About
Why we run this cruise
The Health Optimization Cruise is an annual event about human health, taught through lifestyle medicine and current research, and practiced for seven nights in a row.
Most health advice arrives as a leaflet. This is a week where you live it. You wake up and move, you eat food that was made for you that morning, you sit in a room with a clinician who explains what the research actually says, and then you go and swim.
We sail from a Florida port in the early part of the year, usually the third Sunday in January, and spend seven nights in the Caribbean. Three days are at sea, and those carry the presentations and workshops. Three days are port stops, and those are yours to spend as you like.
Every event meal is plant-based, in both cooked and raw form. Award-winning chefs prepare them, the dinners are white tablecloth and intimate, and the speakers eat with you. The ship's own restaurants stay open the whole time, so nobody is locked into anything.
The group is a subset of the ship cruisers from all over the world, eating together every day for a week. A good number of them come back the next year, and several book the next sailing before they get off the ship.
Family
Fun events for every age
Friendships
That support you and your goals
01 · What is different about it
Four things you will not find elsewhere.
A full raw menu
A complete raw vegan menu runs beside the cooked one at every service. Introduced in 2025 and kept ever since.
Speakers at your table
Presenters eat dinner with the group. The questions you did not ask in the session get asked over dessert.
The ship itself
Celebrity Xcel was chosen for indoor air quality and its environmental brief, not only its comfort.
People who come back
A week of eating together makes for real friendships. Many guests travel together the following year.
02 · The hosts
Mike and Denise Young, aPlantBasedDiet.org
The cruise is run by the independent aPlantBasedDiet.org 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which has been working on public health education since 2014. Mike founded it. Denise co-hosts and runs the event side.
Mike Young
Founder, and author of the "life manual" book LIVE to 150, which is free to read, watch or listen to. His stated goal is the eradication of non-communicable disease through the six pillars of lifestyle medicine and healthy vegan food.
Denise Young
Co-founder and host. She came to plant-based eating in 2017 after reading The China Study, having lost family members to diabetes and having watched others through breast cancer. She lost 20 pounds, went back to running, and has not stopped.
The food was terrific, and I lost 7 lbs that week without missing a meal. I signed up for next year's cruise before I left the ship.
Emily S.
Questions we have not answered here?
Ask us directly. Dietary needs, mobility, traveling solo, whether your teenager will be bored.