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Testimony Studies on Diet and Foods
an idolatrous love, and indulge their appetite when they know that
it will injure their health, and thereby bring upon them disease and
unhappiness. This cruel kindness is manifested to a great extent in the
present generation. The desires of children are gratified at the expense
of health and happy tempers, because it is easier for the mother, for
the time being, to gratify them than to withhold that for which they
clamor.
Thus mothers are sowing the seed that will spring up and bear fruit.
The children are not educated to deny their appetites and restrict their
desires. And they become selfish, exacting, disobedient, unthankful,
and unholy. Mothers who are doing this work will reap with bitterness
the fruit of the seed they have sown. They have sinned against Heaven
and against their children, and God will hold them accountable.
Testimonies for the Church 1:219
The parents have borne the burden, and have suffered them to grow
up in idleness, without habits of order, industry, or economy. They
have not been taught habits of self-denial, but have been petted and
indulged, their appetites gratified, and they come up with enfeebled
health. Their manners and deportment are not agreeable. They are
unhappy themselves, and make those around them unhappy.
Testimonies for the Church 3:488-489
Many parents educate the tastes of their children, and form their
appetites. They indulge them in eating flesh-meats, and in drinking tea
and coffee. The highly-seasoned flesh-meats and the tea and coffee,
which some mothers encourage their children to use, prepare the way
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for them to crave stronger stimulants, as tobacco. The use of tobacco
encourages the appetite for liquor; and the use of tobacco and liquor
invariably lessens nerve power.
If the moral sensibilities of Christians were aroused upon the sub-
ject of temperance in all things, they could, by their example, com-
mencing at their tables, help those who are weak in self-control, who
are almost powerless to resist the cravings of appetite. If we could
realize that the habits we form in this life will affect our eternal inter-
ests, that our eternal destiny depends upon strictly temperate habits,
we would work to the point of strict temperance in eating and drinking.