The Hunza Health Secret of Longevity

By Jeremy Carew-Reid

Hunza Valley

“Health secrets of people who live to 145 years of age” "Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food" Hippocrates(460-377 B.C.)

Never have truer words been uttered. Food is an amazing healer and preventer of disease. In fact most disease is a result of faulty use of food. It has been seen time and time again in history that when traditional cultures of people have eaten natural, whole, organic foods they had excellent health, endless energy and near total freedom from disease. But when exposed to modern diet in the “developed” world which included processed, chemically treated, devitalised junk foods they started to develop endless degenerative diseases including chronic fatigue syndrome.

A land where disease is unknown

Would you believe me if I told you there is a land of people on earth where there are no traces of cancer? Where men and women aged 80 years and older having endless energy and freedom from disease. A land where everyone has perfect vision, no heart disease, no obesity, no mental illness, no ulcers and no degenerative disease. Well I am here to tell you that such a land exists. The Hunzakut people enjoy this utopian lifestyle. They are an amazing people unknown to the public at large that live in the mountain peaks of the Himalayas in northwest Pakistan.

In Hunza men father children at ninety. Centenarians are a common occurrence and it is not unusual for elderly people to reach the age of 130 years of age in perfect mental and physical health! In fact a significant number have been reported to live to age 145!

But their greatest achievement is the fact that sickness is rare, that cancer, heart disease, heart attacks, high or low blood pressure and childhood diseases are virtually unknown. There is no juvenile delinquency in Hunza and divorce is a rarity. There are no jails, police or army and there is no need for them, as there hasn't been a crime reported for the last one hundred and thirty years.

Food secrets of the healthiest culture on earth Hunza health secret and secret of longevity #1

So what do the hunza eat?

They eat a diet of fresh, natural, organic, unprocessed food. Everything is fresh. Their food contains no chemical additives whatsoever. The only processing consists of drying some fresh fruits in the sun. No chemicals or fertilizers are used in the growing process. They eat a variety of organic, mineral rich, fruits and vegetables. For protein they eat organic milk, yogurt, paneer, eggs, nuts, mung beans, and small amounts of organic white meat. For carbohydrates they eat a variety of organic unrefined whole grains. For fats they consume ghee, butter and almond oil. They consume rock salt which contains 83 minerals and nutrients.

Hunza longevity bread

The Hunza’s make a bread which accompanies each meal and is quite different from any bread that we are used to. The grain is kept intact as long as possible, and is ground at the very last moment, the housewife grinds only as much as she needs for the next meal, and kneads again and again with water; not with yeast. She then beats it into very thin, flat pancakes similar to the tortillas of the Mexican Indians.

The dough is then simply placed on the grill for hardly more than a moment, in fact just long enough to grow warm and no longer taste raw and it is finished.

Dr. Ralph Bircher noted in his book on the Hunzas “No more effective method of preserving the health value of the grain exists and the taste is excellent even without butter or jam.” Hunza bread can be made from a variety of whole grains. But the best grain to use for chronic fatigue syndrome is Atta flour. This can be brought from any Indian or Asian grocery store or health food store.

I have explained in full detail in my e-book exactly how to make hunza bread.

Apricots

Of all their organically grown food, perhaps the hunzas favourite, and one of their dietary mainstays, is the apricot. Apricot orchards are seen everywhere in Hunza and a family's economic stability is measured by the number of trees they have under cultivation.

They eat their apricots fresh in season. Fresh sweet apricots are a very rejuvenating, energy enhancing food. Excellent for people who suffer chronic fatigue syndrome.

Hunza health secret and secret of longevity #2

The health and endurance of the Hunzakuts is credited as much to what they don't eat as to what they eat.

Frugality of food Hunzas eat more quality food and less quantity of food. The most important aspect of the hunza diet is to eat frugally. The higher the quality of food the less food you need to eat because the minerals and vitamins supply all the bodily needs which satisfy the appetite and energy requirements.

