Does the Fifth Commandment Explain the Entire Chronic Disease Epidemic?

This may be the most direct promise about health provided in the whole Bible.

This verse doesn't just mean your actual mother and father. It means honoring the authority of those older than us and generations before us.

We stopped listening to their wisdom, and now we are failing to reap the blessings of the first commandment with a promise.

It is no coincidence that the post-war generations that started believing new was better and adopted novel foods in favor of preserving the traditions of their parents are now also starting to see life expectancy decrease for the first time in modern history.Beliefs like this is what got us into trouble:

"It doesn't matter that every generation before us ate animal fats, we are smart enough to know better!""We can do better than cow's milk, that's why we've created nut milks with seed oils, gums, and concentrated seed byproducts.""Our ancestors were uneducated and superstitious, modern science is the only source of truth we need."

Listening to ancestral wisdom is part of a Biblical approach to nutrition because it is the natural result of rejecting the pride and evolutionary worldviews that say we are more evolved than people before us.

It is the natural result of understanding that God made humans well, with the commission to steward His creation, from the start.

(By "ancestral" I am just referring to generations before us, nothing false spirituality.)

This doesn't mean everything people believed in the past is automatically true. It's doesn't mean innovation and advancement are inherently bad.But it means that it's time to start reclaiming traditional skills of food procurement and preparation.

It's time to start looking at what people used to inherently believe about healthy, nourishing foods, and asking why we reject most of those beliefs today.

 What advantage did past generations have that we do not?

Wisdom didn't just used to be passed down from generation to generation, it was developed over generations. When we instead start from scratch with our own understanding every generation, our wisdom can never develop the depth and richness that it once had.