Circa 2020 and our dinner table looks the same today…
Every holiday season our meals are garnished with gluten-free, dairy-free goodies and not one of them is made with white sugar. It’s something we figured out years ago and never looked back.
We don’t take a holiday from our Non-Negotiables, even during Thanksgiving & Christmas, and this article is about why we hold that line…
You know the moment when you walk into the church fellowship hall, the office break room, or your sister-in-law’s kitchen, and there it is: the table.
Frosted sugar cookies, fudge on a paper plate, pie with a can of whipped topping beside it, and a punch bowl that glows a color God never made.
Somebody smiles and hands you a plate, and you hear the line every Christian has heard a thousand times:
”Oh, come on, it’s the holidays...”
“Just one piece…”
“Everything in moderation, right?”
It sounds so reasonable, and it sounds so gracious. That’s exactly why so few Christians ever stop to ask whether it’s true.
Here’s what we want you to hear before the first party invitation lands this year.
God created the sugar cane, and it was good. He did not create a white powder stripped of everything He put inside that plant.
”And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good.” — Genesis 1:31
Don’t let “everything in moderation” be your motto this holiday season. Let “all GOOD things in moderation” be your way of life.
That one word changes everything, and it’s what this whole article is about.
The 5 holiday sugar lies below are worth rethinking in light of Scripture before you fill your plate.
Need a quiet moment with God before you dive in? Start with this short prayer…
Being Real With Y’all
No…
We’re not anti-sweets.
We’re not anti-fun.
We’re not “keto” or on a carb restriction kick.
We don’t judge what other families put on their holiday tables.
And, we don’t believe eating a Christmas cookie makes you a bad Christian.
But we are intentional about what we feed our family.
We believe God’s design is better than man’s substitutes.
We believe that just because something is popular, convenient, or socially acceptable doesn’t mean it’s good for us.
We believe Biblical stewardship includes what we put into our bodies, even during the holidays.
And after nearly 24 years of living this way, we’ve learned something wonderful: You don’t have to compromise your health or your enjoyment to enjoy the holidays.
You can have your [gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, but not free-of-flavor] cake and eat it, too!
Our tables are full. Our desserts are delicious.
Our kids aren’t missing out. And our convictions don’t disappear just because it’s Thanksgiving and Christmastime.
This isn’t about earning God’s approval through food. It’s about honoring Him with the choices we make, without making food an idol or judging anyone else’s plate.
So, with that, let’s tackle the 5 Holiday Sugar Lies Christians Need to Stop Believing.
1. “Everything in Moderation” Is NOT in the Bible
Holiday Lie: “It’s Christmas. A little bit won’t hurt, because everything in moderation, right?”
”’All things are lawful,’ but not all things are helpful. ‘All things are lawful,’ but not all things build up.” — 1 Corinthians 10:23
Warning: A saying can sound Biblical, get repeated at every potluck in America, and still have nothing to do with what God actually said.
Go ahead and look for it, because “everything in moderation” isn’t in Scripture. The closest verse is Philippians 4:5, where some older translations read “let your moderation be known unto all men.”
But Paul wasn’t talking about dessert. The word means gentleness, which is why the ESV reads it this way:
”Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand.” — Philippians 4:5
So let’s run the “everything in moderation” rule out to its logical end. Would any of us say a little gossip is fine in moderation, or a little bit of pornography, or a little bit of a bender on New Year’s Eve?
Of course not, because some things need to be removed rather than managed, and we look at white processed sugar the way most people look at a drug.
That’s why we changed one word in the old saying, and it’s the word that makes it Biblical: all GOOD things in moderation.
Honey is a good thing. Maple syrup is a good thing.
Grandma’s pumpkin pie, made with real pumpkin and a natural sweetener, can be a very good thing.
A white powder with every trace of the original plant refined out of it is not on that list.
Most Christians have been quoting Greek philosophy and calling it Scripture. Here is the verse that broke us out of this lie and rewrote our pantry.
2. Even Though It’s Sold at the Grocery Store, It is NOT Always Safe For You
Holiday Lie: “If it were really that bad for us, they wouldn’t be allowed to sell it.”
”When you sit down to eat with a ruler, observe carefully what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you are given to appetite. Do not desire his delicacies, for they are deceptive food.” — Proverbs 23:1-3
Warning: The grocery store is a business, and the shelf space goes to whatever sells, not to whatever builds up the temple of the Holy Spirit.
