Don’t Rebuild What Christ Fulfilled: The Case Against “Bible Diets”

With the growing popularity of the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement alongside a growing distrust of standard Western fare and medical advice, many Christians are rethinking their approach to food. For a Western church long known for pre-service donuts and cookies, the shift toward more intentional eating is a welcome development.

But in a world saturated with conflicting nutrition advice, where should faithful Christians turn? What should a Christian diet actually look like?

Some have suggested we look to the Bible as a kind of field manual for nutrition. John the Baptist’s locusts and honey can be reimagined as a call to ancestral eating. The forbidden fruit of Eden becomes a parable against sugar. The book of Daniel becomes less about God’s sovereign faithfulness and more a justification for plant-based diets or meat fasts. Even Paul’s words about the body as a temple are sometimes repurposed into a transactional wellness mantra, as if the Holy Spirit needs better housing. In each case, Scripture begins to resemble a cafeteria tray of proof-texts—cherry-picked out of context to validate one nutritional trend or another.

While researching my own book Nourished by Design, I encountered what is perhaps the most widespread and theologically significant misuse of Scripture in the Christian health space—the idea that the Levitical dietary laws are timeless health prescriptions. Prominent voices like Dr. Josh Axe and Jordan Rubin, with a combined half century as influential figures in the faith-based wellness community, have long argued that God gave these laws not primarily for ceremonial or covenantal purposes, but to protect Israel from biologically inferior or disease-prone foods centuries before modern science could validate such concerns. In their new book, The Biblio Diet, they continue to suggest that Christians today should also abstain from so-called “unclean” foods like pork and shellfish—that these laws are just as relevant today as they were for ancient Israel.

In this essay, I’ll argue that the well-intentioned “health and wellness” view of the Levitical dietary laws is misguided and theologically dangerous, hiding their true aim: to foreshadow Christ and the fulfillment of God’s covenant.

The Purposes of the Dietary Laws

To evaluate the relatively novel claim that the Levitical dietary laws offer timeless health guidance, we must first understand how they have been historically understood. What function did these food laws serve in Israel’s covenantal life, and how did they fit within the broader framework of God’s relationship with his people? Answering these questions is essential for evaluating whether Christ’s fulfillment of the law rendered these commands obsolete, or whether they still carry enduring relevance for Christians under the banner of wellness.

In short, the Mosaic dietary prescriptions have typically been understood to have had three primary purposes:

First, the laws were intended to separate the Jews from their pagan neighbors as God’s people, serving as a sign of God’s covenant and a visible marker of distinctiveness. As Thomas Aquinas put it, the laws helped “withdraw the people from the fellowship of idolators” through daily practices that set them apart as exclusively devoted to the LORD.

Second, the laws cultivated obedience. John Calvin observed that “God exercised them in the observance of trifling things, that He might accustom them to obedience in greater things.” In other words, even small commands whose rationale might be mysterious or arbitrary were meant to train the heart for trust and submission in all areas of life.

Third, the dietary laws instilled an embodied sense of holiness, reminding Israel that even the most routine acts, like eating, were to be governed by reverence for a holy God and received from him with gratitude.

If we interpret the Old Testament in light of the New Testament (as we’ll discuss more below), we can recognize that hints about the specific and temporary purposes of the dietary laws are already embedded in the Old Testament text. Leviticus 20, for example, declares the rationale for the fundamental separation between clean and unclean: “I am the Lord your God, who has separated you from the peoples. You shall therefore separate the clean beast from the unclean … You shall be holy to me, for I the Lord am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine” (Lev. 20:25–26). Notably, health isn’t mentioned.

The language of Leviticus 11 further underscores the ceremonial and (from our perspective) temporary nature of these laws. Pigs are not described as inherently unclean, but as “unclean to you” (Lev. 11:7). Similarly, fish without fins or scales are said to be “detestable to you” (Lev. 11:12). The Hebrew word for “detestable” here is sheqets, a term almost exclusively used in the context of ceremonially unclean animals that cause ritual impurity.

This stands in contrast to the timeless moral prohibitions elsewhere in the Torah. For example, Leviticus 18:22 states, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” Here, there is no qualifier (“to you”) attached to the word “abomination,” which is translated from the Hebrew word toʿevah—a word that is commonly used to describe universally binding moral offenses, not ceremonial or ritual regulations.

