A clean living religious sect is ensuring significantly improved health for its adherents, including reduced rates of cancer, according to a new study.
Seventh-day Adventists, a Christian sect that is known for health promotion, has fewer premature deaths and lower rates of cancer compared to the general population, a US study has revealed.
Researchers at Loma Linda University, California, found similar results when they limited the analysis to Black Adventists and the Black general population.
Previous research has suggested that that Seventh-day Adventists have lower risks of many cancers, heart disease, and diabetes, which could be due to the Church’s promotion of healthy lifestyles that include not smoking, eating a plant-based diet, regular exercise, and maintaining normal body weight.
Dr Gary Fraser and his colleagues compared death rates and cancer incidence between a national Seventh-day Adventist population and a representative sample of the US population, analysing data from the Adventist Health Study-2 and a US Census population.
They found significantly lower rates of death from any cause, as well as a lower incidence of all cancers combined in the Adventist population, by 33% and 30% respectively, as well as lower incidence rates specifically for breast cancer (30%), colorectal (16%), rectal (50%), and lung cancer (30%).
The team also discovered that death rates and incidence of all cancers combined were significantly lower among Black Adventist individuals compared with Black individuals in the US Census population, by 36% and 22% respectively. The findings are published in CANCER.
Dr Fraser said: “This is the first confirmation of previous reports, now using national populations. Further, we were able to control for differences in tobacco use by excluding any currently smoking non-Adventists and adjusting for past smoking and time since quitting in previous smokers.
“In addition, this is the first report that includes a comparison among Black individuals alone.”
Dr Fraser although its study does not identify the causes of the health benefits experienced by Adventists, other studies have demonstrated that the plant-based diet chosen by many Adventists is an important factor.
“Adventist vegetarians have less overweight, diabetes, hypertension, elevated blood cholesterol, coronary heart disease, and several cancers compared with Adventist non-vegetarians, who themselves are lower than usual consumers of animal foods,” he said.
“Thus, the findings in this report comparing all Adventists-vegetarians and non-vegetarians to average Americans are largely as expected, and strongly suggest that these health advantages may be available to all Americans who choose similar diets, in addition of course to other well-known prudent lifestyle choices such as regular physical activity, avoiding smoking, and care with body weight.”
Fraser GE, Cosgrove C, Mashchak A et al. Lower rates of cancer and all-cause mortality in an Adventist cohort compared with a U.S. Census population. Cancer 25 November 2019; doi: 10.1002/cncr.32571.
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