Why Your Pursuit Of A Better Body & The Perfect Diet Is Never Going To Make You Happy, How Christians Should Make Food Choices, The Ultimate Source Of Joy & Much More With Doug Wilson.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, I would define idolatry as looking to any finite thing to supply a need that only the infinite can supply. Keeping in mind that your life is meant to be spent, you're supposed to expend it. You're not supposed to put yourself in a museum case and keep yourself going. My question is not is Joel Salatin doing a good thing? But is the good thing that Joel Salatin is doing, is it scalable to the point where everybody gets to eat.

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more? My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Well, every so often I like to, and I have been doing this with increasing frequency, actually interview someone who is really an expert in spiritual fitness, the spiritual disciplines, caring for that one part of us that is often shriveled and shrunk up inside because we're so busy exercising right and eating right. And my guest on today's show is definitely one of those people. His name is Doug Wilson. He's a little bit of a polarizing figure in the religious community in the US but he's a man who I've grown to know over the past, oh, 20 years I've known this guy, and he's pretty smart. He's written an incredible suite of books, including one on food and a Christian approach to health, food and health in general. I think you are going to be fascinated by his take on eating healthy and on caring for our bodies and a balance that we can strike between that and judging others while at the same time loving ourselves and caring for our temple, so to speak. So sit back and get ready for an interesting episode with the great Doug Wilson. Welcome to the show, folks. I have today, actually, an old family friend of mine, Doug Wilson, who is the minister of Christchurch in Moscow, Idaho, a church that I attended through much of my childhood and also during college and still visit quite frequently whenever I'm down in Moscow, Idaho, which is only about 90 minutes from my home in Spokane. And So I've known Mr. Wilson for quite some time and he actually had a stint in the US Navy for a while, and then he attended the same university that I did, University of Idaho. However, while I got a Glorified Personal Training certification, he studied philosophy and since then went on to do quite a bit. Notably, he, he helped to found and now serves on the board of Logos School, the school that my wife attended, which is a classical and Christian K12 school down in down in Moscow. He's also the senior fellow of Theology at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, which I would consider to be one of the better liberal arts institutions in the country, actually, and quite close to the coffee shop that my mom actually runs down in Moscow, Idaho. And so I'm familiar with a lot of the students that go to that university as well or that college as well. He has authored many books. Mr. Wilson is a prolific author and his books are fantastic. He has books on marriage, on child rearing. I absolutely love his titles on raising boys just because I have twin boys myself. Some excellent books on Christian education. His son, Nathan Wilson, you might also be familiar with as a well known fiction author. And I'll link to all of his books as well as everything else that we talk about if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com DougWilson and Doug also has about a metric ton of grandkids spread across the planet with what seems to be rapidly increasing frequency. And so he has a lot of children out there bearing his name as well. And so the topic that I really wanted to get into today is related to A book that Mr. Wilson wrote called Confession of a Food Catholic. I'm also going to link to that in the show notes as well because I really, really would love to get your perspective. And by the way, I seem to be going back and forth between Doug and Mr. Wilson. What do you prefer for this show?

Oh, Doug is great.

All right, all right, that's going to shorten the syllables I got to use. All right. So Doug, you wrote this book called Confession of a Food Catholic. And I know that you've also done quite a bit of thinking about how we tack relationship between health and fitness and pursuit of a better body and caring for our bodies and caring for God's temple, but at the same time not kind of sliding into a selfish obsession with our bodies and with health or with longevity or anti aging at all costs. And this is certainly something that's been a topic on my mind quite a bit lately. And so this book, Confession of a Food Catholic that you wrote, which you say is dedicated to all those at church dinners who I noticed didn't have enough protein on their plates and who tried to cover it up by noticing I didn't have enough greens on mine. Let's start here. What is a Food Catholic? And how would you describe yourself as a Food Catholic?

Great. First, thanks for having me on. This is a great opportunity. A Food Catholic is someone who believes that all foods are acceptable for us to eat with regard to our spiritual condition. In other words, I cannot put distance between Me and God through anything I put in my mouth, or I can't be put right with God through anything that I eat. And what I've noticed, and the reason I wrote the book, is that many people feel when they eat, they feel a spiritual guilt. Either they feel if they eat poorly, if they miss the regimen that they assign for themselves, it's not like, oh, I failed to do the extra push up. There's a spiritual guilt that many people feel. And what I wanted to do was go to war with that sensation of guilt with regard to what you eat. Now, if someone said, yeah, but if someone had a diet of deep fat fried Twinkies and that's all they ate, wouldn't that be bad for them? Well, yeah, it'd be bad for them. It'd be bad for their physical well being. It's not healthy. But they're not corrupting their soul by means of the Twinkie. Now, they may be corrupting their soul by means of their lack of discipline, but that's a different issue. It's a different category. So we have a tendency to blame. When we have a moral failing or a spiritual shortcoming, we want to blame the stuff instead of addressing the root spiritual issue, which is your relationship to God. I think it's far worse to be fighting with someone over what they. You go out to lunch with a friend and you spend the time quarreling over what they ordered instead of just enjoying the time with your friend.

