Loma Linda looks like any average Inland Empire suburb. Curved residential streets with wide lots are populated with modest homes, many sporting swing sets in the front yard and basketball hoops in driveways. Gas stations and fast food chains anchor busy street corners. There’s no real central downtown, and instead, the city functions around a variety of strip malls and shopping centers. But this sleepy town has a world-famous reputation as a place where residents live significantly longer — about a decade more — than the average American.
In 2008, Loma Linda rocketed to the national stage when it was dubbed a “Blue Zone,” the term coined by author Dan Buettner to describe a place where people not only live longer but also live healthier lives. Nearly 20 years later, the California town of around 25,000 people still stands out rather oddly in its peer group, which includes beautiful international destinations like Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; and Ikaria, Greece. All of them are set against mountains or sea, with residents who live a more traditional lifestyle.
Gaining such a reputation can fundamentally change a place — there was major media attention, a book and even a documentary that followed — but despite international acclaim, most residents and workers in town agree it’s just another city in California.
‘Totally irrelevant’
When you drive into town, there are no signs welcoming you to the United States’ only Blue Zone. And you’ll be even harder pressed to find any overt explanation as to how they ended up with this distinction, but there is one very large clue: The main employer in town is Loma Linda University, a private, Seventh-day Adventist college primarily focused on health sciences. It grew from a small medical school established in 1905, when Seventh-day Adventists purchased a failed resort with plans for a new community.
Today, the sprawling medical system extends through much of the center of town. Even those who may not subscribe to the Christian denomination’s religious beliefs — like observing the Saturday Sabbath or following biblical teachings — are surrounded by their health-conscious tenets, like a vegetarian hospital cafeteria and a dry campus. Since nearly half of the residents in town are Seventh-day Adventists, it deeply shapes business and city policy.
Mayor Phill Dupper grew up in Loma Linda as a Seventh-day Adventist, though he said he’s probably “not the strongest spiritually anymore.” He’s always loved the area, and he said most people, Seventh-day Adventist or not, value the principles of community. “It’s a very unique city. We don’t have the same issues that other cities have ... for the most part, we all get along,” Dupper said, describing it as a safe, welcoming place.
Dupper said he thinks the benefits of strong community ties are undervalued when talking about Blue Zones and overall health, and he thinks that’s still what makes Loma Linda a great place to live today.
The Blue Zone designation actually makes him a bit nervous, he said, and he doesn’t tout it often, since the data that the designation was based on is now rather old and was based solely on the Seventh-day Adventist part of the community. He said it’s been brought up among city officials as a way to promote the city, but members are often divided.
Even Dr. Gary Fraser, whose research was the base for much of the Blue Zone status designation, told SFGATE that “the Loma Linda experience is totally irrelevant.” The research done was important, and the designation is significant, he said, but the overall study of longer living is more complicated and technical than it’s often presented, and it has more to do with Adventists than Loma Linda.
He said that when he began his research more than 40 years ago, it was helpful to be able to study Adventists because it helped level the playing field. Since most don’t smoke or drink and participate in similar, healthier lifestyle activities, researchers could analyze their diets more effectively and understand how that affected longevity. Fraser said, if anything, it points to the importance of studying how people eat, something he’s continuing to do today.
“It’s had people look into what we found a little bit more and become aware that it’s possible with the way you live your life to make a difference,” Fraser said.
He’s not surprised people are still interested in the Blue Zone status, though, because people of course want to learn how to live longer. Still, it’s hard to study, since diets can be so varied and often rely on people reporting their eating habits accurately.
Despite decades of this research, “there’s still a great deal that we do not know,” Fraser said.
‘It’s not that different’
When most people visualize a Blue Zone, they might picture lots of centenarians briskly walking around town in sweatbands. But on a busy Wednesday morning at a cafe near one of the many university medical buildings, people of every age group walk in, ordering coffee and bagels as they do in every other city in America.
Lydia Lowe, a nearby Redlands resident, said the Blue Zone status is one of the first things people say when they hear she lives near Loma Linda. She recently visited the Philippines and said several people knew about it when she shared where she was from. She said that she thinks certain pockets of Loma Linda are certainly focused on health and wellness, but “it’s not that different than anywhere else.”
For others, it’s a fundamental shift in how they approach life. Jim Steele, who lives in Cherry Valley but comes into town frequently for health care appointments and to see friends, said, “It’s so relaxed here. There’s no anxiety here.”
Dr. Thomas Chandy, a resident psychiatrist at Loma Linda University, said the Blue Zone status is part of the city’s culture — especially for those in health care. “It’s very important to people here,” he said.
Are Blue Zones disappearing?
John Walsh, an associate professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California, goes down to the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica, another Blue Zone where the average age is 85, every year to teach a three-week intensive course on the area and its associations with longevity. “There’s no one magic bullet ... it truly is the culture,” Walsh said.
That type of culture has been ingrained for hundreds of years in the Blue Zones outside of the U.S. For Loma Linda, that type of culture was created through the religion. Men live to about 89 years old and women live to be about 91, while the average life expectancy is around 78 in the U.S.
“They really centralize that concept of care of, you know. Everybody helps each other through their relationships in the church ... it’s very much so a tenet of their lifestyle,” Walsh said of Loma Linda.
But people aren’t flocking to Loma Linda the way they’re moving to the Nicoya Peninsula. Walsh said the Costa Rican destination has become a popular tourism hot spot, especially for surfers and digital nomads, and the place is beginning to show signs of change.
A recently released, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study shows Blue Zones might actually be disappearing, or at least aren’t quite as remarkable as they once were. The analysis didn’t include Loma Linda — it looked at Okinawa, Sardinia and Nicoya — but found that the longevity gap between Blue Zones and most other cities is shrinking.
David Rehkopf, a Stanford epidemiologist who has been doing research in Costa Rica for more than 20 years and is an author on the new research study, declined to comment, as the study is currently under review. Regardless, he said, the Blue Zone label is still relevant today because it pushes people to think about health more broadly rather than just, for example, how one supplement or habit change may affect their longevity.
Another criticism from when the Blue Zone debuted that still holds today: “There may be other Blue Zones out there we just don’t have data on,” Rehkopf said.
“The people in these blue zones, for the most part, ... they aren’t trying to be healthy, they aren’t like working hard at it, you know? It’s just they were born there, and they’re doing what they do,” Rehkopf said.
Mayor Dupper said just that about Loma Linda. “Blue Zone ideology is definitely part of our community, I don’t want to dismiss that,” Dupper said, acknowledging how important health, diet and community are to Loma Linda.
But for someone who grew up there, he’s not sure how much that matters. “It’s just kind of always who we’ve been,” Dupper said.
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