Word of Wisdom – Experiment

Sounds interesting. I have heard similar things from people in my ward who have done this.

I think in part, the focus on grains was something that Joseph Smith and the society at the time could understand. Since they were farmers primarily, understanding how to balance their lives food-wise so they ate what was available makes sense.

It might boil down to the inspiration being “Thou shalt be mindful of the consequences of what thou eats” with Joseph Smith translating that into what we see got written down.

I read/heard someplace that the “Mormon Tea” brewed in the Mid-West contained substances even more potent then coffee or tea it was designed to replace.

I feel the WoW is wrong just as much as it is right.

People at the time were quite aware that alcohol was unhealthy in excess, especially the more potent drinks.

The WoW happened to be right about tobacco, well ahead of its time.

Coffee? Tea? I dunno. Tea seems to have a lot of health benefits and coffee appears to be a much healthier source of caffeine than soda or energy drinks. Coffee is a carcinogen according to California, but everything is a carcinogen there. Over-dependence on caffeine is probably not a good thing anyway. I’ll call this a toss-up, though some might argue this point is incorrect.

Fruits and vegetables are good for you? I’d say that’s common sense, even for its time.

But the whole wheat thing? I wouldn’t say it’s all that accurate. It’s not that wheat is bad for you; it’s that your body doesn’t register carbs in quite the same way as it does fat/protein and so you tend to be able to eat more calories worth of bread than you can of steak. And then gluten tends to be a problem for a select part of the population. If the church came out of China instead of the US, it would have probably said the same thing about rice.

One thing was correct well ahead of its time. Another seems to be mostly incorrect. Everything else was either neutral or pretty well understood at the time.

Coffee? Tea? I dunno.

Fruits and vegetables are good for you? I’d say that’s common sense, even for its time.

I’d say that Coffee and Tea may not actually be part of the WoW. I’d also contend that veggies and fruits as we think of them today were luxuries in the 1840s. For example people would get an orange or a few strawberries only on special occasions in New England because they were so expensive for the masses. On a related not during my mission in the 1990s to a tropical country that grows lots of fruits, the average person there couldn’t buy fruit because most was sent to the US where it was sold at much higher prices.

Back to the OP. Probably lots of reasons to rethink the WoW. What Mom3 said makes sense.

Individual adaptation is a thing, but there seems to be a semi-widespread consensus (if you could call it that – it might just be a fad) that grains are actually not all that good for you. They’re just cheap and were plentiful in the 19th century. Point is, there are a lot of diets that work well for some but not others, with low-fat diets tending to be the least effective for losing weight and reducing cholesterol levels. (mostly because the fat tends to get replaced by sugar- something much worse for you because our bodies were not evolved to process it in the quantities we find today)

I suspect people losing weight on diets has more to do with the mentality of dieting making you more conscientious of what you eat rather than the food actually eaten.

I think the same can be said about replacing coke/mountain dew with coffee. More caffeine, but way less sugar. Even if you drink diet soda, the artificial sweeteners are in some ways worse than real sugar and there is still something to be said about the carbonation.

My boss drinks over 2 liters of diet coke every day and I shudder thinking what that is doing to his body. He’s not a member, so he drinks coffee too, but I have my bets on which is going to kill him faster.

Interesting article excerpt from the Apr 2 Wall Street Journal:

Psychiatrists and therapists don’t often ask this question. But a growing body of research over the past decade shows that a healthy diet—high in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish and unprocessed lean red meat—can prevent depression. And an unhealthy diet—high in processed and refined foods—increases the risk for the disease in everyone, including children and teens.

Now recent studies show that a healthy diet may not only prevent depression, but could effectively treat it once it’s started.

Oh, there are many in the mental health field well aware that diet and exercise are extremely important factors. Exercise and good food are, in fact, medicine in that they change our neurochemistry in a very real sense, similar to medicine. Sometimes a change of diet and addition of exercise is all that is needed to relieve some mental health conditions. Not always, obviously.

There are good, peer-reviewed empirical studies showing the biochemical benefits of exercise and nutrition. I’m not talking about psuedo-science claims or the MLM vitamins your aunt swears cured her cancer.

I believe that if God cares about our health, he will inspire researchers to seek answers to many questions about what helps us to walk and not be so darned weary. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of different opinions and modern prophets have been pretty mute about it–just letting that old WofW health code from over 100 years ago ride, even though there isn’t a Mormon I’ve ever met who follows it as written. So, we’re forced (or blessed, depending on how you look at it) to study it out in our own, look for the most reliable sources of data, and see what works for us.

What works for me is a high protein, low carb diet. Green tea. Some black tea on occasion. Fruits, nuts, veggies, lots of spinach. Occasional alcohol. No coffee, not because I think it’s necessarily bad, but because I never developed a taste for it. I think it’s awful. No sodas, even though I kinda like the taste of some of them. When I limited carbs, especially bread, what little fat I had (mostly in belly area) shrunk pretty quickly. I also found I started having some aversion to bread. I just couldn’t stand the texture and feel of chewed bread in my mouth, nor the thought of swallowing that into my body. Now, I’ve since become a little more tolerant of bread, and started eating more carbs when I increased my exercise. I was just much hungrier and couldn’t always easily find the better foods. Bread is so easy and cheap. Consequently, some belly fat has returned, dang it. I try to currently keep my carbs, or most of them, at breakfast. I find I feel a little better with some complex carbs early to help give me energy. I think I’d probably do better going back to fewer carbs, but it’s more difficult, not to mention more expensive, to find the right foods.

So, my interpretation of the very old and badly in need of updating WofW is that diet is very important to our physical and mental health, and a big factor in our ability to be good disciples and parents and friends. So follow the data and figure out what works.

Feiw, one of my daughters switched to a diet focused on the Word of Wisdom, and it has been very good for her.

As far as generally good diet advice, particularly the focus on avoiding addiction, I really don’t have any issues with the Word of Wisdom. I can accept it almost without reservation as introduced. My only deep issue is its use as a baptismal requirement, and I don’t love it as a requirement for the temple – but that doesn’t torque me like it does with baptism. Our conversion rate would jump significantly if that was changed, and it would give people time to work on quitting without feeling sinful for not being able to quit cold turkey immediately.