Right. So what you're saying basically is that sometimes the legalism or the self righteousness that we get with a lot of these laws that we set up for ourselves regarding food, whether it's, you know, I'm going to be gluten free or I'm avoiding carbohydrates, or I'm not consuming vegetable oils because those aren't good for my body. What you're saying is that, is that what you would care more about is not whether someone eats organic or processed food, but why they're actually making those decisions.

Exactly. So if what somebody else eats is frankly none of my business, they're the one that has to eat it. It's their lunch, they ordered it. If you want a meal that's higher in fiber or lower in fiber, or you need gluten. Not there. Or maybe you're at the counter and you order extra gluten, could you double the gluten?

Gluten powder, we actually call that soy sauce. So you use this term in the book called the Food Pharisee, which is great. The P H O O D the food Pharisee. And you describe these food Pharisees as those who would be unwilling to bring their food laws before the B to be examined and said. That's a topic that Christians really need to think through biblically. And when you get into this whole concept of a food Pharisee lifestyle, what I'd love for you to do, if possible, is tell me what you would describe a food Pharisee as and then get into some of the issues regarding. I think you break it down into five different issues that this food Pharisee lifestyle could be described as.

All right, so if you bring your food, if you say, okay, I want to compare how I eat to the Bible, I want to bring my food choices to the Bible, there's good news and bad news. Well, good news and bad news for the food Pharisee. The good news is that whatever it is you're eating is fine. That's the good news. The bad news is whatever it is your neighbor is eating is also fine. And the food Pharisee is someone who wants to feel superior. They want to look down on someone who's making suboptimal choices.

Right. Which is very easy. I mean, for me as a nutritionist and a guy who's kind of expected to judge people based on what they eat, in many cases that is really difficult for me personally not to slip into that and judge someone's character based on whether they're at the church potluck, reaching for the, you know, the bowl full of Twinkies or the kale salad.

Right now there is a point, let's say, because everything in life is on a dimmer switch and the Pharisee wants everything on an on, off switch. They want it either to be righteousness or unrighteousness. And of course, if your mom, you know, if you're the mom and you're overseeing the diet of your 8 year old son, who would eat if you gave him whatever he felt like he would eat, all sorts of things that mothers were assigned to keep him from eating. You have authority over him, okay, make choices. He's your son, he's your child. But your neighbor or your next door neighbor or your brother at church, he's not in that position. He's a grown up. Let him eat what he wants. And then if you have a relationship where it matters, let's say you're his doctor or he comes to you and he hires you to be his fitness trainer, after three weeks of him doing nothing that you say you could say you know, you're paying. You're wasting money talking to me this this way because you're. You're hiring my advice, but you're not taking it. Okay, well, you have. You have a relationship there that you can draw on. I like to compare it to this. Whenever you disapprove of something that anybody else is doing, it's like writing a check. And let's say it's a $10 check. It's a mild disapproval. It's a $10 check. Well, the thing about checks is you have to have money in the bank to write the check. And if you write a $10 check with someone and you've got $1,000 in the bank with them, that $10 check clears. But if you've got 50 cents in your account with them and you write a $10 check, it's not going to clear. And we have become sort of censorious, and we believe that what other people do with their lives is somehow our business. And one of the things I'm driving at in this book is minding that great Pauline principle of minding your own business. You can say something if someone is your responsibility. You know, I know someone who's got their elderly diabetic father living with them, and they have to watch what he would want to sneak. Right. And so they have to watch that. But they've got a relationship with a deep account there. You can write the check, but you can't write checks for everybody when you've not invested in their lives.

Yeah. And you say, I think in the book, the way you phrase it is that this control over our diet, when you discuss one of the first issues amongst these food Pharisees, which would be a heart issue. A heart issue that the control of diets is used as a substitute for true righteousness. And you mentioned a passage in the Bible about, in Matthew, what goes into someone's mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth is what defiles them. Now, when you say the control of diets is often used as a substitute for true righteousness, what exactly do you mean by that?

So if you go back into the. Some of the very famous names, names like Post and Kellogg and Graham, you know, the inventor of graham flour and graham crackers and so forth, those are all big corporate enterprises now, but at the time, they were alt foodie enterprises. Okay. And when they first began, they were trying to get rid of lust, for example, by use of the Graham diet.

Okay. I've heard of this before. Can you unpack That a little bit. It just sounds super out there to hear that a graham cracker would be used to suppress sexual urges.

