St. Albans, United Kingdom—The Trans-European Division (TED) hosted two of the 22 worldwide live transmissions as part of Global Youth Day (GYD) on Saturday, March 15, 2014, from Vik, Norway (near Oslo), and Newbold College, England. These transmissions were hosted by young people at both venues.
Global Youth Day was the result of inspiration by Gilbert Cangy, General Conference youth director. He wanted to get the eight million Adventist young people throughout the world active; get them out of their usual routines of just listening to sermons and onto the streets to do acts of kindness and service in their local communities and to “be the sermon.”
Individual projects widely varied. In the Netherlands, they used a nationally known saying, “carrying the egg,” as a means of people sharing their stresses and writing something appropriate on a real egg.
In many other cities across Europe, waffles and fruit with Bible texts and other literature were distributed; some youth involved themselves in making the community a better place by picking up litter. Other acts of kindness included visiting a children’s home, giving blood, exchanging cigarettes for fruit, singing at residences for the elderly, feeding the homeless, praying for people, and giving away free hugs.
Globally the effects of GYD have been very impressive. One member of the public in London commented, “You are just great. God bless you all.” The youth that volunteered also gave positive feedback. “It’s a different way to reach out in ministry—perfect, actually, and it needs to continue.” All across the countries young people took part in the day’s events, and reports of these activities are still coming in.
Participating as part of the Oslo program, TED youth director Paul Tompkins saw the action firsthand and said, “It was great to see so many young people excited and motivated to share their faith in a practical way and to participate in an event that linked youth throughout the world.” According to estimates, 58,000 computers worldwide were logged on during the Nordic hour alone.
The impact of Global Youth Day has been huge, and next year this will be repeated on Saturday, March 21—which will also mark the commencement of the international week of prayer.
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Black vegetarians at lower risk for heart disease
The study, available online in the journal Public Health Nutrition, compared the cardiovascular risk factors between black vegetarians and non-vegetarians who are part of the ongoing Loma Linda University Adventist Health Study-2 (AHS-2).*
AHS-2, funded by the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH), is a long-running study of members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church throughout North America. The study focuses on nutrition, lifestyle, and health outcomes. Researchers said Seventh-day Adventists are a unique study subject because they have a wide variety of dietary habits but in general have a very low percentage of alcohol consumption or cigarette smoking—nondietary factors that may otherwise impact the study.
The new results show a hierarchy of benefits received by black participants in the study based on their eating habits: vegans (those who completely abstain from meat and meat products) and lacto-ovo vegetarians (those who consume eggs and dairy) were the least at risk for cardiovascular disease, followed by semivegetarians (those who infrequently eat meat), pescovegetarians (those who eat fish), and lastly, nonvegetarians. The study results show that, compared with their nonvegetarian counterparts, black vegetarian Adventists were at less risk for hypertension, diabetes, high blood pressure, high total cholesterol, and high blood-LDL cholesterol. The study was a cross-sectional analysis of the data and does not conclusively establish cause. In the future, the study involving black subjects also plans to look directly at heart disease experience rather than just risk factors for heart disease.
Patti Herring, an associate professor at the Loma Linda University School of Public Health, and one of the study’s coinvestigators, said, “Some findings for black Adventists are promising, and we are anxious to compare black Adventist health with the general population of blacks. In so doing, we suspect that black Adventists’ health will prove better in many regards than those in the general population, particularly for the vegetarians.”
“There’s a growing body of evidence that vegetarian diets lower the risk for cardiovascular diseases and other diseases,” she said, noting that AHS-2 is one of the few that has such a large number of black participants, which is significant because they generally have some of the poorest health outcomes among minority populations.
Periodic findings of the ongoing AHS-2 study have been previously reported by major international news agencies. Last year, The Journal of the American Medical Association reported AHS-2 findings that vegetarians experienced 12 percent fewer deaths over a six-year period of research.
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* The abstract can be found at journals.cambridge.org/action /displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9205599&fulltextTy pe=RA&fileId=S1368980014000263. The complete article is available for a fee.
