Aug 27, 2026 Show with Kat Owens on “Eat by Faith: Nourishing Yourself & Your Family in Light of Creation, Dominion & the Gospel”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnson.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 27th day of August, 2026.

I'm absolutely thrilled to have a first-time guest today, and we're going to be discussing an issue that is rarely discussed on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Typically, we are going to be heard discussing theological and doctrinal issues and elements of church history, but today we are going to be discussing health and nutrition from a Christian point of view, and my guest to do so is Cat Owens.

She is a functional nutritional therapy practitioner, a certified personal trainer, and most of all a follower of Jesus Christ, and she's an author with Founders Press who will address her book, Eat by Faith, Nourishing Yourself and Your Family in Light of Creation, Dominion, and the Gospel.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Cat Owens.

Thank you, Chris, I'm very grateful to be here.

Before we get into the meat, as it were, of your book, we have a tradition here on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. It apparently is a beloved tradition in my audience because I hear so often how much my listeners enjoy hearing the salvation testimonies of first-time guests.

I always have first-time guests give a summary of their salvation testimonies, which would include the kind of religious atmosphere in which they were raised, if any, and the kinds of providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them.

And we would love to hear your story.

Kat Owens’s Conversion and Reformed Baptist Faith

Great, I love that. Yeah, so I didn't grow up in a Christian home. I was brought to church occasionally, but I think the perspective I always had that I had been raised with was that being really religious was just some people's thing, and for other people it was not their thing, and that that was fine.

That whatever anyone chose to do, that was just their decision. And it was in high school that I started feeling a draw to read the Bible and to get more involved in church activities. And I really can't say why I had that desire at all, which I can see now.

And I think even pretty early on, I was able to see that this was God drawing me to him. This wasn't something I did on my own, that I just had this desire to start reading the Bible. And I had some friends who invited me to Bible study and had a friend there who gave her testimony, which is why I love testimonies as well.

And in her testimony about her family and how her family was saved, I saw that following God wholeheartedly is really the only option we're given to follow God at all. That we can't just—it's not enough to just decide, I'm going to be really Christian or I'm not going to be really Christian, that he demands wholehearted devotion from us.

And once I knew that that was what I needed to do, I knew that that's what I wanted and that's what I was going to do. So I committed myself then to follow God wholeheartedly. I knew very little about what that meant, but that was when I made that decision.

And since then, I—well, starting then, I was—got involved in different Baptist and non-denominational churches, then in high school and then after that in college. And it was only within the last few years that my family got involved in Reformed Baptist churches, and that's been a huge blessing to us.

Well, praise God. And I know that you happen to be married, and I'm sure my audience has guessed by now that you have at least one baby, which is cooing in the background. And I understand your husband is in the military as well.

Yes. So we have three little girls so far, and my husband was a pilot in the Air Force. He just separated and he flies now for UPS, and we're up in Anchorage, Alaska, where he's doing that. And just got involved with a great Reformed church up here in Alaska and hope to have more kids.

That's the plan. Can you see Russia from your house? The topic that we are addressing is something that has rarely been discussed, in my experience, on Christian radio, but it is an important issue. Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and so on.

Health, Fitness, and Nutrition Through a Christian Worldview

And what initially led you to be interested in health, fitness, exercise, and nutrition, and also to eventually steep your life in it?

Well, like a lot of people who get involved in health and nutrition, it started with my own health journey and dealing with some health problems. So I can say I'm very blessed that I never had to deal with some of the really intense health problems that leads people to this same kind of place.

But for me, it was, I was running a lot. I ran cross-country in high school and college, and I started college at the Air Force Academy, which is a very stressful, very rigorous environment. And I think particularly for women, I wish I had known then what I know now that that's really not, I don't consider that a natural environment for women to be in.

We know that the Bible talks about that women in the military, this is a curse. We see it talked about that way sometimes in the Old Testament. We know what the Old Testament says about women wearing men's clothing.

But I just didn't have that biblical perspective at the time. I was still following a lot of the world's ways in terms of career and what I was pursuing. So it's no surprise to me now that that particularly stressful environment, especially for women, can lead to health problems, but it did for me.

