Update, 12/11/2024: The Sabbatical Diet’s inventor, Robert Robinson, died in September 2021 of Covid. Insert your own morbid jokes here about how at least his diet didn’t kill him.
I get a daily email newsletter from Christianity Today, which is great because for a long time I couldn’t afford the magazine, and the newsletter had the content plus a few extras. The guy who does their weblog is great at gleaning every last religion story off the internet and posting them. That’s a full-time job in itself.
The ads that come with the newsletter are another thing.
There’s some schmuck who’s currently promoting what he calls the Sabbatical Diet. In a nutshell, it’s “eat like a king six mornings per week and like a pauper one morning per week.” His words. His book goes into further detail, his website offers testimonials, and at first glance it looks like a lot of bad science. If you follow the program you’ll “achieve perfect body structure, slow aging and reverse and improve the Syndrome X Diseases (Diabetes Mellitus, Hypertension, High Cholesterol, Artherosclerosis)”. Again, his words; he’s supposedly a doctor but he can’t spell arteriosclerosis. Achieve perfect body structure? Slow aging? Next he’ll be telling us that we’ll turn white and delightsome.
Bad science; and bad scripture too. He has a scripture page in which he mangles a few verses in order to back his claims. Most of it comes from Exodus 16, and some poorly interpreted bits of Acts 11; if I went into the other passages I would just get more annoyed, so I’ll stick to those bits.
Exodus 16 is where God tells Moses he’s going to feed the Israelis “bread from heaven,” which they rename “what’s that?” or manna. Every day they could gather a liter per person; on Friday they had to gather two liters because God was taking Saturday off. If they kept any overnight, it went bad. Manna apparently still can be found in the desert, but unlike Exodus, it doesn’t go bad overnight, and you can gather it on Saturdays.
This doesn’t strike me as eating like a king: It’s eating a loaf of bread every day, and it’s the same thing every day, which is why the Israelis eventually got to grumbling. You won’t starve, but you won’t look forward to mealtimes either. Kings historically have eaten themselves stupid. Plus, the Israelis had the same thing on Saturday—so technically the Exodus 16 diet is eating like a pauper daily. But it’s better than starvation, and it was meant to condition the Israelis to be dependent on Y
Acts 11 is where Peter has a vision of a sheetful of non-kosher animals, which he’s instructed to kill and eat, and where he rightly says, “No.” This passage is not about how it’s okay for Christians to violate the kosher laws; it’s about how “what God has made kosher, you must not call non-kosher.” [11.9] God was conditioning Peter to preach the gospel to the gentiles—and according to then-current custom, gentiles were treated as if they were unclean, but God never said they were. He never said any such thing. The non-kosher animals were an object lesson. It's only because Christians can’t control our gluttony that this passage has been reinterpreted to say we can now eat whatever we want. (Don’t believe me? How many pastors do you know that aren’t overweight?)
That said, the Sabbatical Diet guy misinterprets Acts 11 and says we don’t have to eat kosher—as if God meant for us to eat dog and vulture and blood puddings—and says if he didn’t mean any such thing, he used a very poor example to make a spiritual statement. Apparently this guy doesn’t realize sometimes God uses the outrageous to get our attention; he must not have read the prophets nor Jesus’s parables.
If one wants to actually read the bible and find out what it says about diet, one cannot help but return to the kosher laws. You want to find a biblical diet? That’s it. Anything else is an artificial construction, meant to either sell books or get around the bible. This guy is doing both, and promising some rather miraculous results if you follow it.
The bible never promises miraculous health if you eat kosher; it just says “Don’t,” and if you don’t have the faith to follow that commandment, then why should you trust some nutjob who writes a diet book?