The 19th century evangelist Charles Finney founded Oberlin College and had all the students there on the Graham diet. And the part of the purpose of this was to subdue animal urges. Well, going back to your question, that would be. It's a category mistake. I believe you can defile your body. You know, I could drink a vial of mercury and defile my body, you know, killing me. Right, right. But it would be a physical harm that I would be doing to a physical body. I can't get at covetousness by eating more celery or I can't get at. Right. Basically, righteousness is a matter of loving God and loving my neighbor. If I love God and love my neighbor, that's not going to be increased or diminished by whether or not I have another helping of this health food or if I avoid the extra sugar loaded cookie.

Although theoretically, I mean, when you look at something like the gram diet, you could see how complete lack of the fats and the cholesterols and some of the vitamins necessary, for example, for creation of testosterone or progesterone or estrogen, could create a scenario where you actually could kind of develop almost like a food based hypogonadism or a food based lack of actual libido or sexual hormones. Just based on the fact that you're consuming cardboard for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Exactly. But that's sort of like a bank shot. So Charles Spurgeon, a great 19th century preacher, once said, a lot of churches are praying for a revival of the Holy Spirit when what they really need to do is open the windows. They need oxygen in their brains. And of course, you could jigger with your diet such that you give yourself roaring headaches and then because of the headaches, you're tempted to be crabby with everybody you meet. Well, that crabbiness and biting people's heads off, that is a spiritual thing and it's affected by your diet, but it's a bank shot. It's not a direct thing. So it's not like I can eat righteousness. Whatever food I'm eating, it might have more fiber, less fiber, it might have more gluten or less gluten. But none of the foods that I eat are made up of pure thoughts.

Right.

I can't eat pure thoughts and then get pure thoughts directly as a result of that.

Okay, so that would be the heart issue. Then this argument that there's not anything inherently Wrong with something like, say, gluten or anything inherently better about something being organic or natural. Because where things really start is the heart, not necessarily what we eat. So you must first straighten out your heart when it comes to assessing how you might approach food. So.

Exactly. If I could interject there.

Yeah, go ahead.

The most important thing about the table is who you're eating with. Are you loving the people you sit down to share a meal with? And if you're loving God and loving your neighbor across the table, then the food can be something that really enhances that. But the food is like celebratory or. It's not for nothing that people at weddings sit down to eat and drink together. That's deeply embedded in our nature. God wants us to celebrate that way, but we want to keep first things first. God first, then our neighbor, then the food.

Yeah, that makes sense. I think part of this too, when it comes to how a lot of Christians view food is, I think sometimes it can be almost considered as a path to holiness or a path to so called enlightenment. Fasting being a perfect example. We see fasting as being something tied to a lot of religious practices, whether it's fasting for mourning or.

Or.

I just read this book, the Atomic. It's something like, I can't even see my bookshelf from where I'm at right now. But it's the atomic power of fasting, I think it's called. And all it is is the history of combining fasting with prayer and combining fasting with meditation. And the fact that fasting does seem to a certain extent to almost amplify those practices. And so you'll get many Christians perhaps not focusing as much on what they eat and more on what they don't eat or how seldomly they eat. And what's your take on. On a food strategy, something like fasting, to, for example, enhance spirituality or assist with a pursuit of holiness?

Yeah, very good. So the Lord Jesus fasted for 40 days and 40 nights, and it was after he had done that that he had his famous encounter his temptations from the devil. But this is something we see in scripture, and we also see it in world religions around the world. And that is the. The rigorous, I would put it this way, a rigorous discipline of ascetic fasting. It attunes you more closely to the spiritual realm. You become much more spiritually sensitive. So at the end of the 40 days, that's where the Lord has his encounter with the devil. Now some modern scholars would say, well, yeah, that's what you fast for 40 days and then you start hallucinating. Well, well, this is the difficulty. The fact that I'm in touch with the spiritual realm doesn't mean that I'm equipped to be in touch with the spiritual realm. So when Jesus. I believe that some hallucinogenic drugs do the same thing. Some people, when they took lsd, were sort of catapulted into the spiritual realm. Instead of going there slowly over a month and a half, they were just pitched into it. Just being in the spiritual realm doesn't mean that you're qualified to be there. After all, the devil is in the spiritual realm. The Devil's already there. So if someone says, I'm going to fast rigorously and then I'm going to see visions, well, I'm not prepared to dispute that. I think that that's really true. I think that we are spiritual beings, not just physical beings. I believe that the spiritual realm is real, but I believe that people can go to that spiritual realm and not be in fellowship with God when they go there, which is a dangerous place to be.

So what you're saying is that fasting in a pursuit of holiness in the absence of a proper relationship with God is something that could actually threaten to derail you spiritually?

Yeah, it could derail you or. And as this happened with some of the Jesus people back in the day is they took some acid trip and they encountered something that scared them sideways and came back and got right with God. All right, so there are things like that. There are people who are, who go into the spiritual realm and then are misled. There are people who are prepared and equipped. Like the Lord Jesus resisted the temptations of the devil when he encountered the devil in that. In that setting. So it's just being spiritually attuned is not the same thing as being spiritually.

