Why alcohol is still the most dangerous drug

It’s worth noting that thousands of people each year crash their cars, killing hundreds each year, because of heart attacks or strokes while driving. So yes, there are more violent cases out there related to gluttony, actually. Keep in mind also that nobody here is defending drunkenness, and that nobody ever came home and beat his wife and kids because he had a single serving off wine, or swerved all over the road and killed Grandma and the kids on their way to church because he had one beer.

Regarding Dr. Bauder’s column on the sin of gluttony, it is worth noting that obesity was very, very dangerous prior to John Deere, Henry Ford, Willis Carrier, and Norman Borlaug. Eating too much of your crop too early meant you might starve before the next harvest, excess fat after the spring grain harvests could lead to heat stroke in the summer, and would lead to joint issues because you had to walk everywhere and do physical work. You don’t hear as much about it in Scripture because people knew it had deadly consequences.

Rather, to do a good Biblical analysis of gluttony and its results of obesity/etc.., you’ve got to view it in light of the virtue/spiritual fruit of self-control and the simple question of whether, as Bauder hints, self-control in terms of diet might be related to self-control in other areas, and also whether one can be a glutton and exercise his callings to work and family if he’s carrying the signature of gluttony—that 50-100 extra lbs.

Given that other problems we see in the church include accumulation of things (e.g. our storage spaces), debt, and inability to stay away from temptations like pornography, I have a hard time denying that self-control at the dinner table might be incredibly helpful to fellow believers in ways we haven’t even imagined. Moreover, since studies indicate that the cost of gluttony/obesity can be an average of 14-20 years of one’s life, I also think it’s hard to deny that church members are indeed paying a heavy, heavy price for this lack of self-control.

It’s worth noting that thousands of people each year crash their cars, killing hundreds each year, because of heart attacks or strokes while driving.So yes, there are more violent cases out there related to gluttony, actually.

1. Can you note this for us by way of statistics?
2. Why do you think God didn’t treat alcohol and obesity with the same level of equivocation and warning as you do?
3. Why, when alcohol is brought up, is there a seemingly Pavlovian response of bringing up food/overeating/gluttony?

[Larry]

It’s worth noting that thousands of people each year crash their cars, killing hundreds each year, because of heart attacks or strokes while driving.So yes, there are more violent cases out there related to gluttony, actually.

1. Can you note this for us by way of statistics?
2. Why do you think God didn’t treat alcohol and obesity with the same level of equivocation and warning as you do?
3. Why, when alcohol is brought up, is there a seemingly Pavlovian response of bringing up food/overeating/gluttony?

1. Here’s a study from Finland. Really, in a country where hundreds of thousands die annually from heart disease, why would we be surprised at heart attacks getting other people killed in motor vehicle accidents? It doesn’t get the press that DUI does, but it occurs. Here’s another.

2. See comment #31. Prior to AC, motor vehicles, and the green revolution, obesity and gluttony were likely to lead to starvation and death from things like heat stroke. You can see this in older literature where there is a huge consciousness of the consequences of eating too much. The Bible doesn’t make a big deal of it because it wasn’t a terribly common sin in those days, being rather self-punishing. In contrast, the New Testament warns about drunkenness a fair amount because of Greek wine culture—there was a tremendous amount of it out there, as well as a strong culture of getting drunk among the pagans. It has everything to do with what the Bible writers had to address.

3. For starters, because drunkenness is really a subset of gluttony, and for that reason is mentioned hand in hand with gluttony in Proverbs 23, Matthew 11, and Luke 7. Going on, it kills about 7.5x more people than does alcohol, and is especially prevalent among fundamentalists. In other words, it’s the same lack (Galatians 5:22-3) of self-control as characterizes drunkenness, and since it’s far more prevalent, you get far more “bang for the buck” warning about gluttony than about drunkenness. I’d even argue that if you address gluttony, you effectively address drunkenness as well while dealing with other problem behaviors born of a lack of self-control.

1. That doesn’t support your claim that there are more violent cases related to gluttony. One of your links actually disproves you since it says that medical causes other than alcoholism are a factor in 5-10% of accidents whereas 50-75% of severe and fatal accidents involve alcohol. The idea that more serious and fatal accidents are caused by medical issues over alcohol doesn’t ring true.
2. Creative, but unconvincing. Alcoholism was also self-punishing and yet there are strong warnings against drunkenness with lesser warnings against overeating. Which brings us back to the original question.
3. Again, creative, but unconvincing on several fronts. To say it kills 7.5x more people isn’t helpful because it isn’t a proper comparison. Nor is there any evidence that gluttony is “especially prevalent among fundamentalists.” That’s just a silly claim. It seems more likely that there is a softness towards alcohol and a desire to prove that even teetotalers have sin issues (which is undisputed). It’s just a wierd thing.

