Customer Reviews

Health for Godly Generations

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4 star:		(4)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

When I first received this treasure for review I quickly devoured it. I followed my husband around the house reading him choice paragraphs and waiting for him to answer with, "That's what you always say too, dear." But, instead, he gave me a look that said, "I guess this confirms the fact that I still can't have barbecue chips, right?

I tease my husband about his secret (or not so secret) love for potato chips, but he really does "get it." Especially as he's discovered that food really can and is supposed to taste good without being altered beyond recognition. It doesn't need chemicals and food dyes anymore than my daughters need Botox or facelifts (I didn't use myself as an example just in case you disagreed with me!).

Those of us who grew up on Frankenberry and Ding Dongs learned to love the taste of dirt. But, I've found that as we begin to eat right, we develop a taste for what is good, wholesome, and nourishing. Our palates "heal" and we learn to recognize and enjoy the "good stuff" from the pink sugared cardboard.

Renee has done a fantastic job of communicating the fact that what we believe about food matters. And what we do with what we believe will impact future generations. How we grow our food, and what happens to it from farm to table, not only affects our bodies, but in a very real way it impacts Christian culture.

"True beauty is sought as we cultivate food in the way God created, preparing it purely and wholesomely to nourish and strengthen us, and serving it lovingly at the family meal table."

"If `Culture is religion externalized,' as Henry Van Til proclaimed, and if diet preferences are an element of culture (which they are, since diet is not universal but is shaped by geography, people groups, and traditions), then all food practices, including harvest, preparation, nutrition, and consumption, are associated with the working outward of a people's religion....A distinctively Christian and reformed view of culture will likewise affect our food preparation and diet choices."

In a clear and engaging style, Renee speaks candidly about the importance of glorifying God by eating foods that help us to carry out the task of Kingdom building.

"Christians would not purposefully disable themselves to perform a necessary task; that would be ridiculous. However, we impair ourselves perpetually by eating things which will have detrimental effects on our bodies."

In addition to health and nourishment, she reminds us that God did not give us boring, colorless, or tasteless food. In Chapter 5, For Pleasure and Sustenance, Renee explores the beauty and pleasure of food. As well as discussing the blessing and importance of hospitality, she describes how God allows all of our senses to be employed in the enjoyment of a good meal.

Wonderful meals can bring pleasure to all the senses that God gave us. Food is heard sizzling or simmering on the stove or crunching in our mouths. Our eyes are met by the variety of colors, surfaces, shapes, and sizes that can be manipulated in the process of combining foods and presenting them on the table. Food is felt as it is harvested from a garden, sifted through the hands during preparation, or broken into pieces for eating. Aromas of food often greet entrants of a home even before they make their way to the dining table, and appetizing smells entice us toward what will soon be eaten. Taste of course, is the one sense dedicated entirely toward food and is the sense, in eating, that is most fundamental.

In addition to addressing some of the serious problems with food production today and confronting the issues that plague today's average American diet, Renee gives us hope. She offers practical advice on realistic ways we can improve our eating habits. She confirms that healthy doesn't mean misery and despair - quite the opposite.

Renee doesn't promote fad diets or offer us recipe we wouldn't feed the neighbor's cat. Instead she gives us ideas for moving forward. She gives us food charts that will help us make informed choices on what we're putting into our bodies and gives numerous practical helps to get us started. For instance, she has a helpful sugar chart that compares and informs us about the various kinds of sweeteners available, detailing the pros and cons of each. She offers a "suggested basic shopping list" and how to best care for purchased foods.

In a "down to earth" fashion, Renee talks about her own journey to healthy eating, admitting that her family has yet to completely eliminate white flour from their home (though she says they are close).

Health for Godly Generations also answers the following questions:
What do genetically modified foods do to our bodies?
Which foods contain what nutrition?
How can we, in a consumer-driven society, implement a diet that utilizes the bounty of God's goodness for our health?
What are the healthiest substitutions for commercial foods that have been nutritiously compromised?

Renee's advice here is excellent and true:

"Know the origin of every box, bag, bottle, carton, and can that goes from the field to the factory to your feast-table. Know, and be satisfied with, how food was grown, how it was made ready for consumption and packaging, and how it should be incorporated into your meals. The more you study health, the more the principles will become ingrained, and terms such as "natural," "pure," "super food," "vitamin-rich," and "wholesome" will be on your mind as you shop for and prepare meals for your family. The more progress you make toward healthy choices, the more exciting, and hopefully less-overwhelming, meal preparation will become."

In the book I co-authored with Jennie Chancey, Passionate Housewives Desperate for God we attempted to inspire homemakers to live each day and to love and serve their families to the glory of God. Renee' gives advice consistent with this call by inspiring the Christian woman(and others) to nourish herself and her family with foods that will better help them to glorify God and advance His Kingdom!

