As-Salaam Alaikum Family!
The World Health Organization, a United Nation's body, is responsible for directing international health defines health as "a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity". It defines wellness as the optimal state of health of individuals and groups", which is also expressed as a "positive approach to living". The American Holistic Health Association promotes wellness as the result of measures you take to achieve health. Health is the goal and wellness is achieving the goal. Wellness programs abound in churches, colleges and the workplace. According to the CDC, "for organizations, work place health programs have the potential to impact areas such as health, cure, costs, absenteeism, productivity, recruitment/retention, culture and employee morale".
In the Nation of Islam, health is seen as the absence of illness in the body, mind and spirit, curing illness, chronic disease and prolonging life. There is no wellness program such as those in the churches, colleges and the workplace, or even a definition of wellness, but there is How To Eat To Live a two-volume book of instruction by The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad on the benefits of growing your own food, "thinking right", breast-feeding infants, eating at the right time and eating the right foods such as little to no meat, non-starchy vegetables, fruits, pure milk and water, whole wheat bread, navy beans, eating one meal-a-day and fasting; avoiding alcohol and the divinely prohibited pork, food for animals such as collards, corn, soy, lima beans and black eyed peas; too much white sugar and too many sweets, street drugs, pharmaceuticals and processed foods.
In the opening chapter of How To Eat To Live, The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad wrote, "There is no way of prolonging life-unless it begins with restrictions of the foods which sustain life: the right kinds of food and the proper time when it should be taken into our bodies".
In chapter six entitled, Fasting, he wrote, "Allah (God), in the Person of Master Fard Muhammad, has taught me that fasting, with the right kind of food, is the cure for our ills. He said to me that there is no cure in drugs and medicine...We can take medicine all of our lives until it kills us (yet, we are still ailing with the same old diseases)".
In the chapter entitled, The Poisonous Animal Eater, he established the divine prohibition against pork by writing, "God, in the Bible, through his prophets, has condemned the eating of the poisonous animal (swine). It is supported by the Holy Qur'an in Chapters Two, Five, six and 16.
In the closing chapter of How To Eat To Live, The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad wrote, "We must remember the Biblical prophecy of a God coming to us, whose aim and purpose is to teach the way of life and the prolongation of life, accomplishing these things through the food that we eat (both physically and mentally) and the set times this food should be taken".
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