And I got out of college. I was commissioned in the Air Force at this point and just was dealing with some kind of low blood sugar symptoms, some digestive problems, again, nothing major, but enough that I started trying to look for answers to some of these things.

And I went to some of the doctors on the military base I was stationed at, started asking them some questions about these things and just got really unsatisfactory answers. I was told that certain digestive conditions just really didn't exist.

That's just stuff people read about on the internet. These digestive symptoms aren't real. I was told that, well, if you have low blood sugar, you're just going to have to carry around sugar pills in your purse forever.

And then I had one doctor who said, well, this might all just be anxiety. You should try this anti-anxiety medication. I looked at the prescription after I left the office and it was a prescription for antidepressant, which if you know much about those, are just extremely addictive, extremely harmful, and I'm sorry about that, extremely harmful medications, in my opinion, that just completely rewire your brain, have really tragic long-term consequences for a lot of people.

And this was prescribed to me for something that wasn't even depression, wasn't even anxiety really, and with probably just a five-minute doctor visit. And this is a really common experience. So that was when I knew that I was going to have to figure these things out for myself.

And so I had always been somewhat interested in diets and health and had researched and tried different things here and there before, but that was when I really got into it and really started researching and just became really interested in it.

And I think one of the things that drove me to do that to start with, to start researching on my own was knowing that God had made my body well, and it just didn't make sense to me this perspective that your body's just broken.

And whether it's low blood sugar or digestive problems or whatever it is, your body's just broken and all you can do about it is just take this medication, use this Band-Aid for the rest of your life.

And so knowing that my body wasn't just fundamentally broken, knowing that there had to be things out there in God's creation for our health and our healing, I really started getting into researching and trying different things and really just fell in love with researching nutrition.

But it also was a learning curve for me to realize that not everything out there in the alternative space was true. There's a lot of people talking about a lot of different things coming from a lot of different worldviews.

And a lot of the things I experimented with and got invested in at certain points, I was able to look back and see later that these beliefs, these recommendations were rooted in things like atheism, evolution, even false religions.

And so it was no wonder that they were misleading people. And that's when I realized that what I should have been doing from the start was thinking about how do we approach this biblically? What's a biblical perspective on this and how should that guide us as we look through the science and what we see historically?

And when we start doing that, I think we can come to a lot different conclusions than a lot of what we hear, a lot of the recommendations that we are told today.

New Age and Evolutionary Assumptions Behind Modern Diets

Now, can you give us some examples of how some false, unbiblical worldviews and religious ideas have been connected to nutritional advice? You know, I know that a lot of the health food stores that you go to, there may be a lot of great products in there.

You may have somebody that has a lot of great advice behind the counter. But you will very often see at these places imagery and signs and plaques of Eastern religions and things like that. But can you give us some of the specific ways where you began to tap the brakes because you were realizing, wait a minute, this is coming from a dark place?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You know, a lot of what we see and think of as health foods and like you're talking about the health food stores, for sure, definitely have a lot of ties to these New Age beliefs.

And it's, you know, environmentalism is often wound up in these as well. And so there's really a lot of this perspective that is coming from this belief that humans are basically the same as animals and humans are a blight on the earth.

The only thing we should be touching it as little as possible, the more we can just leave nature as it is, the better off it's going to be. And that really does affect how certain people eat. You know, that if you think that the best thing you can do is eat like an animal or eat like a hunter-gatherer ancestor, that's going to mean things like, well, maybe you should be eating raw foods.

Should we be eating a raw food diet? Should we be, you know, preparing foods? Human intervention, any kind of human intervention on nature, on food is seen as an automatically bad thing. And people will formulate their approach to diet based on that.

And we can also see that a lot in just the evolutionary approach to medicine and to health, even in a more conventional approach. And, you know, the first time I really was forced to think about this, I had been experimenting with a paleo diet.

This was really common at the time that I was in college, really popular. This idea that we should be eating like our paleolithic ancestors. And so the paleo diet recommends no grains, no dairy, just lots of meats, fruits, vegetables.

The idea being that, of course, these paleolithic ancestors weren't eating grains. They were hunter-gatherers. They weren't eating milk. You know, they weren't raising animals for milk. And I had really never thought too much about the worldview behind that.