Health for Godly Generations is engaging, thorough, refreshing, and real. It is a useful resource as well as an inspiration. I highly recommend it!

I greatly appreciated the perspective in the book as to how we should be eating to please God, and care for the bodies He has given us. A good portion of the book is dedicated to showing the reasons why eating well is important from a Biblical perspective. The book takes care to show many defective aspects of the standard American diet, as well as many practical tips for how to incorporate wholesome foods into our diets. The extensive research presented throughout the book is interesting and informative. Many Christians do not realize the importance of proper diets, and this book presents the Biblical and practical reasons for eating healthy and whole foods, as well as practical ways to accomplish this. I do not believe the author's intention to create a strict list of diet do's and don't's derived directly from Scripture, but rather to explain the Bible's role in our food choices, and practical solutions to accomplish sensible eating habits that practice good stewardship of our God-given bodies. Overall, I greatly enjoyed this book and benefited from the information in it and have loaned and recommended it to several friends.

Renee Degroot has set in motion a discussion about Christians and food consumption that will be batted back and forth for years to come. While it's true that the Bible has much to say about how, what and why we should eat, many Christians strongly disagree on the specifics. Thanks, Renee, for cogently setting out to help us along this path...my husband, Joe, is slated to be one of the speakers at Vision Forum's food conference next summer. I look forward to seeing Renee and getting her to autograph my copy of her excellent book.

When I heard about Renee DeGroot's "Health for Godly Generations" I was very excited and bought it right away. I love this book!
My husband and I began our journey into healthful eating not long after our first child was born almost 38 years ago. I have read many books on health and nutrition, taught them in my childbirth classes for years and practiced them in our home. New things come and go, ingredients change, what's healthy changes in almost every decade. Through our journey we have come to see that it is actually simple, and needn't be hard or expensive.
In all my readings I have never found a book that ties what we put into our bodies with What as Christians is in our very hearts until I found Miss DeGroot's book. I had a moment when starting it when I symbolically hit my head thinking, "Why didn't I think of that!" It was so refreshing to read, to receive affirmation of what we've been doing for a long time, and conviction regarding what we haven't been doing as we should.
This book in no way ties biblical guidelines for nutrition to our salvation or our rightness before God. You can, should you choose eat bad food, still be saved. However as the scriptures teach, we all will reap what we sow. This is not to say that you will be in perfect health if you eat this way but may I dare say that you will be healthier than you would have been had you not followed biblical advice regarding what is the healthiest way to eat.
Touching someone's eating habits is like trampling their Golden Calf, which they, even unknowingly, idolize. I have been attacked by many, and even yelled at by a husband for answering his wife's question to me regarding nutrition. It is a touchy subject. Please, examine your heart and pray before you read this book. Honestly consider how eating more healthfully might please your heavenly Father and glorify Him in your body, His temple.
I think the arguments regarding nutrition must begin with, "What IS food?" God has blessed us with many varied, health-giving foods which man has adulterated, synthesized,making non-foods which are taste-altering, crave-causing imitations that will not only not offer health but which have the ability to rob it.
Nutrition is a journey. This book is an excellent way to begin yours or to support what you already believe. My thanks to the author!

Praise God that He is working in the hearts of His people to address this issue of food and eating! I couldn't be more excited!
This book is a help to those just starting out on the journey of applying Gods' principles of what real food is, and an exciting encouragement to those who have been saying these things for years, and have hope that others in the church are also seeing this as an issue to be addressed, and that Gods' Word is not silent here.
Renee does an excellent job here, and is obviously an exceptional young lady who desires to bring glory to God in all she does.
As someone who has been raised eating healthy foods, and helps others with health and nutritional issues, I recommend this book as a great source of balanced, Godly info on food. We are at such a disadvantage today as we have so much great info on health, but mostly from a new age perspective, and not a biblical approach. This book is one of the first I have heard of to deal with healthy eating as seen from a christians' perspective.
Purchase, read, and share, you will not be disappointed!

In Renee's book, Health For Godly Generations, she has some wonderful insight into the theology and theory of food from a Biblical perspective! Her biblically reformed world view is woven throughout the chapters as she discusses thoughts we need to consider in order to make wise choices - lifelong food decisions that will effect our health and ultimately how God will use us in kingdom work. (Note: God always can and will use us as He sees fit - healthy or otherwise; however, being good stewards of what He has given us is pleasing to our Lord).

The subtitle of her book, "A Reformational Perspective", reflects her view of applying the whole and authoritative counsel of Scripture into every day life, including what the Believer eats. While she acknowledges we are certainly not subject to the Old Testament dietary restrictions for our spiritual standing before God (salvation), she does exhort the reader that we should be set apart by our food choices, gleaning from scripture and wise counsel, how we should treat our bodies and the kinds of foods we consume.

