What Is The Biblio Diet? A Simple Guide to Eating God's Way
ESTIMATED READ TIME: 7 MINUTES
If you've spent any amount of time trying to make sense of modern nutrition, you already know how confusing it can feel.
Keto. Paleo. Vegan. Carnivore. Mediterranean. Intermittent fasting. Macro counting. Plant-based. Animal-based. Each new approach promises to be the answer, and each one contradicts at least three of the others. Most people end up exhausted, frustrated, and quietly suspicious that the whole conversation has lost the plot.
Underneath all of it, a quieter question keeps surfacing for many people. What if there's an older, simpler, more time-tested way of eating that we've been overlooking the entire time?
That question is what The Biblio Diet is built around. Co-authored by myself and Dr. Josh Axe, The Biblio Diet isn't a fad, a cleanse, or a 30-day reset. It's a return to the way of eating described in the oldest book the world has ever known, confirmed by some of the newest research science has ever produced.
In this article, I'll walk you through what the Biblio Diet actually is, where it comes from, what it includes and excludes, and how to begin living it in a modern world that often feels designed to pull you in the opposite direction.
The Big Idea Behind the Biblio Diet
The word Biblio comes from the Greek word for book, and in this case, the book is the Bible.
But the Biblio Diet isn't a religious diet in the rigid sense that some traditions have used that word. It's not a list of arbitrary rules or a system of food restrictions for the sake of restriction. It's an honest look at what scripture actually describes when it talks about food, health, and the body, and a practical effort to align our modern eating with those timeless principles.
What you find when you do that, page by page and verse by verse, is striking. The Bible has a lot to say about food. From the Garden of Eden to the leaves on the tree of life in Revelation, scripture consistently describes specific foods as nourishing, healing, and life-giving. It also describes other foods, behaviors, and patterns of eating as harmful, disordered, or destructive.
The Biblio Diet is, in essence, an effort to take all of that seriously and turn it into a practical plan for the modern table.
The Core Principles of the Biblio Diet
The full plan is laid out in detail in the book, but the foundation rests on a handful of simple, consistent principles.
1. Eat Real, Whole Foods
The Biblio Diet is built on foods that exist in nature in their original form. Foods you can recognize. Foods that grow in soil, walk on land, swim in clean water, or fly through the air. Foods that haven't been processed, refined, fortified, or chemically altered.
If your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, there's a good chance it doesn't belong on your plate.
2. Choose the Cleanest Sources Possible
It's not enough to eat real food. The quality of that food matters just as much. Grass-finished beef is not the same as feedlot beef. Pasture-raised eggs are not the same as cage-laid commercial eggs. Wild-caught salmon is not the same as farmed salmon. Organic, regeneratively grown produce is not the same as conventionally grown, chemically sprayed produce.
The Biblio Diet emphasizes choosing food that comes from healthy soil, healthy animals, and healthy ecosystems whenever it's reasonably within reach.
3. Include Both Plants and Animals, the Way Scripture Does
One of the things that sets the Biblio Diet apart from many modern frameworks is that it doesn't ask you to choose sides. Scripture consistently describes a varied diet that includes vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, grains, legumes, dairy, eggs, fish, poultry, and red meat. Each food category serves a purpose, and the body was designed to thrive on the variety.
This is one reason the Biblio Diet doesn't fit neatly into vegan, carnivore, or any other ideologically narrow camp. It honors the whole picture.
4. Honor Traditional Preparation
How food is prepared matters almost as much as what's on the plate. Traditional preparation methods like soaking, sprouting, fermenting, slow-cooking, and pairing foods with healthy fats are quietly woven through scripture and through the practices of the cultures that lived closest to it.
Bread was sourdough. Dairy was cultured. Meat was bone-in and slow-simmered. Vegetables were often cooked, fermented, or paired with healthy fats. These aren't arbitrary preferences. They're methods that make food more nourishing and easier to digest.
5. Build in Rhythms of Fasting and Feasting
The Bible doesn't describe a culture of constant snacking. It describes a rhythm of meals, of fasting, and of feasting tied to community and worship. The Biblio Diet honors that rhythm, including the role of intentional, prayerful fasting as a tool for both spiritual and physical renewal.
We covered this in more detail in How the Daniel Fast Should Evolve for 2026, and it's one of the most underused tools modern Christians have available to them.
6. Eat With Gratitude and Community
Almost every meal described in scripture is shared. Bread is broken with others. Food is offered with thanksgiving. Gathering around a table is treated as a holy act, not just a logistical one.
Modern research on longevity consistently confirms that shared meals and a sense of community are among the strongest predictors of long, healthy life. Scripture taught us that thousands of years before the data caught up.
What the Biblio Diet Includes
When you build a meal around Biblio Diet principles, the foundation looks something like this.
