Results from four decades of Seventh-day Adventist health studies have now been compiled in one reference, and are available from the largest university press in the world.
Results from four decades of Seventh-day Adventist health studies have now been compiled in one reference, and are available from the largest university press in the world.
“Diet, Life Expectancy, and Chronic Disease: The Health Studies of Seventh-day Adventists and Other Vegetarians,” was released last week by Oxford University Press, a unit of Oxford University.
The book is being released as thousands of Adventists are participating in a new health study even more extensive than those mentioned in the book.
Dr. Gary E. Fraser, the author and a professor of medicine at Loma Linda University’s School of Medicine and a professor of epidemiology at the university’s school of public health, says the book is based on two studies of Adventists in California in 1960 and 1976.
“We’ve been asked time and time again for results of [these] health studies,” says Fraser. “That’s really what the book is for.”
He says it was a challenge compiling all the previously published information since health study results have appeared in some 320 publications in peer-reviewed journals for more than 40 years.
Having grown up Adventist and saying “no” to meat on many occasions, Fraser says it was natural for him to explore the evidence for a vegetarian health advantage when he had the opportunity.
Many Adventists are vegetarian by choice and most abstain from alcohol and tobacco.
“If it did turn out that there were a large number of very long-lived healthy Adventists, and if our lifestyle really made that kind of difference, we seriously needed to tell this to others in a convincing way,” says Fraser.
“In an age of science with the expectation of empirical evidence, the collection and publication of strong peer-reviewed scientific results from studies such as the Adventist Health Study is necessary to persuade people and change official recommendations,” he says.
The early studies were informative but did not involve enough people in examining different cancers extensively, says Fraser. He hopes the book’s release generates even more support for the current Adventist health study being funded by an $18 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the United States government. The new study, begun in 2002 and sponsored by Loma Linda School of Public Health, aims to examine health habits among 125,000 Adventists, including 45,000 black Adventists, whose males have twice the rate of prostate cancer as do Caucasians, says Fraser.
The reason for this disparity in prostate cancer rates is “totally unclear,” he says. Yet this question is one of the largest-ever health studies examining questions about the health of blacks in America, and is one of the reasons Loma Linda was awarded the NIH grant.
Another reason for the NIH grant, according to Fraser, was to investigate a possible link between consuming soy products and a low overall rate of prostate and breast cancers among Adventists. No other measurable group in the United States has a soy consumption rate as high as Adventists.
Adventists typically are healthier than the general population, the book shows. Of Adventists studied in California, rates of heart attacks were half and cancer was 30 percent less than the general population.
But why are Adventists healthier? It’s hard to know for sure, says Fraser, yet some general patterns have been discovered and are discussed in the new book. Past studies have suggested that meat was a factor in coronary heart disease while nuts and whole grains were protective against it.
For life expectancy, nut consumption, being vegetarian, and absence of excess weight were three factors that made a difference of about two years of life each.
For cancer, fruit consumption was a preventative factor; some cancers, such as colon and bladder, were linked to meat consumption. Legumes helped protect against some cancers, while potatoes are said to help prevent ovarian cancer.
Fraser says the new study will more thoroughly examine meat consumption and effective calcium intake. There is a debate in the medical community whether calcium may be a protective of some cancers but a cause of others. Fraser says the issue is “very controversial.”
Although there is a range of dietary habits among Adventists, church members are more uniform in areas such as not smoking, as well as very little alcohol consumption. But there is more variance in the area of meat consumption, Fraser says.
A major motivation of the new study is to capture the wide range of dietary habits. Fraser says the study is strengthened by a “huge variability in Adventists.” He reports that half of the Adventist churches involved in the study have already been visited.
“The time that this book comes out is very appropriate,” says DeWitt Williams, health ministries director for the Adventist Church in North America. “It shows that being a vegetarian makes a big difference on quality and length of life.
“We all [Adventists] have the same spiritual background. The only thing different is their diet,” says Williams. “When you add as much as 12 years of active life, that’s significant.”
A special effort is being made to recruit black Adventists to participate in the study, according to Dr. Patti Herring, co-director of the Adventist Health study. Two people in each predominantly black church are being trained to encourage other members to complete the study.
“If blacks participate, there’s a lot in it for them,” says Herring. “Overall, our health is much more inferior and our life expectancy is much less. We have a lot to gain from this study.”
For more information on the current health study visit www.adventisthealthstudy.org.
