HEALTHY AT 100 (10 page)

There are thousands of terraced fields in Hunza, creating a sweeping staircase of extraordinary beauty up the entire length of the valley. The soil they are filled with has been brought up the steep mountain slopes in baskets from the river thousands of feet below. Each of them is diked so that the edges are a few inches higher than the ground. This enables the terraced fields to be flooded with the rich mineral waters that come down from the surrounding mountains through more than sixty miles of channels and aqueducts that have been arduously carved and hacked into the cliffs over the centuries. The heavily silt-laden waters carry a finely ground rock powder made by the pulverizing action of the glaciers which dominate the Hunzan landscape. The waters thus not only irrigate the Hunzan crops but also deposit a thin film of precious minerals over the already fertile soil.

As this process has been repeated endlessly over the centuries, it has constantly conditioned and enriched the soil with essential minerals.
Rodale was convinced that this had everything to do with the marvelous well-being of the Hunzans:

The magnificent health of the Hunzans is due to…the way in which their food is raised.…I am sure that the powdered rock dust which flows onto the Hunzan land is a significant factor in the outstanding results obtained by the Hunzans.
²⁰

Over the many centuries, Hunzan agriculture was entirely organic, of course, because no fertilizers or pesticides were available. But in the recent past there was one year in which the Pakistani government warned the Hunzans that a major infestation of insects was expected, threatening their crops. The Pakistanis offered pesticides as protection, but the Hunzan leadership decided against their use. Instead, the people collected the wood ashes from their cooking fires and placed them on the soil around the plants where the invading insects would have liked to land. The presence of the highly alkaline wood ashes repelled the insects. Then, as the ashes broke down into the soil, they enriched it with their high mineral content. In this way, the Hunzans protected their crops without doing any damage to the soil, and in the process even adding to its fertility.

On a different occasion, though, the Hunzans were persuaded to try a synthetic fertilizer by a salesman who convinced them that their crop yields would be increased. The farmers soon discovered that more water was needed to grow the fertilized crops, and that though the harvest was larger, the quality of the grains that grew was inferior. So they returned to their organic methods, and from that point on they prohibited the use of synthetic fertilizers.

Highly aware of both the agricultural value and the microbial dangers inherent in human waste, Rodale was deeply impressed that without the aid of modern technology the Hunzans had developed methods to compost human waste so that it could be safely used to augment their soil. He wrote:

In every phase of their agricultural operations, the Hunzans show a sagacity that is uncanny. One ponders over the amazing fact
that it took the civilized world so long to learn the simple facts of water and sewage hygiene, and yet the Hunzans, in their primitive hideaway, applied it effectively a thousand years ago.…The Hunzan is downright uncanny in his methods of coaxing food out of the soil.…His finger is on the pulse of the land. Soil erosion is at a minimum because he is intelligent and understands the danger of soil loss. He has the time and the energy to farm in a manner that conserves the soil.
²¹

Rodale understood what the erosion of the soil base can do to a culture. Soil erosion has played a determining role in the decline and demise of many great civilizations, including those of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Mayans. In
Topsoil and Civilization
, Vernon Carter and Tom Dale point out that wherever soil erosion has destroyed the fertility base on which civilizations have been built, these civilizations have perished.
²²

Topsoil is the dark, nutrient-rich soil that holds moisture and feeds us by feeding our plants. It is one of the basic foundations of our sustenance upon this earth. Two hundred years ago, most of America’s cropland had at least twenty-one inches of topsoil. But today, most of it is down to around six inches of topsoil, and the rate of topsoil loss is accelerating. The United States has already lost 75 percent of one of its most precious natural resources. It takes nature, unassisted, five hundred years to build an inch of topsoil. Currently, the United States loses another inch of topsoil every sixteen years.

Rodale, who was among the first to awaken modern society to the importance of soil health, saw the significance of the fact that the Hunzans had fed their entire society for thousands of years from their little valley without any topsoil loss whatsoever. It was for him an epiphany that their soil has only grown richer over the years, and that they have actually created fertile soil in places that were once little more than bare rock.

How have the Hunzans managed such a feat? They put everything that can possibly enhance the soil to use, wasting nothing. When their goats and sheep climb high up the mountainsides in the
summer, the children make a game out of going up to find the droppings, then bringing them down to be added to the compost piles. Every solitary thing that can serve as food for fruit trees and vegetables is diligently collected, including dead leaves, rotting wood, and any animal waste they can find. These are all composted in carefully designed sunken compost pits, then carefully distributed over every square foot of the thousands of terraces.

Theirs has been the most magnificent, most enduring, most unremitting agriculture in the earth’s history. While we in the United States have decimated our soil in only two hundred years, the Hunzans have depended on theirs for two thousand and made it steadily more fertile in the process.

What kinds of foods do the Hunzans grow on the fertile terraces that have been called one of the great wonders of the world? They grow a wide variety of fruit, including apricots, peaches, pears, apples, plums, grapes, cherries, mulberries, figs, and many types of melons. They enjoy all of these plus a multitude of wild berries, both fresh and sun-dried. Their apples are huge, weighing more than a pound each. But of all their fruits, the ones they eat by far the most are their celebrated apricots. The Hunzans have developed more than twenty varieties of apricots whose flavor and nutrient value are worlds beyond the types commonly grown in the West today. Their apricots have been described as among the most luscious fruits on earth.

