11. Health Discussion Part 4 - What can the Church Learn from the Medical Community?

The medical industry’s eureka moment was when they realized the very food, they were serving patients and physicians in hospitals was the very same food placing patients in the hospital in the first place. “U.S. health organizations are calling for hospitals to offer plant-based food options. Two major medical groups in the U.S. are calling on hospitals to end the irony and support patient health with healthy food.

The American Medical Association House of Delegates — a group which represents more than 200,000 physicians — issued a policy statement on June 14th at its annual meeting calling on U.S. hospitals to make some changes to hospital food for patients, staff, and visitors: Increase healthful, plant-based meal options, eliminate processed meat from menus, and provide and promote healthful beverages, including getting rid of sugary drinks and sodas. 

The American College of Cardiology also recently released new guidelines urging hospitals to improve patient menus by adding healthy plant-based options and removing processed meats. The guidelines recommend that “at least one plant-based main dish” should be offered and promoted at every meal. And that processed meats — bacon, sausage, ham, hot dogs, and deli meats — shouldn’t be offered at hospitals at all. They also call for a variety of vegetables and fruits to be served in all hospital cafeterias and on-site restaurants” (Oberst, 2017). 

We are seeing new healthy food movements sprout out of hospitals around the country. For instance, Dr. Michael Klaper, M.D of Midland Health in Midland, Texas has begun spearheading a new program with the philosophy, “Food Is Medicine.” They have implemented a “new, lifestyle medicine program for their employees incorporating the CHIP model (Complete Health Improvement Program) … The philosophy, "Food Is Medicine" is one Midland Memorial Hospital strongly believes in. As you can tell from the videos…, adopting a plant-based diet has had such a powerful impact on our employees and we believe our community should also have the tools to be successful (Midland Health, 2016).” This medical group has believed so heavily in this program that 2018 will be the third annual Food Is Medicine seminar. They also provide the visitor with all the resources they need to adopt a whole-food, plant-based lifestyle. 

Additional medical groups of note are adopting a similar strategy include UCLA Medical Center is using organic food. At its cafe, St. Louis Children’s Hospital is offering low-fat, plant-based meals made with no animal products or oils and crafted in small batches by a local company. The University of Vermont Medical Center says it aims to have the most sustainable health care food service in the country. Patients and visitors can enjoy nutritionally dense, minimally processed foods, including a variety of locally produced ingredients. They allow patients to order food when they want it, rather than delivering trays with the same meals at the same time. And the cafeteria serves fresh, organic ingredients and multiple vegetarian options. Another positive development at hospitals are either gardens or farmers’ markets. For example, Stony Brook University Hospital, in Stony Brook, N.Y., has a 2,242-square-foot organic rooftop garden that supplies vegetables and herbs for patient meals. Several Kaiser Permanente Medical Centers in California are teaching their staff about plant-powered eating to pass along information to their patients (Oberst, 2017).

According to a 2015 study published in the journal Preventive Medicine Reports, hospital gardens created for staff, patients, and the community could lower rates of obesity in communities they serve and reduce public health disparities by providing members of the community’s greater access to fresh, healthy, plant-based foods. “Regional distribution of gardens was relatively even, with the greatest number located in the Midwest. The South, a region with favorable growing seasons and the highest levels of obesity and preventable chronic disease in the US (May et al., 2013) had the second-highest quantity of healthcare-based gardens. As part of comprehensive approaches to address chronic disease, it is possible that multiple healthcare institutions may benefit from establishing community gardens” (George, Rovniak, Kraschnewski, Hanson, & Sciamanna, 2015).

The Healthier Hospitals program is a call-to-action for an entire industry. It is an invitation for health care organizations across the country to join the shift to a more sustainable business model, and a challenge for them to address the health and environmental impacts of their sector. By creating a collaborative setting that engages all stakeholder groups and gives each individual player the tools they need to succeed, HH has created a platform to help health care organizations affect widespread, meaningful change — and measure their impact. Through the collaboration of world-renowned industry experts, HH has developed and is proud to feature a suite of tools intended to make the fulfillment of this mission as easy as possible (Healthier Hospitals, 2012).

More and more of the medical community are coming to the realization about what their patients are eating in the hospital is completely counter to providing the patient with the optimal nutrition to prevent the illnesses they are being treated for. Shilpa Ravella, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, states in her blog post “the science linking a poor diet to illnesses like heart disease and cancer is robust. This past October, the World Health Organization released a report placing processed meat in the highest-risk category for carcinogens and declaring red meat “probably carcinogenic.” Meanwhile, the latest dietary guidelines from the U.S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion emphasized the health value of plant foods” (Ravella, 2016)

“As medical researchers discover more about the foods that keep our bodies well, many hospitals continue to serve foods that promote disease. Last year, the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a nonprofit group composed of 12,000 doctors, issued a damning report about the healthfulness of hospital food in the U.S. Of the 208 hospitals surveyed, 20 percent housed fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, and Wendy’s on their campuses. And in a study led by Lenard Lesser, a family medicine physician at the University of California, San Francisco, and an advisor on hospital food environments for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 98 out of 233 university-affiliated teaching hospitals (around 42 percent) had at least one fast-food franchise on campus. Lesser’s findings were similar to another report published in JAMA in 2002, which found that six of the top 16 hospitals in the U.S. housed fast-food establishments” (Ravella, 2016)