Quality Animal Foods
Grass-finished beef, lamb, and goat
Pasture-raised chicken and turkey
Pasture-raised eggs
Wild-caught fish, especially smaller fatty fish like sardines, anchovies, and salmon
Organ meats from healthy animals
Bone broth and slow-cooked bone-in cuts
Real Fats
Extra virgin olive oil
Grass-fed butter and ghee
Pasture-raised animal fats, including tallow and lard
Coconut oil
Avocados and avocado oil
Whole-milk dairy from healthy sources, when tolerated
A Wide Variety of Plants
Leafy greens, rotated for variety
Bitter herbs and greens
Vegetables in their proper season, often cooked
Fruits, especially berries, figs, dates, pomegranates, and grapes
Nuts and seeds, ideally soaked or sprouted
Olives
Properly Prepared Grains and Legumes
Sprouted, fermented, or sourdough breads when grains are eaten
Soaked beans and lentils
Whole grains in moderation, prepared traditionally
Fermented and Cultured Foods
Sauerkraut, kimchi, and other cultured vegetables
Yogurt and kefir from healthy sources
Naturally fermented sourdough
Apple cider vinegar
Healing Spices and Herbs
Garlic, onion, ginger, and turmeric
Oregano, thyme, rosemary, and sage
Cinnamon, cloves, and frankincense
Fresh herbs of all kinds
Clean Water
Filtered water, ideally with minerals added back
A small pinch of unrefined sea salt for hydration
What the Biblio Diet Avoids
Just as importantly, the Biblio Diet steers clear of the foods and ingredients that are doing the most damage in the modern food supply.
Industrial seed oils, including soybean, canola, corn, sunflower, and "vegetable" oil
Refined sugar and high-fructose corn syrup
Artificial sweeteners, dyes, and preservatives
Heavily processed packaged foods
Conventional, factory-farmed meats and eggs
Farm-raised fish heavy in antibiotics and contaminants
Processed deli meats and cured meats made with nitrates
Fortified, ultra-refined grain products
Excess alcohol
Foods that are unclean according to scripture, including pork and shellfish, depending on personal conviction
What the Biblio Diet Is Not
A few honest clarifications, because the Biblio Diet often gets misunderstood in both directions.
It is not a religious requirement. You don't have to be a Christian to benefit from the Biblio Diet. The principles are rooted in scripture, but the science behind them applies to every human body. Many people have come to the Biblio Diet through health questions and walked away with both a stronger body and a deeper faith. Others have come through faith and discovered remarkable health changes along the way.
It is not extreme. The Biblio Diet doesn't ask you to eliminate entire food groups, count macros, or live on a strict regimen. It asks you to return to real food, eaten well, in community.
It is not expensive by necessity. Eating Biblio is often cheaper than eating the standard American diet once you stop buying processed convenience foods, restaurant meals, and packaged snacks. The investment shifts from quantity to quality.
It is not a fad. The principles in this way of eating are thousands of years old. The science confirming them is decades old. The fad is everything that was invented in the last fifty years and labeled "food."
How to Begin
If the Biblio Diet sounds like something you want to live, the best advice I can give is this. Don't try to change everything at once.
Most people who succeed with this way of eating begin with a few simple shifts and let them compound over time.
1. Replace Industrial Oils With Real Fats
This is one of the highest-impact changes you can make immediately. Throw out the canola, soybean, and "vegetable" oils in your pantry. Replace them with extra virgin olive oil, grass-fed butter, ghee, coconut oil, and tallow.
2. Upgrade Your Animal Foods
Switch from conventional, factory-farmed meat and eggs to pasture-raised, grass-finished options. Even doing this part-time changes the nutrient profile of your diet significantly.
3. Cut the Refined Sugar
You don't have to eliminate every form of sweetness, but cutting refined sugar and high-fructose corn syrup out of your daily food is one of the fastest ways to feel a difference.
4. Build Around Real Meals
Move away from constant snacking and toward two or three real, nourishing meals each day. Build them around quality protein, healthy fats, and a variety of plants.
5. Add One Healing Food Each Week
Bone broth this week. Sauerkraut next week. Wild-caught sardines the week after. Liver from a trusted source the week after that. Slowly, your plate begins to look more and more like the table scripture has been pointing us toward all along.
6. Read the Book
I'd be remiss not to mention that the full Biblio Diet plan, including a 7-day meal guide, recipes, food swaps, shopping lists, and the deeper biblical and scientific foundations, is laid out in detail in The Biblio Diet. If this article resonates, the book is the next step.
The Bottom Line on Eating God's Way
The Biblio Diet isn't an attempt to invent a new way of eating. It's a recovery of the oldest one we have.
For thousands of years, before food labels and processed convenience and conflicting nutrition science, people ate real food, prepared it well, shared it in community, and gave thanks for it. They built their bodies, their families, and their faith around the table.
We can do that again. The food is still here. The principles still work. The body still recognizes them.
Eating God's way isn't complicated. It's been hiding in plain sight in scripture the entire time, waiting for us to come back to it.
References:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2910600/
https://www.jordanrubin.com/thebibliodiet
https://www.jordanrubin.com/newsletter/how-the-daniel-fast-should-evolve-for-2026