The Healthiest People on Earth: Your Guide to Living 10 Years Longer with Adventist Family Secrets and Plant-Based Recipes

Seventh-Day Adventists are reputed to eat a healthy diet—a vegan diet that abstains from alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco. John Weeks’s book The Healthiest People on Earth chronicles the Church’s dietary beliefs—unfortunately, not very successfully. Weeks’s writing and writing style are weak—not easy to follow and not easy to read, which makes his concepts difficult to digest. The book is full of I’s and mine’s and John’s, but his biggest problem is his singular black-and-white beliefs: anything to do with the church’s doctrines and diet is shining white, anything outside is poisonous black. His high-handed proselytizing starts from page one and continues throughout. To quote Weeks, “Take heed, all you milk-glugging, cheese-scarfing, lacto-ovo vegetarians!” This is a common example of his style. A meaty diet is pure poison, and so are eggs and milk, he says. Weeks spends much of his writing giving detailed information about his ancestors’ and his own life from young adulthood on, and on how his lifestyle has changed with his new beliefs. His frequent use of block capitals is disturbing instead of emphasizing. His vegan recipe collection is only fair, recipe layout is poor, and recipes appear in continuous text, making them user unfriendly.