Your final sentence is actually your good one.

[Bert Perry]

The Bible doesn’t make a big deal of it because it wasn’t a terribly common sin in those days, being rather self-punishing. In contrast, the New Testament warns about drunkenness a fair amount because of Greek wine culture—there was a tremendous amount of it out there, as well as a strong culture of getting drunk among the pagans. It has everything to do with what the Bible writers had to address.

Sounds like you are admitting to willingly putting words into God’s mouth. God didn’t make a big deal of it maybe because … it isn’t a big deal (where alcohol certainly was, and is). The Bible writers “addressed” exactly what God inspired them to address, which is all part of the sum which is all we need for life and for godly living. Looking back at the last time we discussed this topic, I made similar accusations about your manner of handling scripture as I tried to understand how you came to different conclusions than others. Perhaps we are seeing more of that here, where you are willing to personally somehow adjust scripture to our culture rather than let it speak directly to what it says and doesn’t say.

I completely agree with Larry’s conclusion about that paragraph:

[Larry]

Creative, but unconvincing.

I also completely agree with Larry that

[Larry]

Your final sentence is actually your good one.

If you like to eat, you should learn to exercise more. If you exercise a lot, you can eat a lot without gaining weight. If you eat a lot and exercise a lot, you should also reduce / eliminate refined sugars. Oh, and it’s okay to have a pint or two at the end of your half marathon. The end.

[T Howard]

If you like to eat, you should learn to exercise more. If you exercise a lot, you can eat a lot without gaining weight. If you eat a lot and exercise a lot, you should also reduce / eliminate refined sugars. Oh, and it’s okay to have a pint or two at the end of your half marathon. The end.

Do you equate gluttony with weight gain?

Perhaps before more is said regarding gluttony we should agree on the definition of gluttony. Bert has made argument in the past in this regard.

https://sharperiron.org/comment/99048#comment-99048

[Bert Perry]

As a rule, when people argue “oh, there are all these other ways to gain weight than overeating”,that’s usually a dodge to get around the fact that they’re fairly overweight. Very often, it’s visible at a glance, and at other times, the old 1970s “gut check” can work wonders; take off your shirt, pinch your skin to the side of your navel, and tell me how thick that fold is. Can you pinch an inch? If you can, you’ve got some weight to lose.

But I’m not convinced that gluttons are all an inch-pinched+ overweight. For example, bulimiacs are likely gluttons, yet their practices keep them skinny. Bauder explores the definition in his Food Pharisees? post yesterday:

[Kevin T. Bauder]

Second, the Hebrew terms translated glutton and gluttony have the idea of making light of something, and by implication squandering it. These words are not first and foremost about eating. For the Old Testament writers, gluttony was associated with bad companions, dissipation, rebellion, and especially drunkenness. The danger for the glutton was not growing too fat, but being left in poverty when all resources had been squandered.

The New Testament also associates gluttony with bad companions and drunkenness. This is the point of the charge that the Pharisees leveled against Jesus (Matt. 11:19). Their evidence was not that Jesus had been observed overeating, but that he kept company with publicans and sinners. Interestingly, the New Testament term for a glutton, phagos, simply means an eater, not necessarily an excessive one. Not the quantity, but the conditions of the eating are determinative. Other than Jesus, the only New Testament individuals to be accused of gluttony were the Cretans who, according to one of their own poets, were habitually “liars, vicious animals, lazy eaters” (Titus 1:12). The notion of an eater does not stand on its own, but in connection with a complex of behaviors.

In short, the biblical vision of gluttony is not one that revolves around overeating or being overweight. A biblical glutton is a wastrel, a spendthrift, and a sluggard whose friends are of the worst sort and who pits riotous, wanton living against God’s righteousness. In short, a biblical glutton is a lawless person whose life revolves around sensual pleasures, who substance is spent on those pleasures, who lacks the self-control to deny himself those pleasures, and who does not care what they cost.

So the argument about biblical gluttony cannot move forward without us agreeing on what the sin of gluttony actually is.

There are no clear Biblical warnings concerning the deadly results obesity and being overweight. It also is absolutely silent on cigarette smoking.

1. I never said that there were MORE deaths on the highway due to gluttony. I was pointing out that the notion that “nobody ever kills a bunch of people on the highway from having too many Big Macs” is false.

2. Yes, alcohol can kill as well, but prior to Henry Ford, it tended (and still tends to except for vehicle accidents and such) kill over a period of years to decades from things like cirrhosis. Acute alcohol poisoning was rare at the time because it’s simply hard to keep the glass going to your lips when you’re already very drunk. For a man my size, it takes about a gallon of ordinary wine, and 40% of that gets you to twice the legal limit for driving.