Right, got it. So another thing that I'm curious about when it comes to fasting is of course, the reason that a lot of people are fasting or eating healthy food right now. For them, it's this idea of anti aging or longevity and even couching that sometimes in terms of, and I've explained it this way before, you want to enable or equip yourself to be able to do the very best job with the skills that God has given you to be able to live out your purpose in the most impactful way. And if you are diabetic in a wheelchair when you're 50, you're far less likely to be able to do that than if you're robust and Strong and you've lifted weights and done some fasting and eating good foods and really equipped yourself to be able to make a difference physically just because our bodies are what's going to house our souls and spirits and enable us to do something like get on an airplane to go give a talk to someone about the gospel, or to be able to get out of bed in the morning and go to the office to do your job and to glorify and magnify God with whatever it is that you're doing in your, your career. And so to me that makes sense. But you also get in the book into another food Pharisee issue, which you refer to as the God issue, which I think might kind of relate to this a little bit. So can you get into what your thoughts are in terms of using food as a way to enhance our physiology in a way to really almost keep ourselves on this planet for a longer period of time? Sure.

I think it's obviously it's a good thing. In the Psalms it talks about old faithful Christians being fruitful into their old age. And then at the end of Deuteronomy, it famously says that Moses died when he was 120 years old. And it says in Deuteronomy 34,7, his eye was not dim nor his natural force abated. So when Moses died at 120, he walked up the mountain in order to die there. So the last thing Moses did was climb a mountain and then God took him. So it's obviously, I wouldn't mind going that way. Yeah, I think that's a good way to go. So obviously it's a good thing to be able to be fruitful and productive as long as you can be right. But everything is a cost benefit analysis where if you eke out an extra six months because you spent five years focusing on certain aspects of your health and that bought you an extra six months. Well, you lost on that trade. If you just let yourself go to pieces and you don't have any, you don't care, you don't take care of your body at all and you die of emphysema in your 40s and it's directly the result of things that you were doing. Well, that's a problem too. But the other thing is that our lives are amiss. James tells us not only are our lives amiss, but God doesn't operate according to our timekeeping. Someone might take superb care of themselves and get hit by a truck, and then somebody else is lazy and lives to be 98. Everything we do we have to do as good stewards without believing that we are in complete control. God lets us govern our lives to a certain extent, which is fine so long as we remember that he's got the ultimate decision making power of how we are to spend our lives.

Right. And this might be kind of a philosophical can of worms, but then what would you say to someone who says, well, you know, God has determined when I'm going to die, and let's say that's going to be when I'm 78 years old, out on a hike, dropping dead of a heart attack. Therefore it doesn't really matter whether I were to consume the black bean kale versus the Twinkies and donuts every day for, for food, just because, you know, God's already laid it all out. And when I'm going to die is when I'm going to die.

Yeah, you could answer that guy somewhat readily by saying, and suppose you were a farmer who said, you know, if God has determined that I'm going to harvest a crop this year, then I'm going to harvest a crop whether I plant or not. Okay, well if you don't plant, I'm willing to bet $10 on which one he foreordained for you to get. Okay, so what I would do, what I urge people to do, is to live as wise stewards, doing the best they know with the information they have, but leaving the results to God, knowing that you could be overridden. So God wants us to be responsible. He wants us to take the best care of ourselves as we know how, keeping in mind that your life is meant to be spent, you're supposed to expend it. You're not supposed to put yourself in a museum case and keep yourself going. Your life is supposed to be laid down for others. So you expend yourself for others and you want to be able to do that as long as you possibly can. My wife and I are currently living with. We moved in with my dad two years ago. He's 92. And one of his great challenges is his mind wants to be far more productive now than his body will let him. He's like an old war horse in the stable that hears the sound of battle and he wants to go out, but he's just not up to it. King David, one time in the Bible, when he was elderly, he went into battle as an older man, was almost overwhelmed, and then his soldiers wouldn't let him go anymore because his willingness to fight his body didn't match what he wanted to be able to do. And so what we should do is try to pace ourselves so that as long as we're here, we're able to do productive things. We always want to be able to contribute. We don't want to spend the last 10 years just sitting there.

When it comes to that idea of free will versus predestination, it's a matter of trusting God and knowing that he has a plan written out for your life. But then what's the saying? Go trust God, but then put on your seatbelt. Something like that.

Right? And so a great verse for this would be in Deuteronomy 29:29. It says the secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children, that we may keep the words of this law. So God runs the universe. We don't. His secret ways are his secret ways. I trust him to do right, but I've got to live according to the light of nature and according to the light of scripture. And I've got to make the best decisions I know how to make, surrendering the ultimate outcome to Him.

