A Community That Can Be Measured

Loma Linda has an unusual place in research because a religiously prescribed way of living happens to be well suited to study. The population is large, geographically concentrated, stable over time, and follows dietary and lifestyle rules that vary in a measurable way between members, which is why the Adventist Health Study cohorts have been followed for decades. Published analyses from Adventist Health Study 2, covering a very large cohort of North American Adventists, report associations between vegetarian dietary patterns and lower mortality within that cohort.

The atlas reports those as published findings about a studied population, not as a claim that any diet will produce any result for any individual, and it is worth being explicit that association in a cohort study is not the same thing as an established cause. Two things follow that are genuinely interesting for a reference work on religion. The first is that a religious community volunteered itself as a research subject over generations, which required an institutional commitment to the research as well as to the teaching. The second is that Loma Linda is the only such religious community named among the Blue Zones, a popular framework about longevity that has itself been contested, so the town appears in two literatures with different standards of evidence.