HEALTHY AT 100 (6 page)

As the years went along, Japanese researchers began studying sleep patterns in the Vilcabamban elderly. In the modern world, sleep apnea, or difficulty in breathing while at rest, is very common among people over 65. The Japanese used portable respiratory monitoring devices to record breathing patterns of Vilcabambans aged 84 to 94 and found that nearly all participants enjoyed healthy and peaceful sleep.
⁹

In 1993, an article in the
Los Angeles Times
enthusiastically summed up the picture:

Folks in Vilcabamba have a reputation for long life. Very long life. More than a few say they have passed the century mark; people in their 80s and 90s appear almost common. And the Ancient Ones, as they are called, maintain their health and vitality right to the end.
¹⁰

As in Abkhasia, though, there has been a great deal of controversy over the actual ages of the elders in Vilcabamba and serious doubt
about the most extreme of the superlongevity claims. Claiming an age of 167 when the oldest fully authenticated human age known to modern science is 122 is not the quickest route to credibility.

Verifying the ages of old people in places like Abkhasia and Vilcabamba is never as simple as it sounds. Unlike the case in Abkhasia, where there are hardly any records to speak of, there are baptismal records in Vilcabamba that have been kept by the local church and birth records kept by the Civil Registry that go back as far as 1860. But the records are old and incomplete. There are pages missing, and pages so worn they cannot be read. What is more, Vilcabamban parents have not always registered the births of their children. And to make things even more confusing, cousins and other close relatives in Vilcabamba have often been given the same names.

Several years after the excitement about longevity in Vilcabamba had grown to a worldwide phenomenon, two American scientists—Dr. Richard B. Mazess, a radiologist, and Dr. Sylvia H. Forman, an anthropologist—sought to arrive at as much certainty as possible about the ages of the elders in Vilcabamba. They performed a meticulous house-by-house census, then checked all the birth, death, and marriage records that they could find, and finally cross-checked the various documents against one another. It was a bewildering maze of documentation, but Mazess and Forman eventually concluded that there had been a consistent pattern of age inflation.

For example, in the case of a man who had claimed to be 132 shortly before his death, they found that the man had actually been only ninety-three at the time of his death. Apparently, the man had attempted to appear older than he actually was by adopting as his own the baptismal certificate of an older deceased relative who shared the same name. It turned out that his mother had in fact been born five years after his own stated birth date, something that even the heroic modern advances in reproductive technology have not been able to replicate.
¹¹

Mazess and Forman ultimately came to believe that this kind of thing was common, and that none of the twenty-three self-proclaimed centenarians then living in the village of Vilcabamba had actually reached the age of 100. When they published their findings in
The
Journals of Gerontology
in 1979, they titled their article “Longevity and age exaggeration in Vilcabamba, Ecuador,” and declared that “extreme ages were either incorrect or unsubstantiated.”
¹²
As a result, many in the scientific community came to believe that longevity in Vilcabamba had been totally discredited.

At that time, Vilcabamba had only about a thousand residents. Mazess said that in a population that small, it would be out of the ordinary if even a single person over the age of 100 were to be found, and truly remarkable if there were two people of such an age. He listed ten people who claimed to be centenarians, but who he considered to be between 85 and 95.

Presumably, Mazess and Forman were correct in their evaluations. However, fifteen years later, two of the ten people Mazess had listed were still alive, which would mean that based on the ages he attributed to them, there were in 1994 at least two centenarians in a population of one thousand—a number that Mazess himself had said would be extraordinary.

Dr. Leaf had been aware, of course, of the tendency for old people to exaggerate their ages. He and his team had also spent long, painstaking hours studying the available records, and they had eventually concluded that the elder Vilcabambans probably did not actually know their ages, and so the ages they gave were almost completely useless. He was struck, nevertheless, by the fact that the very oldest people were remarkably fit for their age, even if they might actually be a decade or two younger than they claimed.

In 1990, the Ecuadorian physician Guillermo Vela Chiriboga, who headed one of the scientific expeditions organized by Dr. Leaf to explore longevity and health in Vilcabamba, published
The Secrets of Vilcabamba
(
Secretos de Vilcabamba para vivir siempre joven
). Having done further study after Leaf had left, he also could find no evidence to substantiate the claims for particular individuals living to extreme ages. And, like Leaf, he recognized that in a culture where people don’t actually have a very good idea of how old they are and where there is much respect for the elderly, there can be an incentive to exaggerate. But he continued to find numerous oldsters whose later years were filled with health and vitality and who did not suffer
from the cardiovascular ailments so common among elders in the modern world. He wrote:

Even if Gabriel Erazo, who claimed to be 130 years old, and others who claim to be over 100, are 20 or 30 years younger (than they claim), that does not invalidate the reality.…In Vilcabamba I found very elderly people with healthy bodies and souls.
¹³

Dr. Chiriboga also found that even the most elderly of the residents of Vilcabamba rarely suffer from fractures, osteoporosis, or arthritic ailments, which are common among older people elsewhere. His trained medical eyes could find no evidence of cancer, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, arthritis, or dementia, even among the very eldest of the population. He wrote that local inhabitants, even in extreme old age, “are agile and mentally lucid, with a sense of humor and admirable physical health.…[They] enjoy tranquility without a competitive spirit, and spurn the accumulation of wealth.”
¹⁴

Of the many perspectives on the people of Vilcabamba, one that I find particularly fascinating is that of an American woman named Grace Halsell, who lived in Vilcabamba for two years in the 1970s and subsequently wrote a book about the people there, titled
Los Viejos
(
The Old Ones
).
¹⁵

To say that Grace Halsell was an amazing human being is an understatement. She died in 2002 after living what the writer Gore Vidal called “the most interesting and courageous life of any American in our time.” A distinguished journalist, she worked for three years in the White House as a speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson. Her newspaper articles for the
New York Post
, the
New York Herald Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor
, and other major newspapers were filed from war zones in Korea, Vietnam, and Bosnia, as well as Russia, China, Macedonia, and Albania.