I want to ask you a little bit about caring for our planet and also a few other questions about caring for our bodies. But before I do, I do know that there are some, some Christians who listen to the show who do have some pretty strict rules for themselves about the things that they will eat and the things that they will not eat. How they care for their bodies and health is important to them. And I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that. Although as you alluded to and as you also describe in your book, that's not where true holiness is derived and that you must care for your heart and your holiness via things that go outside of food. Food is you can't eat your way into morality. But at the same time, many of these folks are finding themselves in situations where they might be with other Christians or with people who they may be ministering to at other family's homes and they're presented with a variety of food choices that aren't necessarily the same type of food choices they might have available at home or the same type of food choices they would make at home. What would be your advice to people who are sit with and dining with and breaking bread or gluten free bread with others in that type of situation, do you simply just say a prayer and dig in and trust that God will protect you from the herbicides and the pesticides or what's your approach to that? Or your advice for that type of situation.

I think that this is a golden rule type of thing. Do as you would be done by. So, for example, if we invited someone over for dinner and let's say one of the. One of the people the wife say was allergic to nuts, and if there were nuts in any of the foods, we're not going to finish the dinner because we're all going to be down at the er she's going to swell up. And it's that kind of allergic reaction. Well, if you're the invited guest, it would be. It's loving to let the host know that you are allergic to peanuts. It's a. You would want someone to do that for you, so you do that.

Yeah, that's kind of. Kind of a given. Like a true food allergy.

Yeah, a true food allergy where death might result or some severe reaction. You just love the other person by giving full information. If it is simply a matter of not my. Not my cup of tea, let's say I've been in situations where I'm served something that I just don't like. Now, I don't believe there's anything spiritual or not spiritual in the eating of it, but I just don't like that food that I was served. I believe it's my responsibility to eat it as though I did like it. And so there's no health. It's a small sacrifice that I can make for the sake of the fellowship with the people. And when the plate comes out. When the plate comes out with the salad, you say, this salad has snails in it. Well, okay.

Should have thought that the chicken that maybe had grains instead of insects, you just come back to that. I suppose in a way it could come back to that Bible verse that essentially says love covers all. And in a situation like that, you simply love who you're at that table with. Love your neighbor more than your diet and give thanks for the food as something that can unite us and cause us to come together and just basically trust God and perhaps eat a little less than you might normally if you don't want a stomachache. But trust God and love your neighbor.

Yeah. You don't have to ask for seconds. Right, Right. Basically, you want to conduct yourself in a way that's consistent with the fellowship and the harmony because you value the fellowship with the people you're eating with more than you value your personal convenience. So now there's nothing wrong with your personal taste. Nothing wrong. If you're going out to eat by yourself, you should order what you want, not what somebody else would have wanted you to order, you're eating by yourself, you're in the restaurant, order what you want to eat. But if you're with other people, that dynamic is more important than what you would do if you were by yourself.

Okay, so we've established so far that food doesn't make you holy. Diets aren't a substitute for true righteousness. And that we should trust God more while at the same time making decisions that enable us to care for our bodies in the best way possible. And that when we are with others and breaking bread with them, that it's more important to love others and follow the golden rule than to take our health, health into account at all costs and make other people uncomfortable or create some kind of divisionary type of, type of situation at a table or at a feast. And you know, that leads into the idea that I know people are increasingly concerned about. And I even interviewed a gentleman on my show about a couple of years ago, a regenerative farmer and a Christian and an author named Joel Salad. He wrote a book called the Pigness of Pigs. And in that book he talks about how these big corporate farms can find pigs in cramped and dark pens and inject them with antibiotics and feed them herbicide saturated food to increase profits. And that that's really not respecting a pig as a creation of God. And that furthermore, that's also not caring for God's planet and our environment in a way that we really should be doing as good stewards, as good gardeners of this earth that we live on. And so a big part of that book, if we were to fully live out that idea of caring for God's planet, would mean making a lot of different food choices when it comes to even something as simple as the origin of the package of meat that we might be grabbing from the meat counter at Rosars. And so what's your take on this when it comes to the environmental considerations in the animals that surround around us that we are eating?

This is a great question and it's also a huge one. And that means we won't be able to get into every aspect of it. But I want to point in different directions because now you're not just talking about farming and raising pigs, for example, you're also talking about economies of scale, prices, the general economy and so on. And I'll try to illustrate what I mean. First, this is no knocks against Joel Salatin, God bless him, and I'm happy he's doing what he's doing. And when people do that and they make a living from it, it's knock yourself out. I'm grateful for that sort of thing. But here's the, this is the issue. It's not just the pigness of pigs, it's also the humanness of humans. When I say, okay, say he describes to me a pig's life, a pig that he raised and brought to market. And I compared the life of that pig to the life of a pig in the stockyards somewhere. Okay, I have no doubt that Joel Salatin is exactly right when it comes to which pig's life was better.