I just had seen that people had success with it. I decided to try it. It did help me with some health problems. And there's a lot of reasons for that now that I could, you know, I could go into. There's a lot of nuance there about why I think people experience success with a lot of different diets out there, even if it's not the best thing.

But I was visiting a friend and this friend's mom was a very devoted Christian and she rebuked me for this paleo diet. She said, you know, this is based on evolution. You shouldn't be eating this way.

You should be eating grains like the Bible talks about. And at the time, I didn't think too much of it. I kind of just reasoned that, well, because the Bible talks about grains, that doesn't mean we have to be eating grains.

And I wish I had now, though. I wish I had really thought more about that and thought, if this is coming from a completely false worldview, then what kind of false conclusions is it going to lead us to?

And, you know, right now we see low carb diets being really popular. And again, I can tell you a lot of reasons why those why people have a lot of success with those. But it's important to understand that the worldview behind that in the the narratives people are using to promote these low carb diets is this idea that humans, your pre-human ancestors, your hunter-gatherer ancestors were mostly eating meat.

They weren't raising grains. The only fruits that they probably had access to were these really low sugar, you know, uncultivated, maybe a few berries in the summer. Like this idea that your ancestors were not eating a lot of carbohydrates and so that therefore that is the ideal diet of a human today.

And so they advocate that this is how all people should be eating. Carbohydrates are inherently harmful for this reason. And it's completely based on the evolutionary worldview. And so it's no wonder, yeah, that I think people are being really misled by that.

And it turns out there's a lot of long term health implications to not eating carbohydrates. And I've seen it countless times.

Yeah, I know a number of people. I don't know if there was any worldview that you described that convinced them to start on like the Atkins diet. I think a lot of it was word of mouth and testimony of people who rapidly dropped a ton of weight.

And I've met people that did fairly quickly lose a lot of weight. I would say at least half of those people couldn't keep it up, though, because there are too many delicious things that are involved in carbohydrates and they quickly regain the weight.

There might be some of my friends out there that I'm not remembering out right now that are continuing to maintain the weight loss. But you are saying that to cut out or to radically, drastically minimize carbohydrates in your body is dangerous in some way.

Yeah, absolutely. And I've seen that, too. People who lose weight very dramatically. There's a lot of health symptom improvements I've seen with a low carb diet. And again, I could go into a lot of details about why that is.

But what we see long term is that it's actually doing a lot of harm to your metabolism. And so people who stay on these low carb diets long term, they actually start to see that their fasting blood sugar starts going up as they develop this physiological insulin resistance where your body's basically just losing its ability to use glucose from carbohydrates as a fuel source.

People have trouble sleeping. They have trouble regulating their electrolytes. And then it's also just very stressful. So one of the things that carbohydrates are doing in your body is they're opposing stress hormones.

And when your body has to make its own glucose through its own process, it's going to use fatty acids from fats. It's going to use amino acids from protein. Your body can do that and make its own glucose if you're not getting glucose from carbohydrates in your diet.

But it's using stress hormones to do that. So it's an inherently stressful process for your body. And long term, that sustained stress is going to create a lot of problems. And I've seen it. So it turns out that the reason we crave carbohydrates is because we're supposed to get them in our diet.

And God made it that way for a reason.

So did any of this part of your journey where you were getting more and more involved in the health and nutrition aspect of life, did any of this start before you were born again, believer, or did it all begin as you were already a Christian?

Yeah, most of this was afterwards. I grew up in a family that was fairly health conscious, and I'm really grateful for that. So I certainly was exposed to some of this stuff. I was probably eating a better diet growing up than most people.

I had experimented and tried certain things a little bit on my own in high school before I was a Christian. But most of this was after a Christian and after I became a Christian. And I just wish that I had been able to figure out sooner how much I should have been involving my faith in the decisions I was making and the research I was doing.

And you have in your book, Eat by Faith, which, as I mentioned before, is published by Founders Press, the publishing house that was founded by my very dear friend for decades, Tom Askell, a pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Cape Coral, Florida, who I've had on this program a number of times.

You have a chapter in the book, A Christian Approach to Nutrition. And if you could delve more into the Christian and biblical worldview aspect of the actual nutrition aspect of what we're talking about.