She was also the author of twelve books, including
Soul Sister
, in which she related her experiences, after taking a medication to turn her skin black, living as an impoverished African American in
Harlem and Mississippi.
¹⁶
Her book
Bessie Yellowhair
tells the story of the years she spent living with the Navajo on an isolated reservation in Arizona, and then, with their approval, dyeing her skin ochre and passing as an Indian among white people, including working as a live-in Navajo maid in Los Angeles.
¹⁷

In researching her book about illegal immigrants in the United States, Halsell, who spoke fluent Spanish, became an illegal and undocumented “wetback,” swimming across the Rio Grande to enter the United States, dodging border patrol guards, crawling through sewers, and hiding from Customs in the dreaded Smugglers Canyon. Then, presenting herself as the journalist she also was, she interviewed the whites of the Sun Belt who fear the rising tide of Hispanic immigration, and also interviewed armed border patrolmen, riding with them as they vainly attempted to seal the porous U.S.–Mexico border.
¹⁸

Grace Halsell had an almost unworldly ability to connect with people and see the world through their eyes. The title of her autobiography is, aptly,
In Their Shoes.
¹⁹

During the two years she lived in Vilcabamba, Grace Halsell was one of Alexander Leaf’s interpreters and assistants. Apparently, Leaf never realized that the resident of Vilcabamba who was such an outstanding translator, whose English and Spanish were both impeccable, who seemed to know so much not only about Vilcabambans but also about Americans, was not in fact a penniless Vilcabamban peasant but a world-renowned American journalist who had regularly flown on Air Force One (the U.S. president’s personal plane), and who had interviewed presidents, prime ministers, movie stars, and kings.
²⁰

Unlike Leaf and the other scientists, though, Grace Halsell had not come to the valley to peer, probe, and analyze the people. She had not come to take their blood pressure or measure their cholesterol. She had come to be one with them:

I have always gone to other lands with one idea: to meet people and come to know them. I learn to sing their songs, dance their jigs, eat their food. I try to be one among the people in whose land I am living.
²¹

Doctors, scientists, and researchers have come up with many explanations for the marvels of Vilcabamba. Some have credited the pure mountain air that is uniquely rich with negative ions. Others have pointed to the natural, healthful diet and the great amount of exercise inherent in the Vilcabamban lifestyle. A few have pointed to the soil and its high levels of selenium and other minerals. Others have suggested that Vilcabamban drinking water holds the secret. (Vilcabamba is apparently one of the few places in South America where you not only can but should drink the water. Not surprisingly, several companies have sought to capitalize on this fact by marketing the water in Europe.)

Grace Halsell understood and appreciated these viewpoints, particularly the ones about diet and exercise. She loved the fresh fruits of every variety and the fresh garden vegetables. She loved the tremendous amount of walking she and all the others did up and down the verdant hills in the course of a day. And she loved the magnificent scenery, the pristine air, and the crystal-clear water. But what caught her eye and heart most of all was the quality of human relationships in Vilcabamba. To her, the sense of connectedness that people had with one another was paramount, and was, if anything, more important than the other explanations for their notable health in old age. Like the researchers and doctors who visited Vilcabamba, she, too, sought to understand the underlying reasons for the health and longevity of the people. But what made her unique was that rather than trying to remain dispassionate, Grace Halsell met the Vilcabam-ban people with love.

I went to visit them because I had heard they were old. But I stayed with them because they were themselves, a most lovable people, from whom I wanted to learn. Each one seemed to believe that he would become all that he had given away. I never before experienced a people who had so little and gave so much. Without any material possessions, they somehow assert their personalities, their individuality, their right to be giving. Of all the Biblical injunctions they had heard from the Spanish priests, the
viejos
[old ones] seemed to have taken “It is more blessed to give, than to receive” as their maxim in life.
²²

Halsell was accustomed to the luxuries we take for granted in the modern industrialized world, yet she found the far more simple life in Vilcabamba not to be a burden, but in many ways to be a freedom.

I had no mirror, no running water with which to brush my teeth. I was liberated from the time-consuming feminine activities such as shaving my legs and under my armpits, spraying deodorant under my arms, and plucking my eyebrows, painting my nails, curling my hair. Living in the Sacred Valley was like being a child again. I awoke each morning at sunrise, brushed my hair into a ponytail, slipped on my every-day-of-the-week clothes, and I was ready to greet the day, the Vilcabamban way.
²³

The people of Vilcabamba are poor in material things by modern standards, but Grace Halsell found them to be rich in other ways, for they radiated a sense of self-confidence and security in themselves that people in the modern world, with all its material abundance, often find themselves endlessly seeking. As she reflected on the underlying reasons for their remarkable health and longevity, she came back again and again to the way she saw them treat each other:

Living among the
viejos
, I never heard them quarrel or fight or dispute with each other. They had what I would consider a “high” culture in this regard. They spoke beautifully, elegantly, with ample flourishes of tenderness. Their words themselves were often caresses.
²⁴

She asked one of the two local policemen what kinds of crimes were committed in the valley. “Not much,” he replied. “We don’t have any real crimes.”
²⁵

Halsell believed that a key to the health and harmony in Vilcabamba was that people of all ages were intimately interwoven with one another. Living in close-knit families, they enjoyed all the benefits and comforts that come from sharing one’s life with loved ones. She saw no separation of people by ages.