Health And Obligation

Physical health, when it receives attention, can be mistaken for something valuable independent of truths about morality and other metaphysics.  Without a very specific kind of objective moral value (of health), health, the convenience of not facing physical ailments, and survival itself are entirely meaningless, and even then, the only foundational reason one would have to be healthy is because of more explicitly philosophical matters like reason and moral significance.  Since there is evidence for Christianity, the implications for how people should regard and act towards their health are worth understanding given that health can affect so much of one's life.  While it is not the most central or important part of Christianity, there are some moral dimensions to this that, as usual, fall in-between two erroneous mistakes, and the body's health does have objective importance if Christianity is true.

It is the same reason why pursuing physical beauty can have added weight on the Christian worldview.  Instead of being an expression of subjectivist vanity or a striving for a pointless goal, doing one's best to pursue physical health can be an expression of love for God, whose most significant physical creation is the body the human mind is integrated with.  A person could care for the durability, strength, and epidemiological readiness of his or her body specifically because they are a Christian who takes the various ramifications of Christianity for human life seriously.  At this point, they would need to ensure they do not fall into an error that some Christians who do emphasize physical health could lapse into.

There is no moral obligation on the Biblical worldview to drink or eat things which are evidentially recognized as not promoting peak health, so it is not as if failing to eat natural foods or consuming something that is, on its own, unhealthy is automatically a sin.  It is active disregard for the health of one's body under circumstances where one does not have to exclusively focus on other things, such as when one has the time, energy, and/or money to pursue health that is morally problematic.  It is ideologically trivializing the body and its health that is the real Christian error here.  As the shell that houses the only kind of consciousness the Bible specifically says contains the image of God, the human body is nothing for Christians to ignore when they are not forced to focus on other matters.

Disregard for health, to clarify, is not even the same as being so focused on more substantial matters when one's career or family is not interfering with consistency in eating well (or doing something else aimed at health).  Even when a person has all the money and time they need to invest in their physical health (or mental health) without detracting from their philosophical concentration or immediate survival, the health of the body is still far from the most important part of human existence.  Then there are those who might understand all of this and still not be able to afford healthier food or have free time to devote to consistent exercise because they are working during most of their waking life while not being given enough resources to make the most of their health.  They cannot be at fault for not being able to chase after it to the same extent as someone else even if perfect physical health was otherwise an inherent obligation; this is not a disregard for health.

Someone who is unable to give much attention or time to steps towards physical health could not be sinning either way.  Moreover, health is a means to an end without any intrinsic significance unless certain philosophical ideas are true, making a blind, emotionalistic love of health based on practicality alone pathetic and objectively meaningless.  Physical health is a genuinely good quality on the Christian worldview, however, because of the high value of human life in this particular worldview for which there is evidence, but many specific ways to pursue it are still at most superogatory: good in the sense of having objective moral value but not obligatory, which would then necessitate that everyone who is not healthy, who sacrifices physical health for other things, or who does not do everything possible to benefit the health of their body is sinning.  This is clearly not the case according to the Bible.