A Christian Approach to Nutrition and the Rejection of Asceticism

While you're muted. I don't know how that happened.

Sorry about that. That's OK. Yes, love to talk about this. So no matter what perspective someone is approaching diet with, whether they're following a low carb diet or a plant based diet, almost universally, our culture has this idea that if you're going to eat healthy, it's going to involve some level of self-denial and restriction.

And choosing the healthy foods over the enjoyable foods. That if you, you know, you have the option between the cheese crackers and the carrot sticks, you're going to have to choose self-denial and choose the carrot sticks.

And that's how you eat a healthy diet. No matter what kind of diet someone's following, we almost universally see this concept that you have to deny yourself in some way to have a healthy diet. And there certainly is truth to that, which I will get to.

But what I believe we have to recognize first, starting before almost anything, is this idea that healthy and enjoyable is not a dichotomy. This is not some duality that God gave us these appetites and it was a mistake or it was just meant to lead us into temptation somehow.

But that if we have a craving for carbohydrates or meat or fat or even just more food, there's a reason for that. And we need to understand what these reasons are. Sometimes there's certain health conditions that might be, I say, hijacking our appetites in some way that we need to be aware of.

But fundamentally, if we have appetites for certain foods, it's for a reason. And God actually gave us these to lead us to healthy food. And I'm talking about appetites for fundamental things like carbohydrates or fat, not necessarily you have a craving for Oreos.

The healthiest thing you should be eating in this moment.

But Oreos are not a God-breathed part of the diets. I imagine that, right?

There's some things that are pretty obvious. But that's one of the things I want people to see first, first of all. And I think that that idea actually comes largely from this really ascetic approach to diet that we started to see with the Second Great Awakening here in the United States in the 1800s.

So we had people like the founder of the graham crackers. So these were named after this man Graham, who promoted this really sparse diet, basically saying that we should just be living off whole grains and no meat.

And he had all these other practices that he promoted, things like sleeping on hard beds and taking cold baths. And it was basically this idea that just the more you can punish your body, the healthier you're going to be.

And there was a lot of religious ideas that that was rooted in for him.

Was he a Seventh-day Adventist, just out of curiosity?

Yeah. Oh, yes. Good question. So he actually was not. But his ideas, we see those directly picked up by the Seventh-day Adventists shortly afterwards. And they were the ones who really made those ideas mainstream.

So, yeah, understanding the Seventh-day Adventist influence here is huge because they also really promoted this idea that any kind of stimulating foods, any fine foods were going to lead you into sin and that they were also just unhealthy.

And they had such a big influence on modern diets, what we believe about food, the kind of foods we eat, the kind of foods we see in the grocery store, the kind of things that are taught in medical schools.

People often don't know just how big of an influence the Seventh-day Adventists have had on what we eat and what we think about food today. They were part of developing nutrition guidelines. They own a lot of the food companies that stock the grocery store shelves of the foods we see today and really promoted these ideas about meat and just that enjoyable, fine nourishing foods in general were inherently unhealthy because we really didn't see that a lot before in history.

People intuitively understood things like meat and fat are satisfying and they're good for you. And these are important for being strong and things like that. So. I think an important part of this biblical approach is understanding that that's really, that's really not a biblical approach at all to think that we have to be just avoiding all anything tasty, satisfying.

And we know the Bible warns us against asceticism. I see the same kind of concept in a lot of modern diets today. This idea that to be, you know, it's not being righteous specifically that we're trying to achieve with self-denial, but it's health that we're trying to achieve with self-denial.

And just in the same way that the Bible warns against that, saying that's not how you become righteous in God's eyes. I don't. I also would say that's not how you became healthy because God gave us these appetites for a reason.

And we need to understand better what those appetites are and how we honor them. And so the approach I take is to lay out this foundation that says that we will find good, enjoyable and healthy foods when we honor God's natural created order for our bodies and for creation.

We see certain patterns in creation about how God made animals and plants to work together, how food production is supposed to work naturally in creation. But then we also have to recognize with that that humans have been given this important role of dominion over creation.

