Meditators munching on granola and Gurus drinking decaf cappuccinos are now common television images in the U.S. Savvy advertisers show their goods as being connected to spirituality, as their research found that “If it’s holy, it’s healthy” is the marketing ploy that sells products. Although, it is true that these clever ads increase sales, they also, unfortunately, contribute to our culture’s growing and misguided perceptions of spirituality.
Last month, a Google search using the terms “nutrition” and “spirituality” provided 1,440,000 hits, and an Amazon search delivered 879,730 results. Clearly spirituality/nutrition is a hot topic and a vehicle for sales. Yet just like the article on Spirituality & Physical Health, this current article may be startling to some readers, as the facts differ from what is commonly believed in this area.
One must delineate the impact of spirituality from that of religious practices to ensure we do not reach false conclusions. For example, not long ago, researchers at Loma Linda University in California studied the health of Seventh-Day Adventists in their state. They found this spiritual group was at lower risk of developing certain cancers and that Adventists outlive other Californians by about six years.
On the surface, it appears that Adventist’s spirituality has produced these results. Yet our conclusion may change after considering that Adventists ascribe to a vegetarian diet, exercise, rest, and abstinence from tobacco, alcohol and other drugs as part of their religious practices. From what we know about nutrition, exercise, and proper rest, it is likely that a non-spiritual person would add years onto life by doing the same things as do Adventists, and the “spiritual” part of the equation does nothing.
Let us now consider some relationships between nutrition and spirituality. Spirituality is arguably more prevalent, and has been around much longer than good nutrition. It is only through recent technologies that some of the world’s populations can transport foods, safely store them, fortify them, and make them accessible and affordable. Even now, good nutrition is not common for most of the 6.6 billion people on the planet. Furthermore, humans have faced poor nutrition for most of their collective histories. Hence, we find that much of human spirituality currently exists and developed under conditions of nutritional depravity.
Moreover, some spiritual development practices are contrary to sound nutrition. For example, judge the impact of not eating on the body/brain/mind. Prolonged fasting depletes the body’s stores of glucose, vitamins and minerals, causes the body to use its lipids and proteins for fuel, increases ketone bodies in the blood, and reduces metabolic functioning. This all forces a shift in the brain’s acquisition and delegation of energy, resulting in a marked difference in brain chemistry, perception, attention, and other elements of cognitive processing.
On the one hand, it appears that the impact of poor nutrition via fasting may be what is needed to access the brain’s spiritual centers. On the other hand, poor nutrition has been associated with poor mental health. In both cases, it is the brain’s response to the stress of fasting that engages different ways of functioning and processing information which apparently gives rise to the spiritual experience in some and illness in others.
Hence, we may conclude that good nutrition helps prepare the body/brain/mind for the successful connection to and integration of spiritual pathways in the brain that arise through the high stress demands of some spiritual techniques. Having a “well-kept brain” prior to subjecting it to stressful methods, such as prolonged fasting, is a rational step in “practicing safe spirituality.” Not doing so may exacerbate known or latent mental or other health issues.
Suffering one’s health may lead to spirituality, but spirituality obtained leads to improved health. It is not uncommon for dietary changes to take place after spiritual advances have been made. For example, obesity is a concern in the US. People may overeat due to desire, emotional conflict, unfulfillment, and so on. Some hallmarks of spiritual obtainment are an increase of positive emotions, a cessation of desires, and greater fulfillment in life. In my practice, some people reported an ease of dietary control, which resulted in weight loss and better health, through spirituality.
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