Loma Linda Residents Up in Arms About McDonald’s Moving to Town

Loma Linda, California is not like other American towns, mostly because so many of its residents are members of the Seventh-Day Adventists Church, which according to the churches’ official web site, means following some rules while still here on Earth if you want to get to heaven. One of those rules, or guidelines, as the church calls them, is living a clean healthy lifestyle. And that is not what many adherents see when they look across the counter at a McDonald’s fast food menu. This is why, according to the LA Times, citizens are upset about plans for a McDonald’s to be built in their fair town.

To gain a better perspective, says the paper, you have to understand that the people that live in Loma Linda take their way of life very seriously. The entire city has been a tobacco-free zone, for example, for thirty years. There are also no bars in the city limits. On the plus side, ABC News notes, it has been named by National Geographic Magazine as one of four places in the entire world with the healthiest people living into their old age.

The issue came about when McDonald’s came to town asking to put up a store. The town council voted 3-2 to allow it, despite the fact that the council has a majority of church members on it. Those that voted for it have told the Times that nowhere does the bible say that those in a position to do so, should force their way of life onto others. The others in this case are the other half of the 23,000 people that live in Loma Linda that don’t belong to the church.

One of the major critics of the move are doctors at the world famous Loma Linda University Medical Center, who have banded together and put out a statement decrying the move as going against not just the church, but the reputation of the town and it’s famous medical institution. They say for years, Loma Linda has been seen as a symbol of what clean living and healthy eating can do for the people who practice its precepts, and allowing McDonald’s to put up a store in the town would damage that image, and would likely open the floodgates to allowing all manner of other eating establishments that would detract from the healthy lifestyle the town has promoted for so long. As just one example, they note that men in Loma Linda, live on average seven years longer than anywhere else in America.

In a bit of irony, the very first McDonald’s was built in 1940, just a couple of miles outside of town.


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