Right.

So I don't have no quarrel there. But there's the other end of the equation also, and that is how much does Joel Saletan's bacon cost? And how much does the bacon at Walmart cost? And do poor people get to eat bacon? So one of the things that I have, the difficulty that I have with the movement to locally source everything and organic farming and all of that is no objection to organic farming or, or respecting the lives of the livestock and the nature of these things. That's all great, but all of those considerations are going to affect how much the bacon costs. And when you, if you grow organic apples, but because of the care you have to put into them, they're $5 apples, what you're saying is that poor people don't get apples at all. So my question is, is not is Joel Salatin doing a good thing, but is the good thing that Joel Salatin is doing scalable to the point where everybody, there's 7 billion of us, right? Is it scalable to the point where everybody gets to eat?

Yeah. And Dr. Mark Hyman, who I also interviewed a few months ago, talks about the true cost of food. You know, the fact that, you know, antibiotic resistant superbugs are on the rise due to the overuse of antibiotics, and that loss of biodiversity is caused by a lot of these modern farming practices that may short term reduce the cost of food or the monocropping of agriculture like corn or soy or grain, resulting in less expensive food, short term, but eventual depletion of the soil's minerals and nutrients. And so, so I think there's a little bit of a long term thinking pattern that may dictate that some of these things are going to be expensive in the long run from a health or an environmental standpoint. But I guess my question, beyond simply whether or not a certain practice would make a food affordable for the masses, is how Christians should approach the environmental impact behind the food choices that we make. Should we actually be taking that into account in a significant manner when we are shopping at the grocery store.

Yeah, we should take. I think we should take all of those things into account. Yes. And I appreciate the fact that you were talking about measuring not just the short term impact, but also the long term impact. And then I would return to how does this translate into my life as an individual Christian? One of my friends has a chicken ranch down in Texas. And if you've never seen 20,000 chickens at one go.

I've got 14 outside.

I can imagine 20,000. Whoa. But we need to recognize that when we are talking about the environment, the ecology, the interrelationships with animals, the impact that human beings have on the world, we are, all of us, I think, operating way above our pay grade. The humorist P.J. o' Rourke once said, there's a certain kind of environmentalism that says there's way too much of you, just the right amount of me. So how many, if we practiced the buzzword today, is sustainable? Let's say that all the meat we raised was raised sustainably. All the food we raised was raised in a diverse setting and not, you know, monoculture corn and so on, not Iowa. In other words, let's say we did that well, how many people could we support that way? That's the issue. And then if we said, let's say it's half the world's population, well, now who's in charge of who gets to stay and who has to go? And so all of these, these are legitimate questions. The problem is that we live in an era where there's no shortage of political authorities that want to coercively say they want to set the boundaries and they want to be in charge of that, I would prefer to let market solutions work their way to the top. So if someone figures out the best way to make the best corn, grow the best corn, or the best way to raise the best ham or the best way to cultivate an orchard, I would like the free market to be allowed to work so that. That, that rises to the top.

Yeah, that makes sense. And, you know, I would, you know, I think this. This is probably something we could talk for, you know, a good hour about. But I. I think that there. There's definitely a greater scalability to things like regenerative farming and organic or agriculture than, you know, than. Than big food, so to speak, would paint things to be. However, I think that, that a big part of this discussion comes down to the church doing its job and actually ensuring that the poor and the homeless and the widows and the fatherless are actually taken care of by the church and can actually be given food that will be nourishing to their bodies in a scalable way. So I think there's kind of a larger religious and political consideration here when it comes to who's doing what to take care of the people who can't afford this food. And I also think that. That the food is a lot more sustainable and more scalable than we have perhaps been led to believe by the Kellogg's and the Nestle's of the world, so to speak.

Another thing that you want to make sure that we do is not just take care of the individual widow and orphan, which is pure and undefiled religion, James says, but also as part of our social conscience, we should labor, pray, work to see to it that big, big corporate interests are not allowed to construct the laws in such a way as when a small farmer is developing some new way of doing it, that the big corporations can get their thumb on the scale. They've got a battery of lawyers that can go lobby Congress to pass a law that affects the little guy and not the big guy. So I want equal weights and measures so that what applies to one applies to all. And they're not allowed to use their weight. They're not allowed to throw their weight around in such a way as to prevent genuine scalable competition from arising.

