in the Bible as well as our everyday lives. The main question is, "Can we control our desire for food?" Our secondary question that we will spend the most time on is: "Why did God give us food as a requirement to survive and also make it a sin at the same time?" For instance, why did God tell Adam and Eve that they could eat any plant they wanted, but not from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Why did he tell Adam that they couldn't eat other animals? Why did Esau give his birthright to Jacob over food? Why did God give such strict laws to Moses about what food the Israelites could and couldn't eat? Why did Daniel earn the favor of the king just by eating better? Why did Jesus fast? Why did Jesus feed the 5000? Why will there be a wedding feast in heaven when Jesus returns? What is it about God and food?

Back to the lack of self-control question. Read part of this article by Cathleen Falsani:

"America is becoming known as a nation of gluttony and obesity, and churches are a feeding ground for this problem," says Ken Ferraro, a Purdue sociology professor who studied more than 2,500 adults over a span of eight years looking at the correlation between their religious behavior and their body mass index.

"If religious leaders and organizations neglect this issue, they will contribute to an epidemic that will cost the health-care system millions of dollars and reduce the quality of life for many parishioners," he says.

Ferraro's most recent study, published in the June issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, is a follow-up to a study he published in 1998, where he found there were more obese people in states with larger populations of folks claiming a religious affiliation than elsewhere -- particularly in states with the most Baptists.

So it's not surprising that Ferraro's latest study found that about 27 percent of Baptists, including Southern Baptists, North American Baptists, and Fundamentalist Baptist, were obese.

Surely there are several contributing factors to such a phenomenon, but when Ferraro accounted for geography (southern cooking is generally more high-caloric), race and even whether overweight folks were attracted to churches for moral support, the statistics still seem to indicate that some churches dispense love handles as well as the love of the Lord.

Ferraro's study also found that about 20 percent of "Fundamentalist Protestants," (Church of Christ, Pentecostal, Assemblies of God and Church of God); about 18 percent of "Pietistic Protestants," (Methodist, Christian Church and African Methodist Episcopal), and about 17 percent of Catholics were obese.

By contrast, about 1 percent of the Jewish population and less than 1 percent of other non-Christians, including Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others), were tipping the scales with commensurate gusto.

What's up with that? Aren't we supposed to be different than the world? Aren't we supposed to treat our body as God's temple? Why do Christians struggle with too much food? I have some answers. This is going to be a fun time. Stay tuned.