This is hard for many Christians to accept. We’ve believed for decades that if a product made it onto the shelf, somebody somewhere must have decided it was safe for our families.
So we stopped reading labels, and we stopped asking where an ingredient came from.
Here’s the truth about white sugar. Sugar cane is a tall, fibrous grass that God packed with water, fiber, and trace minerals, and people have chewed on it for thousands of years.
Then man came along and pressed it, boiled it, filtered it, stripped out its color, and crystallized it until all that was left was nearly pure sucrose. What comes out the other end gives you calories with no vitamins, no minerals, and no fiber to speak of.
White sugar is a man-made construct rather than food the way God designed food, and Scripture calls delicacies like that exactly what they are: deceptive food.
Here’s the kicker: white sugar is rarely called “sugar” on the label anymore, which is why we built a label check into this week’s Swap.
Not just white sugar… here are 5 more health lies to rethink before you buy.
3. A Little Sugar Does NOT Leave Your Immune System Alone
Holiday Lie: “Sugar only shows up on the scale. It doesn’t have anything to do with getting sick.”
”It is not good to eat much honey.” — Proverbs 25:27
Warning: The hours after a sugary snack may be the very hours your body is least ready for the germs going around the church nursery.
This one surprises people, and the research behind it has been sitting in a major nutrition journal since 1973.
Researchers at Loma Linda University gave healthy adults 100 grams of sugar, which is about what you’d get from two and a half 12-ounce cans of regular cola. Then they drew blood and watched how well their white blood cells could engulf bacteria.
Those white blood cells are called neutrophils, and they’re your body’s first responders against infection. After the sugar, they did their job significantly worse.
The biggest drop came one to two hours after eating, and five hours later the white blood cells were still working below where they started. On the flip side, when people fasted for 36 or 60 hours, those same cells got noticeably better at their job.
Now let’s be fair about the study, because that’s how we do research around here. It was small, it’s more than 50 years old, it measured the cells in a lab dish rather than counting who caught a cold, and 100 grams at once is a big dose.
But think about a normal day in December. A flavored latte at breakfast, cookies in the break room, a can of soda with lunch, and pie after dinner can stack up past that number without anyone ever “overdoing it.”
So imagine what your immune system looks like when nearly every meal from Thanksgiving to New Year’s includes white sugar.
No wonder so many believers catch every cold and flu going around between November and January, and then wonder why they can’t shake it.
Here’s the detail most people miss. The researchers didn’t only test white sugar, because they also tested glucose, fructose, orange juice, and honey, and all of them caused the drop at that dose.
We’re not telling you to fear honey, because this is the reason the Bible says ”it is not good to eat much honey,” and it’s the whole point of “all GOOD things in moderation.”
If faith transforms lives, why does it so rarely transform how Christians care for their bodies?
“I’m grateful to be here, receiving encouragement, recipes, and whole-body transformation. Even after trying times, I trust you and Mama Z. The spiritual aspect completes the system: body, soul, and spirit.”
— Ellen D.
4. Sugar Is NOT Just “Empty Calories”
Holiday Lie: “It’s just extra calories. I’ll walk it off after the holidays.”
”Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?” — 1 Corinthians 6:19
Warning: What you eat doesn’t only land on your hips. It lands on the trillions of bacteria God placed in your gut, and those bacteria talk to your immune system all day long.
In 2025, scientists at the Technion in Israel published a study in Nature Communications that looked at one of the most common bacteria in the human gut.
First, they went through data from real people and found that people who drank more soft drinks showed a different “genetic switch” setting in that bacteria. Then they tested it in mice by adding white sugar to their drinking water.
The sugar flipped the same genetic switch, and it changed the mice’s immune cells. It also lowered a protein that helps hold the gut lining together, the seal that keeps what’s in your gut from slipping where it doesn’t belong.
To be clear, that last part was measured in mice, not people. But it shows how fast sugar can reach past your waistline and into the systems that guard your health.
And here’s the good news: when the mice went back to plain water, those changes reversed.
That’s how God designed you. Your body wants to heal, and it starts the moment you stop feeding the problem.
”For I will restore health to you, and your wounds I will heal, declares the LORD.” — Jeremiah 30:17
This is the manifesto the Church needed sixty years ago, and the good news is that the body responds to its inputs faster than most Christians have ever been told.
