Pastor Bill Elder turned 101 years old this month and is finally starting to take it easy — though it wasn’t exactly by choice. The centenarian recently broke his right hip and opted out of having surgery because the complications due to his age would have been too great. It has slowed him down, but only slightly. “You lose a lot of your freedoms,” he says. But for Elder, the Lord’s work never stops. Last year, a couple days after his hip went out, he gave a rousing sermon at his local church.

For the last few years, Elder has lived with his wife of 74 years, Mary, at Linda Valley Villa, a 98-unit assisted living facility for seniors. The average age of the residents of the complex is 87 — a full eight years past the average life expectancy in the United States. However extraordinary it sounds, Elder’s age or appetite for life isn’t exactly a unique occurrence around here, where people outlive each other instead of retiring. It’s not uncommon for residents to celebrate their 106th birthdays or still work jobs well into their 90s.

The Seventh-day Adventists are known as America’s “longevity all-stars” and they largely credit their long life spans to their vegetarian diets.

One of the fastest growing Christian denominations, Adventists count 20 million members worldwide among them. It’s also one of the most diverse religions in the United States, according to a Pew research study (the Loma Linda region alone has a Spanish, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese and Thai Seventh-day Adventists churches). What they choose to eat and how is deeply rooted in their religion. The Adventist philosophy — “honoring God with the body” — connects health to faith, instead of treating it as a separate entity that functions outside of it.

“We are the temple of God and we should not put anything in that temple that’s going to hurt us,” says Loma Linda resident Sophia Poulos, 92, who lives with her husband Nick, 93, at Valley Villa and has been a vegetarian since she was baptized as an Adventist when she was 12 years old.

While often seen as a sect that exists outside of mainstream Christianity, Adventists have played a huge role in shaping the mainstream food culture of America as pioneers in alternative meat industry. They’re also the entire reason why American breakfasts are synonymous with cereal — the Kellogg brothers, who were Adventist, invented corn flakes.

The origins of this unique gastronomic gospel can be traced back to Ellen G. White, the original medical evangelist and prophetess for Adventists whose writing became the foundation on which the Seventh-day Adventist theology developed.

Spanish for “Beautiful Hill,” Loma Linda was once part of a Native American village appropriately named “plenty to eat” in the local language before it became known as Mound City and attempted to bill itself as a tourist destination with the opening of the Mound City hotel which did little to attract visitors. In the 1890s, a group of Los Angeles physicians purchased it, reopening it as a health resort which they called Loma Linda. By 1904, that resort had also failed, but one year later, the Seventh-day Adventist purchased it and made it into a sanitarium and nursing school. A school of medicine opened in 1909.

By the time explorer and writer Dan Buettner came across Loma Linda, the city had already established a reputation for longevity thanks to a series of studies on Adventist health conducted at Loma Linda University.

“All the common diseases that finally kill people were being put off by four to seven years,” says Dr. Gary Fraser, a professor of cardiology at Loma Linda University’s school of medicine and principle investigator of a current study examining Adventist health with 100,000 participants.

In 2005, Buettner wrote about these findings in a cover story for National Geographic called “Secrets of Long Life,” which catapulted Loma Linda and the Seventh-day Adventist way of life to international fame. Working with scientists Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain, the team who coined the term “Blue Zone” after drawing a blue circle on a map around Sardinia’s Nuoro province after noticing it was the region with the highest amount of male centenarians, the trio identified the Greek island of Ikaria, Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula, Okinawa in Japan, and Loma Linda as other “Blue Zones” in the world.

It has been over a decade since Loma Linda received its Blue Zone designation, but the Adventist Health Studies, which began in 1960 at Loma Linda University are still ongoing, attempting to further investigate how the unique dietary habits of the Adventist community contribute to decreased risk of chronic disease.

Loma Linda University’s kitchen is also digging deeper. A 25-year food industry veteran and Seventh-day Adventist chef Cory Gheen is at work experimenting with meat alternatives creating menus for a new generation of vegetarians. He hosts an online series called Live It (In the Kitchen) where he walks viewers through recipes for dishes like pearled barley and pea risotto, lychee coconut ice-cream, and bean burgers and has collaborated with the Riverside Convention Center (which sees 250,000 guests a year pass through its doors) to featuring things like quinoa chickpea cakes and other unique items for vegetarian meals.

One of the most popular items he’s concocted is a meatball made with walnut instead of ground beef, a dish just close enough to mimicking the real thing that’s featured on the University hospital’s menu.

But it isn’t just their diets that help Adventists outlive the rest of the country. “Right now, the focus is on eating and vegetarianism, but the Adventist idea of health goes way beyond that,” Gheen says. “We don’t smoke, we don’t drink, we take time off once a week — a sabbath — where people are encouraged not to work, we drink clean water and get plenty of exercise; there are so many different components that go into the full idea of what health really is.”

“Be optimistic, be outgoing, try to live a stressless life and laugh easily,” she says. “Oh, and stay away from the sugar.”