If you're just beginning your food journey into healthy eating, this book would be an excellent resource to help you understand why it's so important. If you don't have a good grasp of why you're making dietary changes, when things get tough, you'll go back to the old ways of eating. But once you've read Renee's book, I believe your mind will have been transformed so that you see food differently than you ever have before. And it will have practical results in your life on a day to day basis.

For those of you homeschooling and hoping to teach a home economics course to your high school student, Health For Godly Generations would be an ideal text to use in your class. Since it covers some of the practical aspects as well as the theology, your student would have a biblically balanced course and know WHY they need to make healthy food choices.

Perhaps you've been eating healthy for years, but just need a refresher as to why it's so important to do so. Renee's book would be a great review and just might inspire you to take it up a notch! Or, at least not to throw in the towel. Healthy eating is for life, an Renee will whip you back into shape in no time! By chapter four, I realized I had slipped in a couple of areas and I needed to get back on track and remain committed to my health.

The only reason I gave this book 4 stars instead of 5 is because it is so academic that many will shy away from it after reading the first couple of chapters, but I encourage you to READ IT and press on. Renee pulls those academic thoughts together as you get deeper into the book!

What a blessing this book has been to our family!
Long have we looked for a book that focused on the biblical standards of healthy eating/living than our new agie books we own (though those books have been very helpful, the mindset of the authors is still somewhat evident in their writing and sometimes a bother to pass over some chapters at times).

This book was EXACTLY what our family had been praying for and were not disappointed! If anything, it was far more than we ever could have hoped for and have been greatly blessed by its contents and could read it over and over again!

A HIGHLY recommended book in our family library that you should definitely consider adding to yours! :)

two very thankful avid readers,

Donna & Miss Antoinette K.

*1 Corinthians 10:31*

One of the areas that I have needed to grow in wisdom has been our diet. For most of our lives our family has eaten a typical Standard American Diet. When we saw our parents' health decline several years ago, we made a few changes, mainly by making our own whole-wheat bread from freshly ground wheat berries. Oh, that was so good and satisfying!

Then about a year and a half ago something came along and rocked our world -- we discovered we needed to become a gluten-free family immediately. I felt like all of my kitchen knowledge flew out the window that day. Well, as much of a shock that it was, it has been a wonderful blessing, one that I am thankful for everyday. It set us on a path of healthier eating. Don't get me wrong it, wasn't without disappointments and fleeting moments of despair. But the Lord has been gracious to us and . . . what went from a study of what we could not eat any longer became a study of what are the healthiest and best foods that we could eat.

While I was reading all about gluten-free cooking a new book showed up last fall that caught my attention -- Health for Godly Generations by Renée DeGroot. I quickly bought a copy and read it cover to cover as fast as I could. This book has literally transformed my thinking about food and what we should be eating. It made me ask some very important questions about the food we were eating, such as . . .

Where does it come from?

How was it raised?

What treatment did the animals have while alive?

What chemicals were used?

What could those chemicals be doing to our health, short term and long term?

As a Christian - and a mother - these were moral questions that I could not ignore.

I began sharing what I was reading with my family and put this book on my daughters' reading list. After finishing Renee's book I began to read the books she recommended for further study. Some I already owned, but hadn't learned to appreciate them yet, others I was able to get through our library. This has become one of our favorite topics to learn about as a family.

I have already loaned this book out several times and I highly recommend it.

This book was written by a friend of a couple friends of mine. I have been delighted as I have been reading it; it truly has a very Biblical and balanced perspective. For those of you who are interested in improving your health but do not have the drive to study in-depth as I do, I would recommend that you read this book before you read any others in order to help you establish a solid Biblical philosophy of health upon which to build all your other knowledge and decisions in this area. It is very easy to read and understand as well as being very thorough and systematic.

Miss DeGroot promotes a more natural approach to health and yet still has an appreciation for the technological advances in modern medicine and an understanding of their proper place in our lives.
Reading this book has been so encouraging to me because she is in agreement with the same basic philosophies of health that I adhere to (those of the Maker's Diet, Weston A. Price Foundation, and Nourishing Traditions), and yet has what I have not seen in any of those, and that is a presuppositionally self conscious Biblically reformational perspective, as well as a generational and dominion mindset. Everything that she has said in her book is all that has been on my heart to say concerning reforming our lives in the area of health for some time now, thus I am so grateful that the Lord gave her the grace and resources to be able to articulate and put it in print; and much more eloquently than I ever could have!

Miss Mell, BHC (Biblical Health Coach) of Ye Are Not Your Own ([...])

In Health For Godly Generations, my friend Renee has laid out a Biblical foundation for all who desire to care for their bodily temples for God's glory, taking into account the long-term consequences of their diet. This well-written book is an excellent starting point for someone who desires to embark on the journey of eating healthfully and naturally, as God intended, so we that are well-equipped to serve the Lord!