Adventists don’t lie. We just believe some very convenient things about food.
Calories don’t count on the Sabbath. It’s holy time, and holy time has no metabolism. Whatever we eat between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday is strictly between us and God.
Haystacks are a salad. There is lettuce in there somewhere, under the corn chips, the beans, the cheese and the sour cream. We saw it once.
Potluck food doesn’t count if we take only a little of each dish. There are forty-three dishes.
It’s vegetarian, so it’s healthy. This covers the cheesy casserole, the fried gluten steaks and the third slice of pie. No cow died for it, so our arteries must be fine.
Big Franks are basically vegetables. They come in a can with the Loma Linda name on it, and Loma Linda is a Blue Zone. We rest our case.
Sabbath lunch ends around four. The Sabbath nap is exercise, because rest is a commandment and we take our commandments seriously. Getting up off the couch for vespers counts as a workout.
Then there’s the Blue Zone, which we mention at every family gathering. The Adventist Health Study found that California Adventist men lived about seven years longer than other Californians, and women about four. In 2005 National Geographic called Loma Linda a Blue Zone. The people in those studies also exercised, ate nuts and kept a healthy weight. We tend to skip that part and keep the trophy.
We tell these lies with gravy on our chins and love in our hearts. Pass the haystacks. The diet starts Sunday.
Photo: Ruth Hartnup, “Ridiculous amount of nachos”, CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Large_nachos_plate.jpg (cropped, text added)
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