5. Diet Soda and “Sugar-Free” Candy Are NOT the Answer
Holiday Lie: “I’ll just grab the diet version and the sugar-free candy, so I’m fine.”
”If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, lest you have your fill of it and vomit it.” — Proverbs 25:16
Warning: Trading white sugar for a lab-made sweetener swaps one man-made problem for another.
This is where one of the largest soft drink studies ever done gets interesting. Researchers followed 451,743 adults across 10 European countries for an average of 16 years, and published the results in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2019.
People who drank two or more glasses of soft drinks a day had a 17% higher risk of dying during the study than people who drank less than one glass a month. People who drank at least one sugar-sweetened soft drink a day had a 59% higher risk of dying from digestive diseases, the kind that hit the liver, pancreas, and intestines.
But the artificially sweetened drinkers didn’t get off the hook. At two or more glasses a day, they had a 52% higher risk of dying from circulatory diseases like heart disease and stroke.
This kind of study shows a link, not proof that soda caused every one of those deaths. Still, when nearly half a million people point in the same direction, it’s wise to listen.
That’s why our first Non-Negotiable has always included fake sugars. “Sugar-free” on a candy bag doesn’t mean God-made.
So what do we use? These are the sweeteners in our kitchen, starting with the ones closest to how God made them:
Raw honey and pure maple syrup, the two oldest sweeteners on the list
Date sugar, which is simply dried dates ground into a powder
Coconut sugar and maple sugar, both dried from plant sap
Liquid or powdered stevia and monk fruit, from plants, and very sweet, so a little goes a long way
Allulose, a rare sugar found in small amounts in foods like figs and raisins, though what you buy is made in a facility, so we treat it as an occasional helper
Every one of those is still a sweetener, and that’s why Proverbs 25:16 is the verse for this section. Even the good things stay in moderation.
Here are the three things we refuse to let back into our home, no matter how many birthday parties try to sneak them past the front door…
![[LIVE] The Three Non-Negotiables If You Want To Feel Better TODAY](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8Im_!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F194951215%2Fc08d78d4-cf92-4fa6-9836-2fbdb8545e04%2Ftranscoded-1776810353.png)
“Thank you so much for everything you all do, and especially today for the Scriptures. I really needed those today.”
— Mary G.
“All GOOD Things in Moderation”
”So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” — 1 Corinthians 10:31
We want to be clear about something before you head into the season.
This was never about being the family with the sad plate at the party, because people are usually amazed at how good a healthy dessert or a fresh gluten-free loaf can taste.
It’s not about guilt, either. If you’ve eaten white sugar every holiday of your life, you didn’t know what you didn’t know, and God’s mercies are new this morning.
But now you do know. You know the Bible never said “everything in moderation,” and you know what a sugar-loaded afternoon does to the cells guarding your family from the bug going around.
You also know the good news: your body was designed to recover, and the gifts God made are sweet enough.
So this season, we invite you to do something most Christians have never tried. Go into Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s with a plan, and with a plate you made yourself.
That’s exactly why we’re handing you Mama Z’s Holiday Survival Guide in this Swap.
A Prayer for You. 🙏
Heavenly Father, thank You for the sugar cane and the honeycomb, the maple tree and the date palm, and for every good and perfect gift You placed in creation for me and my family to enjoy. Help me not take these precious gifts for granted.
Give me wisdom at every table this season, and give me kindness, too, so I can hold my convictions without looking down on anyone who hasn’t learned what I’ve learned.
This Holiday season, please guard my body, strengthen my immune system, and let my home be full of joy, health, and gratitude from Thanksgiving through the New Year, for Your glory and for the abundant life Jesus came to give me.
Amen.
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Your Bible Health Swap This Week
#028: The Holiday Survival Toolkit
This week’s Swap includes Mama Z’s 105-page Holiday Survival Guide with 27 holiday recipes and 11 DIY stocking stuffers, the Sugar Alias Label Check, the Sweet Swap Chart, the Holiday Party Game Plan, the All GOOD Things Truth Cards & a Prayer Before the Feast!
One Swap this week. One faithful step. A transformed life.
Learn more about the Bible Health Transformation Journey and start wherever you are.
“It has truly been amazing for me and my family as we find natural and Biblical ways to improve our health and wellbeing in our home.”
— Wendy J.
