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Vital Valuable Victuals – Clean Meat
Lifesaving insight in revealing the distinction between clean and unclean animals to mankind came thousands of years before man learned the biological and scientific knowledge that help us validate these designations. This brief article is intended to demonstrate the wisdom of the Bible, the word of God in this matter. This article is by no means exhaustive but it is sufficiently conclusive by giving insight and understanding into the topic.
Omnivores
Omnivores will eat just about anything from grubs to rats and decaying plants to carcasses and some are known to eat feces. This often leads to them contracting worms, parasites and diseases. Furthermore omnivores generally have simple digestive systems with short intestines that do not thoroughly detoxify the food they eat and therefore toxins will enter their muscles and fat rendering their meat unfit and unsafe for human consumption.
Examples of omnivores are pigs, badgers, bears, coatis, civets, hedgehogs, opossums, skunks, sloths, squirrels, raccoons, chipmunks, mice, rats, chimpanzees and humans. These creatures would cause a health hazard if used as food by humans.
Carnivores
Carnivores in the wild generally eat the weak and diseased animals or their carcasses. They serve to clean the environment of health hazards and to weed out potential health hazards and from having them spread to various species.
The digestive system of carnivores is typically short and simple. They have only one stomach. This specialized digestive system is designed to process meat with relative ease but is not designed to process plant life.
Examples of carnivores are cats, hyenas, wolves and some bears. These animals are not meant for human consumption.
Herbivores
Herbivores eat mostly healthy plants. They do not eat meat but naturally choose a diet of grass, grains and other healthy plant life. Most humans know the health benefits of this as opposed to eating rotting flesh for example.
Clean land animals, according to the Bible, are both herbivores and ruminants, they chew the cud. Remember what mom said, chew your food. Ruminants chew their food twice over. This makes for better digestion. Ruminants have a complex multi stomach or four chamber stomach digestive system. The food they eat is fermented before it reaches the true or main stomach. This process is called foregut fermentation. They also have very long intestines that enables them to further digest their food. This specialized digestive system renders their meat safe and healthy for human consumption. Clean animals also have split hooves.
Examples of God designated clean ruminants are; cattle, sheep, deer and goats.
Examples of herbivores that are not clean according to the Bible are horses, elephants and rabbits. These animals use a digestive system called hindgut fermentation which is not as effective as foregut fermentation and allows certain volatile fatty acids to be absorbed into the blood and into their flesh which makes them not appropriate for human consumption. High concentrations of certain fatty acids and volatile fatty acids can cause cell death via apoptosis or, when concentrations are greater, necrosis in the consumer. There may also well be other reasons why these animals are designated unclean and not fit for human consumption.
These herbivores are most likely among the least troublesome of the unclean animals that the Bible tells us not to eat. God tells us not to eat pig several times in the Bible for example. (Leviticus 11:7, Deuteronomy 14:8, Isaiah 65:4, 66:3, 17)
Similarly clean fish and clean birds can be compared to unclean sea creatures and unclean birds.
Notice: Philadelphia has been using pigs to detoxify their garbage and sewage for a hundred years; a clam can detoxify dozens of gallons of sea water daily; and vultures and insects clean up the great outdoors by consuming decaying carcasses and preventing the spread of disease.
What happens to the toxins in these scavengers and cleaners after they eat and later once they die?
Fish with scales and fins are clean food according to the Word of God. Toxins are found within the head, liver and intestines of fish. It is therefore unsafe to eat these parts of fish. The more mankind pollutes the environment the more pollutants get created and the more toxic becomes our food chain. Many pollutants will detoxify in time but with increasing levels of pollutants this process becomes less apparent.
Shellfish
Let’s look at shellfish as examples of the nature of the problems that confront man in consuming healthy life sustaining food.
Shellfish, including shrimp, prawns, oysters, clams and mussels, are found in both freshwater and sea water. These invariably contain potent marine toxins which are known to cause food poisoning.
Shellfish consume toxin~producing algae, for example, which are passed on to humans when eaten. These marine toxins are called domoic acid, okadaic acid, brevetoxins, and saxitoxin. They can cause a range of respiratory, gastrointestinal, and neurological symptoms, and in some cases can be fatal when eaten in sufficient quantities or by sensitive individuals.
These marine toxins are caused by ingesting bacteria and viruses from contaminated algae or marine organisms in the surrounding water. These toxins aren’t deactivated by heat, so cooking shellfish is not enough to prevent poisoning.
Some people, such as restaurant patrons and sea food salesman, claim that if shellfish are raised in clean water they will not contain toxins and are therefore perfectly safe to eat. Look at clams for example. They are filter feeders. They pump water through their digestive system and constantly filter out whatever is in it including contaminants and toxins. This is what they were designed to do. They are a cleaning mechanism for the rivers, lakes and oceans of the world. In so doing their bodies accumulate toxins and pollutants. Clams can live for years, some species for decades and even distant sources of pollution can produce high levels of toxins inside them over periods of time. So eating clams from seemingly non polluted water could still be dangerous.
Cooking shellfish or freezing them does not destroy the toxins.
The CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimates that each year roughly 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases.
Here is some information found on the CDC website:
Shellfish such as mussels, oysters, clams, scallops, and cockles are filter~feeding bivalve mollusks that contain potent poisonous toxins. Some toxins originate in small marine organisms (dinoflagellates or diatoms) that get concentrated in shellfish.
Paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) is the most common and most severe form of shellfish poisoning. PSP is caused by eating shellfish contaminated with saxitoxins produced by dinoflagellates from Aelxandrium, Pyrodinium, and Gymnodinium genera. Symptoms usually appear 30 to 60 minutes after eating toxic shellfish and include numbness and tingling of the face, lips, tongue, arms, and legs. There may be headache, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Severe cases are associated with ingestion of large doses of toxin and clinical features such as ataxia, dysphagia, mental status changes, flaccid paralysis, and respiratory failure occur. The case~fatality ratio is dependent on the availability of modern medical care, including mechanical ventilation. The death rate may be particularly high in children.
I’m not making this stuff up. Like I said that was from the CDC website, www.cdc.gov/.
Although the food supply in the United States is probably one of the safest in the world, anyone can get food poisoning.
Food poisoning is not spread from one individual to another but through direct contact with the causative bacteria, viruses, or other toxins in consumed food.
Toxins remain in the food chain. Be safe, eat clean, God clean.
For information on clean and unclean meat see Leviticus chapter 11, also see United Church of God publications, www.ucg.org/tags/clean~and~unclean~meats.
Leviticus 11:46 and 47 (GNB)
This, then, is the law about animals and birds, about everything that lives in the water, and everything that moves on the ground. You must be careful to distinguish between what is ritually clean and unclean, between animals that may be eaten and those that may not.
Leviticus 20:25 (GNB)
So then, you must make a clear distinction between animals and birds that are ritually clean and those that are not. Do not eat unclean animals or birds. I have declared them unclean, and eating them would make you unclean.
2016 Jacques Gauvin
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