By many accounts, Wareham, now 98, has led a good, full, and meaningful life. What does he know that we don't?

As a middle-aged man, Wareham spent a lot of time in the operating room cutting into one patient after another who had heart problems. There, he noticed something: patients who were vegetarian mostly had much cleaner and smoother arteries than those who ate meat. The arteries of meat-eaters tended to be full of calcium and plaque.

So he made a choice. He decided to become a vegan. That decision was not too hard to make given the fact that many of the inhabitants of his southern Californian community were already very health conscious. Consider: there is no meat sold at one of the largest grocery stores in town. In fact, as recently as a generation ago, meat was difficult to find in the grocery stores of Loma Linda, as the New York Times reports. On top of that, smoking is banned in the town; alcohol is scarcely available; and fast food restaurants are hard to come by.

But make no mistake: Loma Linda is not some bohemian enclave of free-spirited vegans. Rather, what makes the community remarkable -- and remarkably health conscious -- is that it is home to one of the largest concentrations of Seventh-Day Adventists in the world. A conservative denomination of Christianity founded during this country's Second Great Awakening in the mid-1800s, the religion advocates a healthy lifestyle as a main tenet of the faith. This is a major reason why Wareham, a Seventh-Day Adventist, takes his health so seriously.

"Adventists believe in the body and soul as one," according to Dr. Daniel Giang of Loma Linda University's Medical Center. Pastor Randy Roberts of the same university references scripture to drive the point home: "In Corinthians, Paul speaking of the human body says specifically, 'you are the temple of the Holy spirit.' Therefore, he says, whatever you do in your body, you do it to the honor, the glory and the praise of God." The Seventh-Day Adventists, like Jews and Muslims, stay away from foods that the Bible deems impure, like pork.

Many Seventh-Day Adventists are vegetarians, physically active, and involved in their community. In other words, their lifestyles are quite unique in an America where community has become less and less important and over one third of the population is obese. Smoking and drinking are discouraged by the faith, as is the consumption of caffeine, rich foods, and certain spices. By most of our hyper-connected standards, the Seventh-Day Adventists are also an isolated community. Unlike other Christian sects that take their Sabbath on Sunday, they take theirs on Saturday. The more conservative members of the religion cut themselves off from popular culture altogether.



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Because of their unique lifestyle, scientists from a variety of organizations like the National Health Institute and the American Cancer Society have since 1958 been studying how the community's dietary habits, lifestyle, disease rates, and mortality interact in a series of studies known as the Adventist Health Studies. What they have found in the decades since is remarkable.