Abstract
The emphasis on health ministry within the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) movement led to the development of sanitariums in mid-nineteenth century America. These facilities, the most notable being in Battle Creek, Michigan, initiated the development of vegetarian foods, such as breakfast cereals and analogue meats. The SDA Church still operates a handful of food production facilities around the world. The first Battle Creek Sanitarium dietitian was co-founder of the American Dietetics Association which ultimately advocated a vegetarian diet. The SDA Church established hundreds of hospitals, colleges, and secondary schools and tens of thousands of churches around the world, all promoting a vegetarian diet. As part of the ‘health message,’ diet continues to be an important aspect of the church’s evangelistic efforts. In addition to promoting a vegetarian diet and abstinence from alcohol, the SDA church has also invested resources in demonstrating the health benefits of these practices through research. Much of that research has been conducted at Loma Linda University in southern California, where there have been three prospective cohort studies conducted over 50 years. The present study, Adventist Health Study-2, enrolled 96,194 Adventists throughout North America in 2003–2004 with funding from the National Institutes of Health. Adventist Health Studies have demonstrated that a vegetarian diet is associated with longer life and better health.
Highlights
Numerous faith traditions have encouraged adherents to limit eating meat, even if temporarily
The Seventh-day Adventist Church, which began in mid-nineteenth-century America explicitly linked theology and food to encourage a vegetarian lifestyle among present and potential believers
Results of research conducted among vegetarian Adventists and at universities affiliated with the church have greatly contributed to the scientific understanding of the health effects of vegetarian diets and to dietary changes of the society at large
Summary
Numerous faith traditions have encouraged adherents to limit eating meat, even if temporarily. The Seventh-day Adventist Church, which began in mid-nineteenth-century America explicitly linked theology and food to encourage a vegetarian lifestyle among present and potential believers. The Church influenced the diet of non-members around the world through its ambitious organizational structure dedicated to education, health care, and the development and mass production of plant-based foods, such as meat analogues, breakfast cereals, and soy milk. When the Millerite prediction that the world would end in the early 1840’s did not come to pass, a handful from that movement went into a period of reflection and reassessment, resulting in a core group of ‘Adventists.’ This group increased from about 200 in 1850 to 3500 when the Seventh-day Adventist church was officially organized in 1863, having wide-ranging interests such as temperance, education, and religious liberty (Butler 1986). There are sub-groupings with this group such as vegan (no animal products), lacto-ovo-vegetarian (can include eggs and/or milk), pesco-vegetarian (can include fish), and semi-vegetarian (eat red meat, poultry, and fish less than once per week and more than once per month) (Le and Sabate 2014)
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