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Why Are Pigs Unclean or Unhealthy – Page 2
So we find that clean and unclean foods are simply foods that God is saying are healthy or unhealthy for our bodies. For instance, when God all through scripture calls a pig an abomination, then it will never cease to be an abomination and God has a very good reason for calling it as such.
A pig for instance will eat anything including its own urine and faeces, rotting vegetables, maggots and even the decaying and rotting flesh of other animals. If that has not turned your stomach, they will also eat cancerous growths from other animals including other pigs. To make matters worse, the fat of a pig absorbs all these poisons like a sponge. It is also known that the flesh of a pig can be up to thirty times more toxic than beef, and also has twice as much fat as beef. So eating pork is far more likely to lead to high cholesterol levels and a far greater increased risk of heart attack or cancer. And as mentioned on the previous page, pigs have very high histamine levels and sulphur content that lead to high blood acidity and osteoporosis.
A pig is so poisonous that God gave the pig a canal that runs down each leg with an outlet in the bottom of the foot, which oozes all the pus and filth that the pigs system is not able to deal with fast enough, and some of this pus also passes into its own flesh.
The pig cannot sweat or perspire like other mammals either so the toxins that would otherwise be sweated out of the animal remain within the body and flesh of the pig. The swine carries at least 30 diseases which can be easily passed to humans. Now you know why God commanded that we should not even touch their carcases. (Leviticus 11:8)
Farmers will often enclose pigs around the nest of a rattlesnake because they will eat the snakes and will not die even if they are bitten. Pigs and swine are so poisonous that it is extremely hard to kill them with many poisons even as deadly as strychnine.
After a pig is slaughtered, worms and insects take to its flesh far quicker than the flesh of other animals. In just a few days, the flesh of a swine is full of worms. Pigs and swine carry more than a dozen parasites such as trichinae, tapeworms and flukes and are contaminated with high levels of salmonella and other harmful bacteria. There is no safe temperature their flesh can be cooked at to ensure that all these parasites and eggs will be killed. The trichinae parasite is microscopic and once eaten can become lodged in your intestines, muscles and the spinal cord or brain. The end result is the disease known as trichinosis. There are often no symptoms, but when there are, they are commonly mistaken for other serious diseases such as MS, meningitis, gastritis, typhoid, rheumatism, arthritis, gall bladder or acute alcoholism.
There are many more biological reasons why pigs and swine should not be eaten but a true Christian should need only one, and that is because God prohibited it. “you shall not eat of their flesh, nor touch their dead carcase.” Leviticus 11:7-8, Deuteronomy 14:8. Those who erroneously say Christ abolished the law of unclean foods such as eating pork are motivated by their stomach and not Scripture. The problems with eating pork are biological and Jesus Christ never changed the laws of biology.
There are just as many problems with the many other creatures that God has informed us are unclean (unhealthy) and hence we need to trust that God has very good reasons for the foods he has instructed us not to eat.
Does the Bible recommend that we be vegetarians? It doesn’t have anything specific to say on that subject. But it is clear that the first diet given to man was vegetarian, that meat was allowed after the flood until present times, and that in the New Earth the diet will be vegetarian. Apparently, God’s ideal diet for us is a vegetarian diet. And just looking at human physiology it is evident that the body He created for us to use functions best on plant-based materials rather than animal-based materials.
Our teeth are designed like those of vegetarian animals – short, more designed for chewing than tearing at food. Our intestines are very long, designed for the passage of vegetation rather than flesh. (Vegetarian animals’ digestive tracts can handle plant material which makes its way down the passages over days. Flesh-eating animals’ digestive systems are short, as meat tends to putrify as it digests and should not stay in the body too long.)
Is there any scientific study which compares people on various diets, and looks at the diseases they suffer? Is there really any significant benefit of one diet over another?
The Adventist Health Studies have been the longest-running studies on diet. SDA's were chosen for the studies because they have been advocating the Biblical dietary standards for well over a century. The findings of these health studies have been very interesting.
Adventist men live on average 7.3 years longer and Adventist women live 4.4 years longer than others in the same population.
Five lifestyle choices (not smoking, eating a plant-based diet, eating nuts several times per week, regular exercise and maintaining normal weight), as promoted and practiced by Adventists for more than 100 years, increase life span by up to ten years.
Fruits and vegetables lowered the risk of heart disease and cancer dramatically.
- Increasing consumption of red and white meat was associated with an increased risk of colon cancer. But eating legumes was protective.
- Eating nuts several times a week reduces risk of heart attack by up to 50%.
- Eating whole meal bread instead of white bread reduced nonfatal heart attack risk by 45%.
- Drinking 5 or more glasses of water a day may reduce heart disease by 50%.
- Men who had a high consumption of tomatoes reduced their risk of prostate cancer by 40%.
- Drinking soy milk more than once daily may reduce prostate cancer risk by 70%.
In every case, vegetarians had a lower risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and arthritis, than non-vegetarians.
The health laws which God gave to His people so long ago are still valid. The proof of the pudding is in the eating – those observing these rules today live longer, more healthful lives than others in the same communities who do not observe these health rules.
Clean and Unclean food list - Page 3