Clean and Unclean Food

 

NIV Leviticus 11:46-47

These are the regulations concerning animals, birds, every living thing that moves about in the water and every creature that moves along the ground. You must distinguish between the unclean and the clean, between living creatures that may be eaten and those that may not be eaten.’”

Photo by Gor Davtyan on Unsplash

 

 Why is this passage ponderable?

Depending on how you interpret Old Testament scripture,  you may come away from this passage wondering what God knew about human nutrition that He did not disclose to Moses and Aaron when he dictated the dietary laws in Leviticus 11. This is especially ponderable because these laws are very specific. To people living in food rich countries like the USA, these laws are mostly inconvenient. But to people living in drought stricken countries, any food that can sustain life for another day is fair game. So we can only imagine what those Israelites who had wandered in the desert might have been thinking when Moses and Aaron delivered these directives to them. 

 

Perhaps a recent finding by Duke University gut-brain neuroscientist Diego Bohórquez, provides some clues.  He found that some enteroendocrine cells also make physical contact with the enteric nervous system, forming synapses with nerves. This revelation opens the door to rethinking how we might affect these signals — and might someday change how we treat conditions as varied as obesity, anorexia, irritable bowel syndrome, autism and PTSD.

 

If you were asked where the human body’s nervous system is located, you’d probably answer “the brain” or “the spinal cord.” But besides the central nervous system, which consists of those two organs, our bodies also contain the enteric nervous system, a two-layer lining with more than 100 million nerve cells that spans our guts from the esophagus to the rectum. The enteric nervous system has been called “the second brain,” and it’s in constant contact with the one in our skull. That’s why just thinking about food can lead your stomach to start secreting enzymes, or why giving a speech can lead to your feeling queasy. 

A number of diseases — autism, obesity, anorexia, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, PTSD and chronic stress — share a symptom known as altered visceral sensing, or a hyper- or hyposensitivity to gut stimuli. “For instance, clinical observations have suggested that some children with anorexia may be hyper-aware of the food they ingest from an early age,” says Bohórquez. “Under normal circumstances, this process happens without detailed spatial and temporal awareness, but those children can feel what’s going on in there, which triggers anxious feelings.” With this knowledge, scientists may better understand other disorders that have been thought to be solely psychological.

Everybody eats. Eating options inherently vary by culture, religion, region, and personal tastes. With such varied options, many people can be bombarded and end up making poor and costly decisions. 

Food-related diseases are rampant in America. Thirty million people suffer from diabetes, while 40% of the adult population struggles with obesity. Choosing the right food and diet can help combat these diseases.

 Perhaps that is what could not be disclosed by Moses in Leviticus 11? Even as they were leading the Israelites to the Land of Milk and Honey, Moses and Aaron often met with dissension. Much of it was over the quality and variety of the food they had left behind in Egypt when they elected to journey to the Promised Land. Trying to explain to this hard-headed bunch the specific reasons why certain foods promoted wellness and fervor while others might diminish their ability to fight off disease and their enemies, would have been a lost cause.