Most of the prayer request letters I receive come from people who have a physical problem that modern medicine has failed to solve. But the second most frequent request is that I pray they ‘stop cheating’ on The Hallelujah Diet.
But before anyone can ‘stop cheating’ on The Hallelujah Diet, they need to have a reason. Knowledge is power and, sadly, the Bible tells us God’s people are being destroyed for lack of it:
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6)I have written previously that the most important knowledge you can have to stop you from cheating comes from Scripture. It tells us that as Christians, our body doesn’t belong to us...it belongs to God. To help you understand better why it is imperative that you follow God’s original diet, I have also shared some incredible research on how animal-source foods adversely affect our health. This knowledge should be of great help in understanding why we must each stop cheating in order to restore our body to wellness. In this message, I want to expand our knowledge by talking about a substance most people consume in large quantities on a daily basis that is extremely detrimental to their health: refined sugar. Hopefully, what we share in this Health Tip will be another incentive to stop cheating for those who are struggling.
A Little Foundational Knowledge
The Bible tells us that God gave Adam the diet with which He intended his human creation to be nourished :“AND GOD SAID, Behold, I have given you every herb (vegetable) bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat (food).” (Genesis 1:29)Following the period in this verse man lived for almost 2,000 more years on God's Original Diet — without a single recorded instance of sickness. The biblical patriarchs of this time lived to be an average age of 912. Sadly, over the years, man has slowly but surely moved further and further away from God’s plan for the proper nourishment of the human physical body. Today, man consumes a diet that bares very little resemblance to God’s Original Diet. The result has been a continued deterioration of mankind’s health.
Refined Sugar & High Fructose Corn Syrup
When God created man, He gave man taste buds that were attracted to sweet tasting foods. Thus, man was naturally drawn to the sweet tasting foods that God intended for the proper nourishment of the human body: naturally sweet raw fruits, raw vegetables, seeds, and nuts. As time went by, especially in the past 100 years, food merchants learned how to manufacture foods, placing them in jars, cans, plastic containers, boxes, packages, etc. In order to do this, they had to alter the foods from their natural form into something that was no longer natural. The food merchants started with natural, raw plant foods — as provided by God in nature — but began cooking and processing them into a form that was a far cry from the form they were in when harvested. This cooking and processing removed the sweetness (along with most nutrients). In order to overcome the lack of sweetness in these manufactured foods and to entice people into buying them, food merchants learned that by adding sugar to their manufactured and processed foods, it would be accepted by a person’s taste buds. Thus, these nutritionally empty products could be sold to an unsuspecting public. Today, it is difficult to find a manufactured food product that does not contain refined sugar or high fructose corn syrup. Even organic, supposedly healthy, packaged products like spaghetti sauce include sugar; check labels and prove it to yourself.100 Years of Manufactured “Food”
Around the early 1900s, the average annual consumption of refined sugar was approximately 5 pounds per person per year. Today, the average that number has ballooned to approximately 172 pounds per person per year. That means each person is consuming approximately 50 teaspoons of refined sugar or high fructose corn syrup every day! Sugar cane is the natural source for sugar — but you would need to eat approximately 150 feet of sugar cane to equal 50 teaspoons of refined sugar (3 feet per teaspoon or cube of sugar). That is physically impossible and therefore unnatural, yet that is precisely the unnatural amount of sugar that an average American consumes daily. Some people say that it would be impossible for a person to consume 50 teaspoons of sugar in a single day, but they fail to realize that just- A 12-ounce can of a soft drink contains approximately 12 teaspoons of refined sugar.
- A half-cup of ice cream contains 5-6 teaspoons of refined sugar.
- A chocolate bar contains 7 teaspoons of refined sugar.
- A glazed donut contains 8 teaspoons of refined sugar.
7 Things You Need to Know About Refined Sugar
Victoria Bidwell in her book “The Health Seekers Yearbook” illuminates this problem. Here are some of her key points:- Refined Sugar is Fragmented – Through heating and mechanical chemical processing, all vitamins, proteins, fats, enzymes – indeed – every single nutrient is removed until nothing but pure white sugar, pure ‘naked calories’, pure refined carbohydrate remain. In total, 64 food elements are destroyed in processing.
- Refined Sugar Leaves Toxic Acid Residue– Like animal products and refined grains, refined sugar is ‘acid forming’. This means that the body must take vital alkaline minerals, primarily calcium, from healthy bone cells to metabolize refined sugar. With the high consumption of acidic refined sugar and acidic animal products, so much calcium is removed from the bones that osteoporosis is often the result.
"Excess sugar consumption depresses phosphorus levels and causes a corresponding rise in free calcium. This happens because of how sugar affects the glands. Sugar raises levels of the parathyroid hormone, which causes urinary excretion of phosphorus and magnesium, which is needed to bind calcium into bone,” say the experts at Tree of Life Publishing. “So just eating a lot of sugar contributes to osteoporosis and eliminating sugar can help increase bone density.”
- Refined Sugar Contributes to Blood Sugar Disorders– Refined sugar in junk food and soft drinks and power drinks is concentrated far beyond what the human body was ever designed to metabolize at one time.
The New York Times reported on a lecture by Robert Lustig, a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, one of the best medical schools in the country. The lecture, “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” is a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.
- Refined Sugar Promotes Emotional Instability and Mental Illness – Studies show a strong link between refined sugar and depression and mental illness, as well as juvenile and adult criminal offenses.
In 2009, Psychology Today magazine reported that “Noted British psychiatric researcher Malcolm Peet has conducted a provocative cross-cultural analysis of the relationship between diet and mental illness. His primary finding may surprise you: a strong link between high sugar consumption and the risk of both depression and schizophrenia.”
