Dr. Sabaté is a board certified physician in internal medicine. He obtained the degree of Doctor of Public Health in Nutrition from Loma Linda University. He was an American Heart Association post doctoral fellow in the Preventive Medicine Department then became an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics and in the Department of Nutrition. In 1998 he was named Chair of the Department of Nutrition while continuing his teaching commitments in epidemiology.
Dr. Sabaté served as principal investigator in a nutrition research study that directly linked the consumption of walnuts to significant reductions in serum cholesterol. His findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1993 and received the attention of more than 400 media sources, both national and international. He has served as a co-investigator of the Adventist Health Study and is currently a co-investigator of the Adventist Health Study-2.
He has also conducted considerable research in the area of vegetarian nutrition, is editor of the book Vegetarian Nutrition, and was the principal architect of the Vegetarian Food Guide Pyramid released in 1997 at the 3rd International Congress on Vegetarian Nutrition. As co-chair of the 3rd International Congress on Vegetarian Nutrition in 1997, chair of the 4th edition in 2002 and the 5th congress in 2008, Dr. Sabaté has been influential in helping establish the scientific evidence of the health benefits of vegetarian diets.