Apricot orchards are everywhere in Hunza, and nearly every family has apricot trees under cultivation. To view the Hunzan valley in late summer is to see thousands of brilliant orange roofs shimmering in the sun, for the roof of every building is literally covered with drying apricots. Every flat rock surface is also covered with them, split open to receive the sun’s drying rays. The fruits are eaten fresh in the summer, and then throughout the winter and spring they are eaten as dried fruit and also used extensively in cooking and baking. A typical breakfast in Hunza in the winter is a porridge made from dried apricots and millet, upon which freshly ground flaxseeds are sprinkled.

The Hunzans have minimal pastureland, which makes animal husbandry nearly impossible. So like the Vilcabambans and Abkhasians, they eat very little meat. On certain rare feast days they eat goat or sheep meat, and on other days they consume a fermented milk product made from goat or sheep milk. But according to Leaf, meat and dairy products together constitute only 1 percent of their total diet.

It is actually quite intriguing how similar the traditional Hunzan diet is to the traditional diets of the Vilcabambans and Abkhasians. Though they live in very different parts of the world, the traditional diets of all three of these extraordinarily healthy societies are very
low in calories by modern standards. In all three cases, protein and fat are almost entirely of vegetable origin. And all three depend entirely on natural foods rather than processed and manufactured ones.

People in each of these cultures eat substantial amounts of whole grains. In Hunza, the primary grains are wheat, barley, millet, buckwheat, and the hard, pearly seeds of a grass called Job’s tears.

Vegetables also play a prominent role in the Hunzan diet, particularly greens, including mustard greens, spinach and lettuce, root vegetables such as carrots, turnips, potatoes, and radishes, an assortment of beans, chickpeas (garbanzo beans), lentils, and other sprouted legumes, plus many kinds of pumpkins and other squashes. They cultivate many kinds of herbs for both culinary and medicinal purposes, including mint and thyme. They grow flaxseeds, and rare is the meal that does not contain freshly ground flaxmeal in one form or another.

In Hunza, a large part of the diet is eaten uncooked. In the summer, as much as 80 percent of the food is eaten in its natural state. Vegetables in season are picked just prior to consumption and almost always eaten raw. Fresh corn on the cob, for example, is never cooked. In the winter, the Hunzans soak lentils, beans, and peas in water for several days, then lay them out on wet cloths in the sun. They are eaten raw when they begin to sprout.

When vegetables are cooked, they are typically lightly steamed using a minimal amount of water. And the water used to cook them is always consumed along with the vegetables themselves, thus utilizing the food value that has become concentrated in the cooking water.

By eating much of their food uncooked and cooking the rest of their food only lightly, the Hunzans accomplish a couple of things. They keep to a minimum the fuel needed for cooking, an ecological imperative in Hunza where fuel sources are none too abundant. And at the same time they conserve the nutrient value of the vegetables.

The Hunzans may be among the healthiest of any peoples on earth. Their many disease-free and clear-seeing elders are nourished by a cuisine rich in nutrients and by an environment of extraordinary
beauty, with healthy air, water, and soil. Hunza has long been a remarkable place, and we have much to learn from it.

At the same time, though, it makes sense to be cautious when evaluating claims about a distant land that many of us may never so much as visit. Some researchers have become so enamored with the Hunzan way of life as to lose their objectivity.

One starry-eyed researcher who studied Hunzan health and wrote a book on the subject said that men and women work in the fields at 120 years of age or older until their time comes to die. He said they then eat supper with the rest of the group and go to bed. In the morning when the family arises, they discover that the oldster has quietly died in his or her sleep. “What a wonderful way to live and to die,” he reflected, “without suffering the pangs and misery of disease that eventually end in death for most people on earth. The awful suffering that usually precedes death is not known in Hunza land.”
²⁴

While I’m sure that the downward slide of chronic disease and deterioration that often lasts for years in the lives of elders in the modern Western world is far shorter in Hunza, I believe this author’s comments are fanciful and romanticized. No doubt some fortunate individuals in Hunza have died as he described, and many in Hunza have undoubtedly continued in good health until perhaps only a few weeks or even days before their death. But we have no solid evidence that anyone in Hunza has ever lived to the age of 120, and more important, nothing is served by describing the lives and deaths of the Hunzans as totally free of suffering.

I suspect that some of the researchers who have studied life in Hunza have at times become caught up in their zeal to describe a land they perceive to be a paradise on earth. Some, unable to speak the native language, have seen only what the Hunzan rulers have wanted them to see. Others have visited only in the summer, and so have never seen how difficult the cold winters in the mountains can be.

And there is yet another factor that could distort their perceptions. Writers and scientists with already established ideas about healthful lifestyles can tend to look for that which validates their views. People can become gullible when they want to hear what they’ve already made up their minds to believe. It is certainly possible that some of those who have been most fervently enthusiastic
about life in Hunza have to some degree been guilty of making the Hunzans out to be something they are not.
²⁵
Unfortunately, this is not an easy matter today to appraise definitively, as the social and political challenges of contemporary Pakistan are beginning now to invade even this isolated and pristine land (a development I’ll discuss more fully later on).

But whatever the failings and exaggerations of some researchers might have been, it remains an indisputable fact that in Hunza, as in Abkhasia and Vilcabamba, a large proportion of elder citizens have retained their faculties, remained vigorous, and enjoyed life right up until only weeks or months before their deaths. It is an established fact that the elderly in each of these regions have had extremely low rates of heart disease, cancer, obesity, arthritis, asthma, dementia, and the other degenerative infirmities that plague so many older people in the West. It is a fact that they have remained for the most part remarkably fit and active as they age.