HEALTHY AT 100 (9 page)

One of the first scientists to comment on the health of the people of Hunza was the British physician Dr. Robert McCarrison. A major general in the Indian Health Service who was later to become India’s director of nutritional research, Dr. McCarrison lectured frequently to the British College of Surgeons and wrote for the
British Medical Journal.
He became world renowned for his discovery that a disease then inflicting an enormous amount of suffering in India, called “three-day fever,” was caused by the bite of the sand fly.

Shortly after making this historic discovery in the early twentieth
century, Dr. McCarrison was assigned by the British Army to establish a hospital and healthcare system for the Hunzans. He lived among them for seven years, tracing family records, conducting daily interviews, performing physical examinations, and keeping meticulous records. The more he learned, the more impressed he was by the health and robustness of the Hunzans.

In particular, he was astounded by the physical and mental status of the very elderly. Dr. McCarrison’s years of careful scrutiny inspired him to describe the health of the Hunzan people in rhapsodic terms:

My own experience provides an example of a (people) unsurpassed in perfection of physique and in freedom from disease in general.…The people of Hunza…are long-lived, vigorous in youth and age, capable of great endurance, and enjoy a remarkable freedom from disease in general.…Far removed from the refinements of civilization, [they] are of magnificent physique, preserving until late in life the character of their youth; they are unusually fertile and long-lived, and endowed with nervous systems of notable stability.…Cancer is unknown.
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In 1964, another prominent Western physician studied the Hunzans and gave his impressions. The heart specialist Dr. Paul Dudley White had become internationally famous during the 1950s when he was the cardiologist chosen to treat U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower after the nation’s chief executive suffered a heart attack. This forward-thinking physician was also a founder of the American Heart Association.

Dr. White went to visit the Hunzans, to see for himself whether the claims were true that these people lived to exceedingly old ages without any heart disease, bringing along a portable battery-operated electrocardiograph. Owing to a lack of documentation, he was not able to verify the actual ages of the elderly Hunzans he studied, but he did blood pressure, blood cholesterol, and electrocardiogram studies and found not a trace of heart disease, even in the oldest people he examined. Writing in the
American Heart Journal
and elsewhere, Dr. White described examining a group of twenty-five Hunzan men he believed

on fairly good evidence, to be between 90 and 110 years old.…Not one of them showed a single sign of coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol levels. They have 20-20 vision and no tooth decay. In a country of 30,000 people, there is no vascular, muscular, organic, respiratory, or bone disease.
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Hearing such reports, the U.S. National Geriatrics Society asked Dr. Jay Hoffman to go to Hunza to investigate the health and longevity of this unique and isolated people. When Hoffman returned home, he was utterly enthralled with what he had seen. He wrote,

Down through the ages, adventurers and utopia-seeking men have fervently searched the world for the Fountain of Youth but didn’t find it. However unbelievable as it may seem, a Fountain of Youth does exist high in the Himalayan Mountains.…Here is a land where people do not have our common diseases, such as heart ailments, cancer, arthritis, high blood pressure, diabetes, tuberculosis, hay fever, asthma, liver trouble, gall bladder trouble, constipation, or many other ailments that plague the rest of the world. Moreover, there are no hospitals, no insane asylums, no drug stores, no saloons, no tobacco stores, no police, no jails, no crimes, no murders and no beggars.
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If these and other physicians who have made similar reports are to be believed, the health of the Hunzans has long been nothing short of spectacular. And certainly, mountaineers have been greatly impressed by the strength, agility, and hardiness of the Hunzan people. The mountaineering legend Eric Shipton, who was the only man to be part of all of the first four Mount Everest expeditions, often employed Hunzans as porters on his adventures in the region. He said the Hunzans were even better mountain men than the legendary Sherpas of Nepal.
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Shipton was not alone in this judgment. Many mountaineers consider
the Hunzans to be the world’s best mountain climbers, for they can travel, heavily laden, over Himalayan terrain at a rate of more than forty miles per day. One observer noted, “They can scale an almost perpendicular rock with break-neck speed and without fear. They can clamber up the sheerest precipice with the utmost calm.”
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In the mountaineering world, the Hunzans are known not only for their vigor and physical stamina, but also for possessing buoyant spirits and remaining positive under even the most trying circumstances. In an issue of the
Journal of the Royal Geographical Society
, the head of one expedition wrote:

The Hunzan men were with us two months, continuously on the move, over what is probably some of the worst country in the world for laden men. Always ready to turn their hand to anything, they were the most cheerful and willing set of men with whom we have ever traveled.
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Another mountaineer described a situation when a horse had broken free and run away. His Hunzan porter went after the horse, keeping up the high mountainous pursuit in bare feet in drenching rain for nearly two days, finally catching the horse and bringing it back.
¹⁰

Over and over again the leaders of the most difficult mountaineering expeditions describe the Hunzans as a people who seem never to suffer from fatigue. One said it was commonplace to see them walk twenty miles in a day, heavily laden, over irregular mountainsides, and then dance far into the night. And then to do the same the following day, and the next.
¹¹

Another said that he saw a Hunzan, in midwinter, make two holes in an ice pond, then repeatedly dive into one and come out at the other, apparently finding the near-freezing water invigorating, as comfortable as a polar bear.
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In the 1960s, the emcee of the famed U.S. television program
People Are Funny
, Art Linkletter, funded a visit to Hunza by Dr. Allen E.
Banik, a Nebraska optometrist with a long interest in health, aging, and longevity.