And this is what is so often missed in a lot of modern dietary approaches. It's just like what we just mentioned with the New Age beliefs and these evolutionary ideas that humans are basically just animals, that the more we can let nature be nature and not touch it at all, the better it's going to be.

But we know that in Genesis, God gave man dominion over creation. And that means that we are meant to tend it and to organize it and to improve upon it even, to make it more beautiful, to take it and make it into something different and better.

And this word dominion, I think, has a lot of even negative connotation today, unfortunately, because so many people associate that with just doing whatever we want to earth and to animals, abusing them, disrespecting them.

But that's not what it was supposed to be. It's supposed to be this mutually beneficial relationship where we tend to earth and we can actually improve upon it and make it better and make it more beautiful.

And I think when we're interacting with creation in that way, with plants and animals in that way, we're naturally going to create foods that are also healthy for us. And that's the foundation I approach food with.

And then what I do in my book is I take that foundation and apply it to different food groups, to meat, to plants, to grains, to fat. And what we see is that we can see examples where we have not done that well with creation.

We've created foods out of this belief that the natural foods God gave us were bad, or we exercise poor stewardship over animals. And what happens when you do that is you do, in fact, create these foods that are unhealthy and can be linked to a lot of the chronic diseases that we're facing today.

All right, I'm going to read a listener question from Moundville, Alabama, and I'll have you answer it when we return from our first commercial break. Kind of giving you a little time to mull it over.

Ted in Moundville, Alabama, says, it sounds like your guest is not a fan of antidepressants. I'm curious if she has categorically written them off or if she believes that certain patients can benefit from certain antidepressant medications under certain circumstances.

If not, what would she recommend for Christians, for Christian believers who suffer from chronic clinical depression? Let's assume that the believer in question has already tried repenting and praying the depression away, so-called nuthetic counseling, and a strict diet and exercise regimen.

Thanks. And I think that that's an oversimplification of nuthetic counseling, just praying the depression away. But I'll have you answer the question when we come back from our first break, and I will reread the question to you when we return.

If anybody else has a question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, your country of residence, and please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

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I'm Simon O'Mahony, pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Originally from Cork, Ireland, the Lord in his sovereign providence has called me to shepherd this new and growing congregation here in Cumberland County.

At TRBC, we joyfully uphold the Second London Baptist Confession. We embrace congregational church government and we are committed to preaching the full counsel of God's word for the edification of believers, the salvation of the lost and the glory of our triune God.

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Welcome back. If you just tuned us in, we are interviewing today Kat Owens, Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, Certified Personal Trainer, follower of Jesus Christ, and author with Founders Press.

And her book with Founders is Eat by Faith, Nourishing Yourself and Your Family in Light of Creation, Dominion, and the Gospel. If you have a question, submit it to ChrisOnzen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.

Antidepressants, Depression, and Seeking Root Causes

Just to repeat Ted from Moundville, Alabama's question. It sounds like your guest is not a fan of antidepressants. I'm curious if she has categorically written them off, or if she believes that certain patients can benefit from certain antidepressant medications under certain circumstances.

If not, what would she recommend for Christian believers who suffer from chronic clinical depression? Let's assume that the believer in question has already tried repenting and praying the depression away, so-called nuthetic counseling, and a strict diet and exercise regimen.

I guess what he means by that is they've already tried that and it's not apparently working or working quickly enough. And Ted wanted me to clarify something. He says, please note I did not define nuthetic counseling in my question.

Rather, I used the phrase repenting and praying the depression away as a separate part of the question, though I do think that nuthetics lean in that direction. I separated those ideas in two separate clauses specifically so it would not be misinterpreted as a simplistic definition of nuthetic counseling.

I guess that's what I did, according to Ted. But do you have an answer for Ted?

Yes, so I would say I do believe there are situations where these medications can get things under control for people, kind of like a stop the bleeding approach. And I am certainly not the expert to say when those situations, how long those situations persist, but I definitely do think there are times where they can be beneficial for that.

And I also, you know, also would not take this perspective that it is the only kind of solutions are going to be things like praying or repenting. I do think there are real physiological things going on there, and it can be really involved.

I definitely think that these are health issues, can be health issues like many other health issues where it's involved, where the answers are not easy and simplistic, and I can't give one specific thing that I think is always the cause.