Ital sits inside the wider Rastafari concept of livity, a word for right living that treats diet, dress, speech and worship as a single connected discipline rather than separate rules. The body is understood as a temple that should not be defiled, an idea Rastafari shares with, and traces partly to, the Nazarite vow of the Hebrew Bible, which also forbids cutting the hair, a connection Rastas draw explicitly to their own practice of growing dreadlocks. Eating Ital is presented less as a rule imposed from outside than as an alignment with nature, intended to keep the body, and through it the mind, clear and close to its natural state.
Because Rastafari has no central authority comparable to a church hierarchy, Ital observance differs meaningfully between individuals and between the movement's several houses or mansions. The Bobo Ashanti and the Nyabinghi order are generally stricter and more consistently vegan than the wider, looser Rastafari public, and some adherents eat fish while refusing all other meat, reading the biblical restriction more narrowly than others do. The diet has also traveled well beyond Rastafari itself, becoming a recognizable feature of Jamaican and diaspora food culture independent of the theology that produced it.