Dr. Banik paid particular attention to the Hunzans’ eyes and vision. In the West, he well knew, most people experience a gradual loss of flexibility in their vision beginning in their forties and fifties, a condition called presbyopia. As presbyopia develops, people need to hold books, magazines, newspapers, menus, and other reading material at arm’s length in order to focus properly. When they perform near work, such as embroidery or handwriting, they may get headaches or eyestrain. The prevailing belief among modern optometrists is that there is no getting around it—presbyopia happens to everyone at some point in life, even those who have never had a vision problem before.

Yet Dr. Banik found that even the most elderly of the Hunzans did not suffer from presbyopia or any of the other diseases and weaknesses of eyesight to which elder Americans are prone. “In all respects,” he observed,

the Hunzans’ eyes were notable. I found them unusually clear; there were few signs of astigmatism. Even the oldest men had excellent far- and near-vision—an indication that their crystalline lenses had retained elasticity.
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Dr. Banik (along with his co-author, Renee Taylor) went on to describe his findings in his book titled
Hunza Land: The Fabulous Health and Youth Wonderland of the World.
He was enraptured with these people, and wrote:

This race, which has survived through centuries, is remarkable for its vigor and vitality.…In 2,000 years of almost complete isolation, the Hunzans seem to have evolved a way of living, eating, thinking and exercising that has substantially lengthened their life span. They have no money, no poverty, no disease.…It is a land where the people enjoy not only purity of body but also mutual trust and integrity.…

The Hunzans are a hardy, disease-free people unique in their enjoyment of an unparalleled life span.…It amazed me to see
the number of older citizens going about their work and showing none of the signs of decrepitude that are so often evident in the United States.…
¹⁴

Dr. Banik concluded that the health and longevity of the Hunzan people begins in their childhood. Moved by the happiness of the children, he reflected, “They laugh readily and seem to have a kindly feeling toward everyone. There is no juvenile delinquency in Hunza.”
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Almost everyone who has visited Hunza has described the atmosphere of peace and the resilient and seemingly always good-natured attitude of the people. When Illinois senator Charles Percy, a member of the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, visited Hunza, he remarked on the

general air of goodwill that permeated our visit. Wherever we walked, the villagers saluted us and clasped our hands between theirs. Men greeted men, women greeted women. Children ran into the orchards to gather the fresh, sweet apricots for us or offered wild flowers and apples.
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Others have spoken of their amazement at the degree of freedom enjoyed by Hunzan women, especially in a Muslim country. They go unveiled, work in the fields in trousers, and inherit property. Divorce is legally as easy for women as it is for men, although it is not common. Women are not abused or overworked. They typically have only two or three children at widely spaced intervals. There is tremendous respect for breast feeding. Babies are breast fed for up to three years, and even longer in some instances.

When the American Geriatrics Society’s Dr. Jay Hoffman returned from Hunza, he summed up the picture effusively:

The Hunzans appear to be happiest people in all the world. They are happy because they are truly alive.…
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Today, Rodale Press is the largest independent book publisher in the United States, and publishes magazines (including
Prevention, Men’s Health, Runner’s World, Organic Gardening, Backpacker, Bicycling
, and
Mountain Bike
) in forty-two countries. And the Rodale Institute is the world’s preeminent advocate for organic farming and gardening.

Both Rodale Press and the Rodale Institute were started by Jerome Irving Rodale. J.I., as his friends called him, had a lifelong interest in health and well-being, and through his success as a publisher, he popularized the organic movement in America. A 1971 cover story by
The New York Times Magazine
, describing his efforts to promote organic gardening and a healthful lifestyle, called him the “guru of the organic food cult.” (That organic food was then called a “cult” shows you how far we’ve come in the past few decades. Today,
Organic Gardening
is the most widely read gardening publication in the world.)

J. I. Rodale believed deeply in organic food. He felt that the health of a people depends on the quality of food they consume, and the quality of their food depends on the health of the soil in which that food is grown. Nothing, in his eyes, could be more fundamental, nor more important, than the health of the soil.

What does all this have to do with the Hunzans?

Everything. J. I. Rodale was a dedicated student of the Hunzan way of life, and it was from studying the Hunzans that he developed many of his seminal ideas about organic agriculture. He believed that the legendary health and vitality of the Hunzan people grew directly out of Hunzan soil, and that the vitality of their soil derived from their agricultural practices, which he considered to be the finest in the world. In his view, Hunzan agriculture was the pinnacle of the organic way of life and the ideal model for humanity to follow.

Two years before he published the first issue of
Prevention
, J. I. Rodale authored a book titled
The Healthy Hunzas.
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In this book, Rodale detailed how, over a period of two thousand years, the hard and continuous labor of the Hunzans had produced a spectacular series of fertile terraces throughout the valley, with brilliantly designed
irrigation systems that divert water periodically from the mountain streams and rivers to the terraces.

If Rodale was effusive in extolling the sophistication and scope of the Hunzan agricultural terraces and irrigation systems, the American Geriatrics Society’s Dr. Jay Hoffman was downright ecstatic after seeing them:

The thing that impressed us most was the terraces that stretched far out into the distance through the valley and up the mountainsides.…Even the best engineers who have visited Hunza cannot understand how the originators of these terraces were able to erect thousands of them, each irrigated in the greatest engineering feat ever witnessed.…Though they are not listed as such, I like to think of them as one of the seven wonders of the world [due to] the magnificence, engineering skill, and scientific competence built into these terraces.
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When I first heard Dr. Hoffman likening the Hunzan agricultural terraces to the seven wonders of the world, I felt certain he was exaggerating. But as I’ve learned more about the terraces and how they work, I’ve come to feel that his enthusiasm was warranted.