How Our Food Has Changed and How That Now Hurts You

I’m often asked why I don’t promote eating fruits and vegetables, and why I’m always so focused on promoting meat consumption. The answer is simple, the fruits and vegetables that we see today are nowhere near the same food that we ate even 200 years ago.

The popular media, the government, celebrities, and most members of the medical community encourage us to consume more fruits and vegetables and less meat. We’re told over and over that fruits and vegetables are full of vitamins and we need to eat as our ancestors once did. As author Michael Pollan once wrote, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants”. 

The problem is that the fruits and vegetables we consume now bear very little resemblance to the fruits and vegetables our ancestors ate and the quantity in which we eat them was not what we were ever created by God to consume.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-2 states, “For everything, there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;”

Prior to the late 1700s and the early 1800s, there were very few ways to preserve fresh foods effectively outside of fermenting, curing (or salting), or pickling (which was a form of fermenting). 

Starting in the early 1800s, the process of canning foods safely was created, first in France in 1810 and then in the United States in 1812.

In 1930, the process by which foods, vegetables, fruits, and even meat, was pioneered by Clarence Birdseye in the United States. 

Transportation of fruits and vegetables across the country started to increase by ship in the mid-1800s, railroad in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and then refrigerated truck by the 1930s

All these amazing improvements to food preservation and transportation had unintended consequences, specifically, they effectively eradicated the concept of “seasonality” when it came to the consumption of fruits and vegetables

According to the Bible, we were meant to consume things in-season as opposed to what we do now, which is consume whatever we want, whenever we want. We don’t have until summer to eat berries or watermelon, and we don’t have to wait until fall to eat apples or pears. We can eat all products from all over the world anytime we choose.

The result is that now we are consuming far more sugar and carbohydrates than we were ever designed to consume and it’s making us all sicker than ever before.

During a couple of my classes, I had students ask me, “but didn’t Daniel eat just fruit and vegetables and turn out fine?” Or “Isn’t what you are saying, to eat more meat and less fruit and vegetables, un-Biblical?”

As it turns out, the fruit and vegetables that our ancestors ate in Biblical times are not the fruit and vegetables that we are accustomed to seeing in our grocery stores today.

As a result of hybridization and selective breeding, man has changed fruit and vegetables into something much sweeter, larger, and overall, less healthy than what God first created and intended us to eat.

For example:

• Watermelons –
  • Changed back in the 17^th century 
  • A small fruit measuring 1-3 inches in diameter with 1.9% sugar, and small tunnels of edible flesh 
  • The average large modern fruit watermelon today weighs around 15-20lbs and is 6.9% sugar.
• Tomato –
  • Originally very small fruits, about the size of a pea
  • Mid-1700s, they were genetically altered into the “heirloom” tomatoes we know of today. 
• Corn –
  • Completely different now than in Biblical times
  • Originally, was a small grass called teosinte
  • Maybe 5-10 very hard kernels on the .75 inches of the plant that were edible
  • Only about 1.9% sugar
  • Modern ear of corn is over 100 times the size of the ancient variety and has about 18% sugar in the sweet corn varietal.

Daniel was not eating “modern” fruit and vegetables, he was eating seasonally, and what God had created

To answer the second question I received from one of my students, the truth is, eating the man-made fruit and vegetables we have created, out of season, and in massive quantities is what is unbiblical. 

Our bodies were never designed to eat the quantity of plant matter we are consuming now or are told we should consume. We don’t have the correct intestinal design to do that, given how short our large intestine is, how small our cecums are, and how long our small intestine is compared to any other primate.

Our bodies were designed to process and digest meat and small amounts of cooked vegetables with little to no fiber. If we were to eat the foods that God created in the manner and likeness that he created them, we wouldn’t have the health issues that we currently have today, with 93% of all Americans metabolically unwell.

Humans changed God’s design, pridefully believing that we could create something that was better for us than what He created. We were wrong…

According to Genesis 1:11-12, “And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants^[e] yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. ¹² The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.” 

The popular views on fruits and vegetables no longer consider God’s creation or how many have changed it. But the reality is, the more we pay attention to how our food has changed, the more we will realize what foods we need to eat to best feed and heal our bodies.

We were designed to eat animal meat and small amounts of the fruit and vegetables that God initially created. The more we stick to consuming those foods, the more we can honor God, heal our bodies, and do the work that He created us to do.