Adventists population

This variation results in a population with much wider variation in exposure to meat than one could find in a typical sample of the general population. Adventists who chose to use little or no meat also tend to follow many other nutritional practices that are believed to promote health. Thus, wide variation in many dietary exposures, in a population which is relatively homogeneous in many other characteristics relevant to cancer risk, provides an ideal setting to test dietary hypotheses. 

Mortality among Adventists Versus the General Population... 

In fact, it is reasonable to assume that adults in the general population who choose to join the Adventist church are a select group of rather unique and unusual people whose risk of acquiring or dying from any given disease may have been distinctly different from the general population at the time they converted to Adventism.7 If this were true, the primary explanation for their low risk may not be the... 

Compared to the general population, Adventists have an exceptionally low risk of fatal lung cancer and other diseases which are strongly related to cigarette or alcohol use. They also appear to have a marked reduction in risk of death from large bowel cancer, coronary disease, stroke, diabetes, and nontraffic accidents. 

We suspect that the magnitude of most of the associations noted between meat or coffee and specific fatal diseases are somewhat underestimated because Adventists may tend to underreport the amount of meat or coffee they use. If a substantial number of subjects actually use more meat and coffee than they reported on the Initial questionnaire, it would tend to make it harder to find the real associations, and the observed associations would tend to be weaker. Furthermore, we may have missed associations because subjects changed their habits during the 21-year follow-up period. All observed associations are based on meat and coffee use at the time subjects completed the baseline questionnaire (1960). Subsequent changes in these habits would tend to reduce or eliminate the possibility of finding disease associations with these habits. Failure to find associations, or detection of weak associations, could also result from the fact that our study population contains relatively few subjects who are very heavy users of meat or coffee, while it contains an abundance of subjects who have no exposure to these items. 

However, such studies are costly and time-consuming. Large amounts of information are collected on large numbers of people who are followed for long periods. The Seventh-Day Adventists study (85) followed about 6000 white, nonsmoking, long-term California residents prospectively for 6-10 years. Cumulative exposure to total suspended particulates (TSP) and ozone was estimated for each individual in the study. Mortality was not consistently associated with TSP. Measures of inhalable particulate (PMio) or fine particulate (PM2.5) pollution were not considered in this analysis. Two other large prospective cohort studies specifically evaluate the mortality effects of fine particulate air pollution in urban populations in the United States. 

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