Right, right. Yeah, that makes sense. And you know, in the defense of some of these corporations, I know, for example, General Mills seems to be acquiring more healthy food companies that are actually putting out foods that might be a little bit better for the body or better for the environment. But. But, you know, to a large degree, yeah, a lot, A lot of this regenerative farming, a lot of this caring for the earth at the same time that we're supplying food, a lot, A lot of it is really hampered by. By mono cropping, by monsanto s corporations, etc. And again, you know, a pretty big can of worms that, that, you know, I think, I think deserves perhaps a podcast entirely to itself. But I did have a couple of other questions I wanted to ask you. You particularly more related to the person listening who might be a Christian or someone who is struggling with this notion of caring for one's body, but also not doing so in a way that might become sinful. And you know, to me, and I was thinking about this before I got you on the show, you know, this idea of fitness or buffeting the body or training the body, do you think it leads to a bit of a gluttony you know, whether that attachment to fitness, that attachment to crossfit, that attachment to rolling out of bed and strapping on your shoes for your five mile morning run, that you think you're going to feel like crap the rest of the day if you don't get that in, you know, you're going to feel like crap. You know, I've wondered whether an attachment to those type of things that are considered to be honorable, laudable, you know, noble in society nowadays because, you know, that's what the folks on the front cover of Men's Health and Women's Health are doing. If that attachment is an addiction almost similar to something like gluttony, you know, some, something that can almost lead to sin, like how, how do you, how do you think about fitness or about buffeting the body or having these intense habits or routines or rituals of care, of self care.

That's a great question. And it goes right to the heart of, I think, a bunch of what we've been circling around here. I would define idolatry as placing any finite thing in the place where you're looking to any finite thing to supply a need that only the infinite can supply. And different people idolize different things. So one person idolizes money, which means he's looking to money to meet a need that only God can supply. Someone else looks at sex and they want sex to supply what only God can supply. Another person looks at fitness and if they've idolized it's good to be fit, just like it's good to be married and have sex and just like it's good to have money. So the Bible doesn't mind God's people having money, but he minds money having his people. And it's not he doesn't mind his people having sex, he minds sex having his people. He doesn't mind his people having fitness, he minds fitness having his people. Right? So if the drive to be fit or the drive to be healthy, if you're looking to that to satisfy a need in yourself that only Christ can supply, then the problem is you've slipped into idolatry. And it was a good comparison when you said, is there a kind of gluttony there? Well, what's happening in the old fashioned gluttony who is sitting down, you know, to work his way through a mountain.

Of buttered toast, Right, the epicurean fat bastard, so to speak.

Right, exactly. So he's looking, he's looking to food to meet a need in himself that only God can supply. So he's an idolater of food. Someone else could be an idolater of just the right kind of food or just the right amount of food. Food or just the right amount of exercise or just the right look. I want to look like the person on the COVID of that magazine. And if you're an idolater, that means that you're never going to be satisfied. That's the issue. Christ satisfies, idolatries never do. And some people go from idol to idol. You know, fitness doesn't work, so they move to health. Health doesn't work, so they move to something, you know, making money, that sort of thing. When it comes to the human body, I was thinking about this before the interview. There's a difference between some people are fit. There's fit and not fit. There's healthy and not healthy, and then there's busted and not busted. Right. A few winters ago, I slipped on the ice and broke my shoulder. And so now I can't raise my right hand. I can't change light bulbs very well with my right hand. I can still do it with my left hand. So that's busted. My right shoulder is busted. That's not an issue of fitness or an issue of health. Someone could be fit. They could run a race and they could make it the whole distance, but they might have some underlying health disease or someone else might be healthy. And, you know, they're not sick. They don't have a cold. They go to work every day. They've not had a sick day for years. But if they walk up the stairs too quickly, they have to sit down at the top and pant for a while. That's not fit.

And, you know, I personally think that part of this as well is not only the fact that these things can become idols. And in many cases, that's tied to neurochemistry, it's tied to the dopamine response that you might receive from these activities that you've woven as habits and rituals and routines into your life. It can stem from a lack of trust in God that your body is going to do what it needs to do to make maximum impact without you necessarily having to be on an air assault bike for 60 minutes every day. But I think a part of it, at least this was a big part of it for me. This was a light bulb moment for me was this idea that all of these attachments, as Anthony Demello might say, these attachments that are pleasures that eventually become these attachments that we depend upon for happiness in life become that because we have lost or we have never gained the ability to find joy in really what the only source of true and lasting and deeply fulfilling joy would be. And that is God, the presence of God and God's creation around us. And you know, you had recommended actually me a few months ago, a book by John Piper which actually really, really enjoyed about this called Desiring God. You know, and in that book, you know, John gets into this idea of, you know, opening your eyes to see the glory and savor the glory of God and to in a constancy of prayer and a dwelling with God and a dwelling upon God's word. And as I've begun to do that on a daily basis, both my wife and I and have brought the boys along with us. What we've really been focusing on is this idea that all of these things that we're surrounded with, whether it be our food or exercise or the sunshine or a backyard barbecue or a trip to the beach or anything else, these are all pleasures, these are all wonderful. But if we become attached to them and do not focus instead upon the ultimate source of joy coming from God and our relationship with God, then we do create a scenario where we kind of get on this treadmill, so to speak, both literally and figuratively, of pursuing our joy and happiness through some of these things that even to the world might look like noble and laudable pursuits such as fitness, when ultimately that's going to lead to the same dead end as, you know, eating fried chicken wings, laying in bed with greasy chicken skin dripping off your face and that whole epicurean scenario for that same type of joy. So I think a big part of this is where are you finding your joy?