In contrast, eating too much of your grain over the summer can kill you by next spring, and carrying too much weight can kill you during the summer if you’re in a Mediterranean climate from heat stroke. So the ancients—really most people prior to 1900 or so—had a consciousness about gluttony so they don’t need to be told. That’s why being a “glutton and a drunkard” was a capital offense in the Mosaic law—the wicked son was, by gluttony, risking the lives of his family members.

3. Take a look around a typical fundamental church if you doubt that gluttony is a very typical sin in our circles. How many gigantic guts do we have to see before we decide that people are eating too much? How many cases of heart disease and diabetes do we need to pray for each Wednesday before we decide this is a big problem? For that matter, how much sugar do we need to pump into kids in AWANA and VBS before we decide we’ve got a very bad relationship with food?

And yes, I stand by the notion, endorsed by none less by the Mayo Clinic, that as a rule, obesity is a consequence of eating more calories than you’re using. Yes, there are gluttonous bulimics and people with tapeworms, I suppose, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule.

[Bert Perry]

1. I never said that there were MORE deaths on the highway due to gluttony. I was pointing out that the notion that “nobody ever kills a bunch of people on the highway from having too many Big Macs” is false.

And other similar quotes by others …

Of course, none of our reasoning should include how people die and when, because if we truly believe in God’s sovereignty, then time, place, and circumstances surrounding the death really are irrelevant.

None of us believes drunkenness is permitted. We all also agree that gluttony, whatever that actually means (definition is clearly still in question), is condemned. So degrees of each don’t matter.

Bert believes beverage alcohol is a blessing, others do not. I agree with Bert in spirit that if a person makes consuming food or beverage a god, they are in sin. I disagree with him that the consequences of overeating are worse than the consequences of over drinking alcohol.

I think this entire line of conversation has digressed into one of endless genealogies.

I would never separate from Bert over this particular difference in opinion. My concern that I have tried to explore with him is limited to trying to understand how he interprets scripture because his conclusions are so very different. We all read the same Bible, we all claim sola scriptura, yet our actual applications of the Word vary pretty significantly.

Bert, Not to remind you about what you said but, well, to remind you about what you said:

It’s worth noting that thousands of people each year crash their cars, killing hundreds each year, because of heart attacks or strokes while driving. So yes, there are more violent cases out there related to gluttony, actually.

As for whether gluttony is “especially prevalent among fundamentalists” the answer is no. It’s not especially prevalent. It’s prevalent at about the same rate as it is in the general population.

[Larry]

Bert, Not to remind you about what you said but, well, to remind you about what you said:

It’s worth noting that thousands of people each year crash their cars, killing hundreds each year, because of heart attacks or strokes while driving. So yes, there are more violent cases out there related to gluttony, actually.

As for whether gluttony is “especially prevalent among fundamentalists” the answer is no. It’s not especially prevalent. It’s prevalent at about the same rate as it is in the general population.

If 2/3 of the general population is under the ravages of obesity, isn’t that bad enough? My observation is that it’s as a rule worse in churches, in part simply because the average attendee is older, but even so….isn’t 678,000 deaths per year, a huge portion of them in our circles, enough? Isn’t it bad enough that obesity is one of the biggest contributors to the Wednesday night organ recitals at many churches?

Isn’t it bad enough the hundreds of people take innocents to the other side of Jordan because of heart attacks while driving that could have been avoided with proper diet and exercise?

Just count me perplexed to see so much effort put into something that most of “the tribe” is not doing, let alone doing sinfully, and so little effort put into dealing with the #1 killer in our circles. I guess it’s no worse than when our ancestors were crusading against alcohol but ignoring slavery and the atrocities of Jim Crow, but one would hope we would grow a little.

Obesity is a topic we can discuss, to be sure. So is underwater basket weaving, actually. But, the topic here is that alcohol abuse kills people; that it’s the most dangerous DRUG. It does, and it is. No real dispute. There’s no need to bring up obesity or gluttony; those are different issues.

[TylerR]

…that it’s the most dangerous DRUG. It does, and it is. No real dispute.

I’d need to see more statistics. I’m more passionate about alcohol than I am tobacco products, but I’m pretty sure the latter is still the more “dangerous” substance, at least for the next 20 or 30 years, anyway, when the last of the more heavy smoking generation passes. That’s really my only argument about his article, that he completely ignored tobacco products.

Statistics from the NIH Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism site:

An estimated 88,0008 people (approximately 62,000 men and 26,000 women8) die from alcohol-related causes annually, making alcohol the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States. The first is tobacco, and the second is poor diet and physical inactivity.9