The Consequences of the “Health and Wellness” View

But while it’s clear that Scripture does not cite health as the reason for the dietary laws, what’s the harm in adding health to the list? After all, pigs are notoriously filthy animals and known carriers of disease, while ruminant animals like cattle have complex digestive systems that make their meat both resistant to spoilage and highly nutritious. Certainly, God knew these biological realities when he gave the food laws.

But this line of reasoning breaks down when we consider a simple biblical fact: the New Testament explicitly overturns the clean/unclean food distinctions. If these laws were based on timeless biological principles, then their abrogation in the New Testament would be, at best, confusing and, at worst, harmful. Yet Scripture is unambiguous.

Consider Paul’s words in Romans 14:14: “I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself.” A few verses later, he writes, “Everything is indeed clean.” Or consider Mark 7:19, where, after Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for elevating ritual handwashing, he declares that it is not what goes into a person that defiles them. Mark then adds an interpretive comment: “Thus he declared all foods clean.”

Some proponents of the health-and-wellness view interpret Mark’s decisive comment—“Thus he declared all foods clean”—through a more literal rendering, “cleansing all foods.” They suggest Jesus may have been referring obliquely to the human body’s ability to neutralize pathogens through digestion. But this already fragile interpretation falls apart when we consider Acts 10, where Peter—who was likely the primary source for Mark’s Gospel—is given a vision of a sheet filled with unclean animals. When Peter refuses to eat, citing his deeply engrained observance of the Mosaic dietary laws, God replies, “What God has made clean, do not call common.” The same vocabulary for “clean” and “defiled” appears in both Mark 7 and Acts 10, reinforcing the same message: Jesus fulfilled the dietary laws, which are no longer binding on his people. What was once ritually unclean is now declared clean through his finished work on the cross.

To ignore or sidestep this truth is not a minor theological oversight. It distorts the purpose of Christ’s coming. He did not arrive to perpetuate the ceremonial structures of the Old Covenant but to fulfill them—to inaugurate a new era of holiness and freedom, grounded not in external ritual action but in the inward transforming power of the gospel. As the author of Hebrews reminds us, the Old Covenant is now “obsolete” and “ready to vanish away” (Heb. 8:13).

The Limits of the Health Argument

Ironically, it’s only when we set aside the assumption that the dietary laws were based on timeless health principles that we can evaluate the healthfulness of various animals more clearly. If God’s classifications of clean and unclean were rooted in objective nutritional science, we would expect a consistent pattern in which ceremonially clean animals are always healthier than unclean ones. But this isn’t the case. For instance, chickens (classified as clean under the law) are single-stomached scavengers like pigs. Both pork and chicken are frequently implicated in the spread of foodborne illnesses, and both produce meat that varies significantly in nutritional quality depending on diet and environment.

On the flip side, consider the camel: though deemed unclean in Leviticus, it shares many biological similarities with cattle and plays a vital nutritional role in many cultures today. Therefore, while popular wellness interpretations often reduce the Levitical food laws to a simple dichotomy—cattle and lamb as clean and “healthy,” pork and shellfish as unclean and “unhealthy”—a more nuanced view forces us to recognize that healthfulness does not consistently align with ritual cleanliness. It was never meant to point to health. It was meant to point to our need of a Healer.

Recovering a Christian Posture Toward Food

While it’s often tempting to read the Bible as a health and wellness guide, Christians don’t need a “Bible diet.” Our hope is not in resurrecting an ancient eating plan but rather in the One who fulfilled every requirement of the law and made us free to eat. Because Christ has accomplished all righteousness, we are free to receive God’s good gifts with gratitude and joy.

One of the chief lessons the dietary laws still impress upon us is that God’s people are called to be distinct in how we approach food. But this distinction has nothing to do with food codes and everything to do with the posture of our hearts. Christians receive food as a gift from our Father, dedicate our bodies in praise to the Lord who redeemed us, and use our strength in loving service to our neighbors. In this way, every meal becomes a small rehearsal of the gospel: a daily act of thanksgiving that nourishes both body and soul and directs our hearts to the One who is himself our true food and drink.