Where are you finding your joy? And if it's true spiritual joy, then it will satisfy. When Jesus talked to the woman at the well, he said if you knew who you were talking to, you would ask him for living water. And she misunderstood him and said, well, tell me about this so I don't have to come out to the well every day. Because physical water, you need something to drink every day, you need something to eat every day. And if you're looking for your ultimate value or your ultimate joy in that, it's just not going to be able to carry you. But there is, as Augustine said, there's a God shaped vacuum in every human heart and only, only God will fit there. And we try to get other. It's like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. Some people like to put puzzles together with scissors and a mallet. They try to put other things in that spot but only God will fit there. Because it says in Ecclesiastes God has put eternity in our hearts. We were made for communion with him. And so no created thing, whether it's money or a big house or a fast car or a trophy wife or long health or longevity, whatever it is, those things are not going to give ultimate satisfaction. They can give temporary satisfaction. And it's fine that they give temporary satisfaction, but we have to recognize it for what it is.

Yeah. And the God shaped hole concept, I think is a perfect way to describe this. I think it was Blaise Pascal who. I think I forget the name of his book. Yeah, Pence, he has a great quote about that. I think he calls it the infinite abyss, you know, that can only be filled with an infinite object, which would be God. And until you actually fill that hole, you're just going to keep throwing stuff in there and eventually hope that, you know, something that you toss in there is going to be the thing that fulfills. And it just never is until you put God into the God shaped hole. Now, you know, with, with the folks who are listening in and the audience that you're speaking to, Doug, you know, I know that you travel around the world, you know, speaking, you know, to Christian educators and to churches and you know, in many cases in reform circles and beyond, you have a podcast. I'm going to link to that in the show Notes. By the way, if you guys go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com DougWilson and Doug has a couple of podcasts and actually a blog that I subscribe to with some really good writing along with a lot of excellent books that I would recommend that you peruse. But Doug, I don't think that you're on fitness shows very much. And.

Because of that, thanks for having me.

Yeah, yeah. This is probably the greatest number of people who are listening to your voice right now while running through the wilderness or doing burpees therapies. But anyways, what would be the message that you think the physical culture population, immersed deeply in the realm of fitness, immerse deeply in the realm of choosing their diet very carefully, increasingly immersed deeply in the realm of how do I live as long as possible? Like, what's the next anti aging and longevity biohack that I can engage in? What do you think is the message that, that folks need to hear the most in that sector? What would you like to say to the fitness world that perhaps you haven't really been given as much of a chance to say?

I would say don't focus on living long in such a way as to make you forget what life is about. The point is to have lived, not to have lived a long time. There are people who live a long time who wasted it all, and there are people who died in their 20s who laid down their lives for the sake of God or for the sake of some wonderful cause. And the short life well lived is better than a long life frittered away. So basically what you want to do is have all your health disciplines and all your fitness disciplines and all of those things. You want them subservient to life itself. And Christ is life itself. So you want to know God, you want to know Christ, and then fine. All the things you're doing, they're perfectly lawful things. They just need to be number three and four.

A short life well lived is better than a long life fruited away. I think that for people who are spending literal years of their life with red laser lights up their nose, jumping on mini trampolines and laying in hyperbaric chambers, neighbors, I think that's a good message along with the other messages that I think have come up repeatedly during this interview. I mean, for those of you listening in, food does not make you holy. Sometimes loving your neighbor is a lot more important than the food that you're putting into your mouth around your neighbor. This idea that there is a God shaped hole that can only be filled with God and much of the rest of this can be attachments and idolatry. And then finally a short life well lived is better than a long life frittered away. These are truths that I would encourage you, if you're listening, to write down to journal to dwell upon this week as you step back and look at your own life, your own approach to food, your own approach to fitness and assess whether it is a a healthy relationship with those activities and whether you are simply finding joy in God or magnifying and glorifying God and the excellence with which you approach those activities, or whether those have become attachments or idols. And like I mentioned, Doug also has a lot of really good writing that he's done on topics like this, probably most notably the book that I mentioned at the beginning of this interview, the Confessions of a Food Catholic. And I'll link to that book and also Doug's other writings and books and podcasts. Again, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com DougWilson and when you go to that URL, you can also, if you have your own questions, comments, feedback, your own thoughts to add. I would love to see them. I read them all so you can leave them there@BenGreenfieldFitness.com DougWilson Doug, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your thoughts with us about all this stuff.

Stuff. It was my privilege. I really appreciate the invitation.

Awesome. All right, folks. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Doug Wilson of Christchurch in Moscow, Idaho, signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.