The medical community is a great litmus test for looking at our own health and diet in the Christian community. How often do we carry the very food items in our church café or snack stands the medical community to turning away from? If a secular industry can embrace the idea of whole-food, plant-based meals why is it so hard for us as Christians to do the same? As a result, we need to take a hard look at the way churches are feeding their congregations and their communities. Going a step farther, before preparing and serving meals to the military, to orphans, widows, the downtrodden, or the homeless, we should be evaluating whether or not we are serving healthy food to enrich their bodies. 

Therefore, as Christians, we are called to hold one another accountable in all aspects of the Christian life. Being in the community as a Christian is not limited to carrying heavy physical or emotional burdens on Sundays or in our small-group bible studies twice a month. If we are starting off our gatherings from a place of weakness by what we consume how can we expect to be attentive and functioning in a way gratifying God and helps us connect with our community at a deeper level. We have forgotten our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who dwells within us, which has been sent by God. We have to remember this body we are given is not our own, but it was a lent to us by God to carry out the work he has in store for us. We are the stewards of the body and the temple of the Holy Spirit but the current way we look approach caring for our bodies, as Christian men are broken. 

In the beginning, when God created food for us to eat, he provided all of the trees, fruits, and herbs pleasing to the eye and good for food. We need not want for more because it was already there for us. As sin began to enter the world and death came into existence, eating meat from animals was by choice without God. With God providing all of our food needs, there is no necessity for meat. Unfortunately, our culture has adopted the idea to primarily rely on meat for protein and nutrients. We’ve fallen into a diet and health routine because it’s how we’ve been told to do it all our lives and we have been given the tools to recognize how it can be changed for the better. As Christians we have to re-define consumption to include food consumption along with other forms, guarding our whole body against all forms of attacks from Satan whether they be physical, emotional, auditory, visual, and spiritual. How many small battles can we take back at the dinner table for ourselves, our families, our friends, and our communities? 

As a Watchman for God’s kingdom, we cannot disregard the knowledge of protecting our temple fortresses. Satan wants to tear down the walls of the temple even if it means one individual at a time. We see this struggle even from a secular perspective as the trend of obesity has been steadily increasing in both children and adults despite many public health efforts for improvement. We still find ourselves wrestling with most health issues that are preventable. If our individual health is diluting the Body of Christ’s health, how much more is Satan attacking our lives and our spiritual well-being? The Body of Christ is only as healthy as the unhealthiest part of the body, then the individuals making up the Body of Christ collectively need to be healthier. Dealing with our overall health is less about ourselves and more about how we are helping others get and stay healthy. We make decisions every day affecting multiple facets of our life, through which, we dictate how we will carry out our responsibility to the Holy Spirit; as well as, the Body of Christ. We need to radically change the way we, as Christians, view diet and health in our church and community culture. 

Even though we have read the verses saying things are safe and acceptable to eat. We know this was in regard to the Laws of Moses not as something healthy or as something we must rely upon. Therefore, with modern science and technology, we can deduce what healthy is for our bodies, even though, it is permissive or clean to eat all things under God’s Law.  

Fasting gives us the opportunity to realize what we think we desire is to be closer to Jesus. Our desire to be fulfilled comes from the Lord and not from the things bringing us satiation. Fasting removes food as the basis for reliance on God but it also encompasses other areas of our life when we can experience a fast, whether it be physical things, material items, hobbies, security, sex, alcohol, drugs. Fasting is used in times of sadness and fear to prevent us from turning inward. Instead, we turn outward to God for guidance and strength. The war of attrition is won through the hearts and minds of the warriors. We either stay connected to the source which gives us the strength, or we fall down. As Christian we join God in our place of fasting; in order to, wait on the Lord and let Him reveal his great plan to us.

We are seeing new healthy food movements sprout out of the secular hospitals around the country adopting a plant-based diet to positively impact their employees and providing the surrounding community with the tools to be successful. As a church, we should be enacted strategies and tactics to follow their example by adding nutrition and food health to the current outreach efforts. As we see the medical industry as a whole calling this movement into action, how much more wonderful would it be to see Christians following suit. More and more of the medical community realize what patients eat has a direct correlation to the overall health of the hospital and its community. The Church shouldn’t just be praying for those who fall ill or the misfortune of a bad diagnosis. We should actively seek better ways to feed our church and community. As Christian we need to be proactive, instead of remaining reactive. As Christ-centered communities, we need to take a hard look at where we are now and the trajectory we are on as a whole. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “If we could first know where we are and whither, we are going, we can better judge what to do, and how to do it.” 

Finally, we must ask ourselves as Christian, are we enriching the Body of Christ or are we losing battles one meal at a time?