Alcohol, tobacco, coffee and tea are forbidden

Doctrine and Covenants Section 89, dated February 1833, records a revelation Joseph Smith received in Kirtland, Ohio, prompted according to church history by his wife Emma's concern over the mess and health effects of tobacco spit and chewed left by men meeting in the Smiths' home for church business. The text itself is framed cautiously, introduced as 'a word of wisdom, for the benefit of the council of high priests... and also the saints in Zion' given 'not by commandment or constraint,' and prohibits wine and strong drink except for sacramental use, tobacco, and 'hot drinks,' while recommending herbs, fruit, and sparing use of meat, and promising health and, in a frequently quoted closing verse, that the obedient will 'run and not be weary, and shall walk and not faint.'

For the movement's first several decades, observance was uneven and treated broadly as the counsel its own text described rather than a strict test of standing. That changed decisively under church president Heber J. Grant in the early twentieth century, who campaigned to make full observance, including abstention from coffee and tea, an actual requirement for temple admission and, eventually, for baptism and full church membership standing, a shift formalized through the 1920s and 1930s. The word 'commandment' is now used for the Word of Wisdom in ordinary church usage despite the revelation's own explicit disclaimer, an example of how practice and later authoritative interpretation can move well beyond a text's original wording within Latter-day Saint doctrinal development.

Because Section 89's own language is broad, 'hot drinks' rather than a specific list of substances, its practical application has been settled by later authoritative interpretation rather than the text alone. Church leaders confirmed early that 'hot drinks' meant coffee and tea specifically, not any beverage served hot, and twentieth and twenty-first century guidance extended the prohibition to illegal drugs and, for many members, to non-medical use of substances the original text does not mention at all, while leaving genuinely gray areas, caffeinated soft drinks chief among them, to individual conscience after decades of informal debate; official guidance since 2012 has stated that the prohibition is specifically against coffee and tea rather than caffeine generally.

Observance functions in practice as one of the standards a bishop reviews in the temple recommend interview that gates access to temple ordinances, making the Word of Wisdom one of the few dietary-adjacent rules in the tradition with a direct institutional consequence attached to it, unlike the encouragements toward moderate meat consumption and herb and grain use in the same revelation, which remain informal counsel most members do not treat as tested at all. Latter-day Saint public health researchers have also pointed to the Word of Wisdom's abstention requirements as a contributing factor in studies showing Utah's Latter-day Saint population with comparatively low rates of certain smoking and alcohol-related diseases, a correlation the church itself sometimes cites as validating the revelation's promised blessing of health.