A Response to the Video:
Seventh-day Adventism, the Spirit Behind the Church

by Bob Pickle

Answers to Questions Raised by:
Mark Martin, Sydney Cleveland
Dale Ratzlaff, The White Lie
. . . and Others

Discern Fact from Fiction

Health Counsel, Wigs, and the Reform Dress

#123: "To bring under control the male sexual appetites, besides being vegetarians, it was advised by Ellen White that they not eat an evening meal at all."—Dan Snyder.

#123: She said to abstain from supper for this reason. Utterly false.

Under "Point 63" the documentation package offers as proof for this charge page 259 of Solemn Appeal, stating in the index that this is "EGW's advice to not eat an evening meal at all." Yet this is some of the lengthy advice of Professor Fowler, not Mrs. White.

As a good health practice, for reasons quite different than what Mr. Snyder gives, Mrs. White recommended two meals a day for most people, but not everyone. For those who either had to or chose to eat a third meal, supper should be light and eaten several hours before bed time (Counsels on Diet and Foods, p. 158). That way the stomach can also rest through the night. This makes good common sense.

There were folk in her day who tried to make the recommendation of two meals mandatory upon all. Against this idea Mrs. White wrote, "The practice of eating but two meals a day is generally found a benefit to health; yet under some circumstances, persons may require a third meal."—Ibid., p. 176. The next two pages come down on those who would force the two-meal-a-day plan on others. On page 178 she actually called for suppers to begin to be served at Avondale College in Australia.

Her position consistently was that most, not all, would do better on two meals a day, and that no one should be pushy about the matter. [p. 86]

What the video has done here and elsewhere is nothing new. Folk back in 1845 were doing the same:

On the other hand, the nominal [first-day] Adventists charged me with fanaticism, and I was falsely, and by some wickedly, represented as being the leader of the fanaticism that I was actually laboring to correct.—Early Writings, p. 21.

By the way, when well-known medical doctor Sang Lee, newly converted to Christianity, was first given Counsels on Diet and Foods, he was immediately intrigued to find some of his modern ideas as an allergist in the book. He turned to the front of the book to find out where Mrs. White got her Ph.D. from, not knowing that she had only reached the third grade and had died in 1915.

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