As the Blue Zones framework reaches toward the UK, with whispers of public health reform and food policy shifts, I urge you to consider what is being lost beneath the commercialised branding. To recognise that what is being framed as health promotion may, in truth, be the quiet dismantling of ancestral sovereignty.
Beneath the surface of the plant-based messaging lies an intriguing story, one that’s rarely told. A story of Temperance Health Reformers, medical evangelism, and an enduring vision of Eden, claimed to be given to 19th-century prophetess Ellen G. White, co-founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church by God himself, whereby; - ‘fruit, nuts, and seeds’ are considered ‘the God-appointed diet for man.’ She also claimed to have been told, in Vision, that ‘flesh-meat’ was a ‘toxic stimulant’ defiling not only men, but women and children; morally, physically, and spiritually. Her ‘Health Reform message' has since become a global health mandate, wrapped in the language of wellness, and elevated to the realm of public health.
Concerningly, the Seventh-day Adventist Church acquired the commercial rights to the Blue Zones™ in 2020, ensuring the narrative of ancestral diets consumed by elders in Sardinia, Okinawa, Nicoya, and Ikaria would be further erased. Removing their cultural heritage of tending and raising animals, which included pigs, sheep and goats, as though the very practices that nourished them, and regenerated the land for centuries, are suddenly responsible for chronic disease, shortened lifespan, and environmental harm.
My concern is that longevity, health, and food sovereignty are being reframed, rewritten, and replaced by a narrative shaped by commercial interests and ideological bias, disguised as ‘public health’. Something Ellen G White claimed was ‘a duty of the Church’ and its members.
For most of human history, nourishment, survival, and ceremony were interwoven with tools shaped by hand: stone, fire, butchering, curing, and fermentation. Long before humans fermented milk into cheese or processed maize to unlock niacin, we first learned to butcher, transforming the whole animal, muscle, marrow, organ, and hide, into life-giving food, clothing, and tools.
Butchering was the very first act of ancestral processing: an intimate, skilled tradition that honoured both the life taken and the life sustained. Every ancestral technology that followed, including fermenting grains, leavening breads, and softening tubers, carried the same thread of transformation, rooted in relationship, respect, and reciprocity.
Today, however, ultra-processed plant-based products use the language of “clean” and “healthy,” yet they sever us from the very wisdom that not only allowed us to survive but thrive. They offer processed convenience but not complete nourishment.
Food sovereignty has been defined as “the right of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods and their right to define their food and agriculture systems.” This right, to define nourishment on one’s own terms, remains sacred in ancestral communities.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the mountainous interior of Sardinia, where longevity was first identified by researcher Dr. Giovanni Pes. With demographer Professor Michel Poulain, they discovered 14 remote villages nestled within Sardinia’s highest elevations in 2000. It wasn’t defined as a ‘Blue Zone’ because elders ate less meat, but because they raised it, respected it, and shared it within a system of communal resilience known as Ademprivi where anyone in the village could graze sheep, gather firewood, forage wild greens, or collect acorns to make traditional bread.
The longevity of these Sardinian elders was inherited, not engineered.
Dr. Bill Schindler, an archaeologist and anthropologist, spent time in the Sardinian Blue Zone learning to prepare ancestral meats and cheeses. When he asked an elder how often they “ate meat,” the answer, “once a week,” came as a surprise, until he realised, they were referring to the Sunday spit roast, the big celebration meal. What a profound moment of linguistic and cultural mistranslation when the everyday nourishment of bone broth, cured meats, fermented dairy, and organ meats, weren’t considered in their reply. Was it this subtle, but critical nuance that allowed “meat once a week” to become a plant-based health prescription for the commercial Blue Zones narrative?
The Blue Zones™ project, originally designed to highlight places where elders thrive, has increasingly focused on Loma Linda, a Seventh-day Adventist Church enclave in California. Unlike the other four ancestral Blue Zones where people were born and raised on the land, Loma Linda was purchased for the Church by Ellen G. White in 1905. The Seventh-day Adventist College of Medical Evangelists began training doctors and nurses for missionary work, while the Church’s Loma Linda Foods factory, producing ‘health foods’ to replace meat, eggs, milk, and butter, fulfilled their ‘Commission to God’ whilst also offering employment to students to help pay tuition fees.
It is important to understand that the Seventh-day Adventist Church draws selectively from biblical texts, citing Leviticus and Deuteronomy to define ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ foods. Yet, even within this selective biblical framework, their prophetess Ellen G. White went further, declaring all flesh meat, including biblically ‘clean’ animals like cows, sheep, and goats, as a ‘toxic stimulant’ that defiled men, women, and children physically, morally, and spiritually. “Let not any of our ministers set an evil example in the eating of flesh-meat” she stated.
This belief stands in direct contradiction not only to the dietary allowances in the Old Testament but to the Christian message of the New Testament, where Jesus himself teaches that food cannot defile the heart of a person (Mark 7:18-20). In elevating Ellen G White’s visions above both ancestral tradition and scripture, the Church preaches a dietary gospel of fear, one that profits commercially through its global health food industries, while erasing the diverse, animal-inclusive diets that have nourished humankind for millennia.
Today, the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Health Reform message, which promotes a nearvegan diet, is embedding itself quietly but powerfully into the very fabric of American society, through the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) and Adventist Health’s acquisition of the Blue Zones™ brand. Their press releases make clear: their vision is rooted in Seventh-day Adventist heritage, with plans to reach millions of people through continuing community rollouts and medical evangelism.
Through this deepening partnership, the demonisation of saturated animal fats, and increasingly, animal proteins themselves, becomes public health policy. Devout religious beliefs and personal dietary bias undermine open, evidence-based discussions on nutrition, disease prevention, and true sustainability for people and planetary health.
What was once an intimate relationship of diversity with land, animals, and seasonal cycles, a relationship that nourished both body and culture have become a singular prescription for a near-vegan diet, sanctified by science, but seeded in 19th-century prophecy.
Belinda Fettke
Independent Researcher