The Christian Origins of America’s Toxic Diet Culture (And Why We Can't Break Free)

How centuries of Christian food morality became secular wellness advice

Last week my teenage daughter asked me why one of our relatives talks about food like it’s a moral issue. “It’s like they think eating pasta is a sin.”

Bingo. That’s exactly what’s happening—and it explains why Americans have such a uniquely dysfunctional relationship with food and bodies.

We’ve essentially rebranded centuries-old Christian anxieties about appetite, purity, and moral worth as secular wellness advice. The result? A culture where 30 million Americans will develop eating disorders, where chronic illness gets blamed on individual food choices, and where the promise of dietary salvation keeps cycling through the same destructive patterns.

This is not to say that religion has to influence us in this way. In fact, there are Christian resources for eating well, but those are not the ones that went mainstream. Instead, we have a diet culture stripped of explicit Christian theology but retaining all its most problematic assumptions about bodies, virtue, and moral worth.¹

From Holy Starvation to Clean Eating

The through-line from Christian asceticism to modern wellness culture is remarkably clear once you know what to look for.

Early Christians viewed the body as an obstacle to spiritual perfection, something to be overcome rather than trusted. For instance, Augustine believed bodily appetites hindered the soul’s pursuit of God² and Tertullian saw restricting food as a way to counter “Eden’s primordial sin of eating the forbidden fruit.”³

Or take “anorexia mirabilis”—holy anorexia—practiced by medieval Christian women who rejected food as spiritual discipline. Catherine of Siena famously survived on communion wafers alone, believing earthly nourishment was unnecessary for those sustained by God. She died of starvation at 33, celebrated as a saint for her bodily denial.

This suspicion of bodily desire translates directly into contemporary diet culture’s foundational premise, mainly that we can’t trust our hunger, our cravings, or our natural body size. We need external rules, expert guidance, and constant vigilance to prevent our appetites from leading us astray.

How One Presbyterian Made Food Morality Mainstream

Fast forward to the 19th century. Most Americans don’t know that one of our first diet gurus was a Presbyterian minister. In the 1830s, Sylvester Graham began preaching that diet was a matter of both physical and moral health. His solution to cholera outbreaks? A vegetarian, whole-grain regimen that would purify both body and soul.

Graham’s approach established the template for American food reform that persists today in which certain foods are inherently good or evil, proper eating demonstrates moral character, and dietary purity leads to both health and virtue. His famous graham cracker was originally marketed as a moral food—a way to avoid the “stimulating” effects of meat and refined flour that supposedly led to sexual excess and spiritual corruption. (I doubt he would approve of my use of it in the crust for the frozen key lime pie I made last weekend!)

When his followers survived the 1832 cholera outbreak better than others (likely due to basic sanitation practices his movement emphasized), it seemed to prove that God rewarded virtuous eating. The pattern was set: attribute health outcomes to moral food choices, ignore systemic factors, and promise that the right diet will provide individual’s both physical and spiritual salvation.

The Gwen Shamblin Problem

By the late 20th century, Christian diet culture had become a full-fledged industry. One of the most successful examples was Gwen Shamblin’s “Weigh Down Workshop,” offered in thousands of churches during the 1990s.

Shamblin’s theology was explicit. She taught that God created humans with two types of hunger—stomach and heart—and that weight problems occurred when people tried to fill emotional needs with food. Overeating wasn’t just unhealthy; it was idolatry. She famously declared, “Fat people don’t go to heaven.”⁴

Her solution combined prayer with restriction. Eat only when hungry, stop partway through meals, pray about portion sizes. Weight loss became evidence of spiritual growth and God’s blessing.

While Shamblin’s theology might seem extreme, her underlying assumptions pervade secular diet culture. Afterall, it’s not just conservative Christians who think weight reflects character or that appetite indicates spiritual condition. A whole lot of people believe the right approach to food leads to transformation that’s both physical and moral.

Here’s why. Contemporary wellness culture has secularized Christian diet theology while maintaining its essential structure. Instead of salvation, we promise optimization. Instead of sin, we warn about toxicity. Instead of divine favor, we offer bio-hacking and longevity.

The result is a culture where people feel guilty about enjoying food, where normal body diversity gets pathologized, and where complex health conditions get reduced to individual moral failures. We’ve created a secular religion of dietary restriction that offers all of Christianity’s shame with none of its grace.

Why This Keeps Failing

The reason American diet culture produces such consistently poor outcomes isn’t accidental—its structural. As folks like Christy Harrison have argued, when approaches rooted in religious asceticism get applied to health goals, they inevitably create cycles of restriction and rebellion. The body fights back against imposed limitations. People develop anxiety and obsession around food choices. They binge, they purge. And eating becomes a moral performance rather than a basic human activity.

Most importantly, these approaches ignore the social, economic, and systemic factors that actually influence health outcomes. Instead of addressing food insecurity, agricultural policy, healthcare access, or economic inequality, Christian-derived diet culture focuses on individual moral failing and personal transformation. (Check out Jessica Knurick’s substack for lots of thoughts about what evidence-based nutrition actually looks like)

This serves existing power structures perfectly. When health problems get attributed to personal food choices rather than systemic inequities, there’s no pressure for policy change or resource redistribution. People blame themselves instead of demanding better from institutions.

What Other Traditions Offer

But there is hope! This approach to food and bodies isn’t universal to Christianity. And other religious traditions offer radically different frameworks as well. Islamic approaches emphasize gratitude and sharing food with others. Jewish kashrut focuses on ethical consumption and mindful relationship with nourishment. Hindu and Buddhist traditions center non-violence and interconnection rather than bodily perfection.

The approaches I think have the most potential to helping us heal our relationship with food tend to be more communal than individual, more focused on sustainability than optimization, more concerned with equity than personal transformation. They treat food as connection rather than a moral test.

If you are interested in my thoughts on those alternatives, you will have to wait for my next book (Beyond Wellness). For now, it’s enough to recognize that what we call “diet culture” is actually secularized form of Christianity—complete with original sin, redemption through suffering, and salvation through bodily control.

Moving Beyond Food Morality

Overcoming toxic diet culture doesn’t mean abandoning all structure around eating. But it does mean questioning whose moral frameworks we’ve unconsciously inherited and whether they actually serve wellbeing.

Instead of asking Is this food clean or sinful? we might ask, Does this eating pattern help me feel nourished and satisfied? Does it fit my life circumstances? Does it allow me to share meals with people I care about? Does it treat food as sustenance rather than spiritual test?

Instead of seeing body size as evidence of moral character, we might recognize that health occurs across a wide range of weights and that individual factors like genetics, trauma, medication, and life circumstances influence body size more than personal virtue.

Instead of promising that the right diet will cure chronic illness, we might advocate for healthcare systems that address root causes, research that examines health disparately, and policies that ensure everyone has access to adequate food and medical care.

The next time someone promises that eliminating certain foods will transform your life, listen for the religious language underneath the wellness claims. Because until we recognize that our diet culture is often a version of Protestant theology in secular clothing, we’ll keep cycling through the same destructive patterns that have characterized American eating for centuries.

1. If you want a deeper dive into this history, I highly recommend R. Marie Griffith’s Born Again Bodies and Lynne Gerber’s Seeking the Straight and Narrow.

2. Augustine of Hippo, City of God, book 14 (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004).

3. Hannah Bacon, Fat, Syn, and Disordered Eating: The Dangers and Powers of Excess,” Fat Studies 4 (2015): 93.

4. Shamblin as quoted in “Fat People Don’t Go to Heaven,” Globe, November 21, 2000.