- Refined Sugar Contributes to Heart Disease– Fat is not the only culprit in heart disease. High amounts of refined sugar cause insulin in the body to convert blood glucose into fatty acids and triglycerides. (Triglycerides are a type of blood fat.)
A story in the San Francisco Chronical reports, “Your body digests simple sugars and refined carbohydrates such as white rice and white flour rapidly, causing a spike in blood glucose. This causes the pancreas to release more insulin. When your body has more glucose than it needs for energy and has reached its storage capacity for glycogen, the increased insulin prompts the liver to convert glucose into triglycerides, which are then transported to fat cells. Between meals, your hormones release triglycerides for energy. If you’re eating more calories than your body needs, your body can store too much triglyceride according to MayoClinic.
- Refined Sugar Contains No Fiber – Refined sugar is a fiber-less non-food. It contributes to gastro-intestinal upset including constipation, flatulence and gall stone formation.
- Refined Sugar Leas To Addiction and Weight Gain – Refined sugar is highly caloric. The 172 pounds of sugar that the average American consumes each year contain 41,280 calories, which equals more than 10 pounds of human fat.
What Charlotte Gerson Has to Say About Sugar
Charlotte Gerson is the daughter of health pioneer Max Gerson and living proof of the power of Gerson Therapy, a healing modality related to diet. Diagnosed with cancer at age 12, she is now 90 years old. Here is what she says about sugar:“Sugar is a basic element in starchy food. However, processed sugar is a completely different matter. The sugar we purchase in the supermarket for personal consumption is processed sugar. This kind of sugar is heated up in chalk-milk, so that calcium and protein are extracted. After this process it becomes an alkaloid, destroying all vitamin content. “In the second phase, the sugar is mixed with acid chalk, carbonic gas, sulfuric dioxide and finally with natrium bicarbonate. The mixture is cooked and cooled off several times and thereafter crystallized and centrifuged. The dead mass is then treated with strontium hydroxide. “Subsequently, it arrives at the refinery where it is passed over chalk carbon to clean it. Dark coloring is removed by adding sulfuric acid, and then it is filtered with bone charcoal. Finally, it is colored with Indathreneblue or the highly toxic Ultramarine.”
How Refined Sugar Compromises the Immune System
If you remember nothing else about refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup, remember this: refined sugar compromises the immune system. In other words, when we consume refined sugar it prevents the immune system from protecting us as God designed it to. Agatha M. Thrash, M.D., in her book “Preventive Medicine,” shares that just 6 teaspoons of sugar, the amount in just one glazed donut, decreases the immune system’s ability to destroy bacteria by 25%, while 12 teaspoons of sugar, the approximate amount in one 12 ounce soft drink, decreases it ability to destroy bacteria by 60%, and 24 teaspoons of sugar decreasesthe immune system’s ability to destroy bacteria by 92% for more than 5 hours. If you came into contact with virus or bacteria within those 5 hours — just by touching a doorknob, shaking someone's hand, etc. — your immune system may be unable to fight off the invader. And we wonder why our children, as well as mom and dad, get sick.What I Choose to Do
Because I don’t want to get sick, I have not, to the best of my knowledge, consumed anything containing refined sugar or high fructose corn syrup in the past 37 years! The result? I haven’t had a cold or the flu in nearly four decades! And I haven’t received a flu shot in the past 37 years either — which means I have also avoided the mercury and toxins contained these shots! Most people do not realize that the toxic substances in a flu shot further compromise the immune system, as do all the vaccinations given to our children. And here’s something else about flu shots... Dr. Russell L. Blaylock is a retired neurosurgeon and author. He is a former clinical assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. He warns that if a senior citizen receives an annual flu shot for 5 consecutive years, they increase their potential for Alzheimer’s by 1,000%. Rather than take a toxic flu shot which can actually cause the flu, I keep my immune system strong and protected with the Hallelujah Diet.Now YOU Must Choose
Now that you know the dangers of consuming refined sugar, what are you going to do with that knowledge? Will you be a forgetful hearer or a doer?“But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own self. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straitway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.” ~ James 1:22-25Dear friend, I want for you what the Apostle John wished for Gaius:
“Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.” ~ 3 John 1:2God wants us to be as well in our physical bodies as we are in our spiritual souls! But we are not — and it’s not God’s fault. Because God warns us that:
“Be not deceived, God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” ~ Galatians 6:7These are irreversible natural laws, established by God, that govern the God-created physical bodies we each possess. Now consider what God has to say about these physical bodies:
“I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” ~ Psalm 139:14 “AND be not conformed to THIS WORLD: but be ye transformed by the RENEWING (reprogramming) OF YOUR MIND, that ye may PROVE what is that good, and acceptable and perfect, WILL OF GOD.” ~ Romans 12:2For the past 21 years, I have been urging Christians to “renew” their minds about how they look at food and how they nourish their physical bodies. Millions have done so, have changed their diets, and have seen their physical problems simply go away. Will you renew your mind so that you, too, can “Prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, WILL OF GOD?” Or will you continue to allow the world to dictate how you nourish your body? Each of us has a choice! Joshua challenged the Israelites in his day with these words:
“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, CHOOSE YOU THIS DAY whom ye shall serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the Gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” ~ Joshua 24:15That’s it for this time. Next week, the good Lord willing and if the creeks don’t rise too high, we will return with another Hallelujah Acres Health Tip. Trust you will join us and that you will share these Health Tips with friends and loved ones.