The hunzakuts eat according to their energy output, appetite and work requirements. Where as we in the west over eat out of sheer gluttony or habit which results in digestive disease and obesity.

What they don’t eat What the Hunzakuts do not eat or drink, should be of great concern to us and we should think seriously of eliminating the following items from our diet: refined salt, margarine, white sugar, white bread, white flour, refined cereals, sodas, cold drinks, flavourings, colourings, preservatives, red meat, tinned foods, non-organic meat and non-organic eggs.

Hunza health secret and secret of longevity #3

Hunza water

It is generally accepted that the water the hunzas drink plays a major role in their great health and longevity. This water comes from the melting of the glaciers from the nearby mountains.

These glaciers are hundreds of thousand years old and grind the mountainous rock into extremely fine particles. In turn the fine particles of rock are suspended in this water and is called glacial milk because of its cloudy appearance by being so loaded with these minerals.

Coming from glacial mountain streams and waterfalls this water carries a negative charge or negative ions and is called “living water.” This results in the water having an oxygen reduction potential and acts as an antioxidant in the body with the ability to mop up free radicals. Also the minerals in the water carry a negative charge, which make the minerals easily absorbable.

In this way, by drinking this water the Hunzakuts bodies are saturated with minerals which provides them with extraordinary vitality.

Another major factor is that their crops are also irrigated with this colloidal mineral water and thus unlike Western soils, hunza soils are not depleted of minerals. Plants are unable to manufacture one single mineral, so that when soils are depleted, the plants we eat will also be depleted of minerals.

Insufficiencies of essential minerals in our diet will lead to sickness and premature aging.

If you visit my website I will provide you with a link to where you can purchase this mineral saturated hunza water.

Experiments on rats using hunza diet and modern processed diet In 1927 Dr. McCarrison was appointed Director of Nutrition Research in India under the Research Fund Association. For his work and experiments he chose albino rats.

For the first phase of his experiment Dr. McCarrison chose healthy rats. He placed the rats in good conditions, with fresh air, sunlight, comfort and cleanliness. He chose their diet from foods eaten regularly by the Hunza people. This included hunza bread made of wholemeal flour, lightly smeared with fresh butter; organic vegetables, milk; a small ration of organic meat with bones once a week and an abundance of water.

In this experiment almost 1,200 rats were watched from birth to the twenty-seventh month, an age in the rat which corresponds to that of about fifty years in a man. At this stage the Hunza-diet-fed rats were killed and carefully examined. McCarrison's report was remarkable:

"During the past two and a quarter years there has been no case of illness in this 'universe' of albino rats, no death from natural causes in the adult stock, and but for a few accidental deaths no infantile mortality. Both clinically and at post-mortem, examination of this stock has been shown to be remarkably free from disease. It may be that some of them have cryptic disease of one kind or another, but if so, I have failed to find either clinical or microscopical evidence of it."

His experiment did not however stop there. Next he took DISEASED rats and placed them too on the Hunza diet. They all became well. Then he took batches of rats and placed them in clean, comfortable surroundings and fed them the food of modern processed western diet. The rats were soon plagued with diseases and miseries of many kinds (much like so many people are today). Over two thousand rats fed on modern processed diet developed eye ailments, ulcers, boils, bad teeth, crooked spines, loss of hair, amenia, skin disorders, heart, kidney and glandular weaknesses and a multitude of gastrointestinal disorders.

In later experiments, McCarrison gave a set of rats the diet of the poorer classes of England that consisted of white bread, margarine, sweetened tea, white sugar, tinned meats and inexpensive jams and jellies. On this diet, not only did the rats develop all kinds of disease conditions, but they became nervous wrecks: "They were nervous and apt to bite their attendants, they lived unhappily together and by the sixteenth day of the experiment they began to kill and eat the weaker ones amongst them."

These experiments clearly show that diet has a huge impact on mental, emotional and physical health.

Final thoughts

Clearly we can see that diet is of paramount importance in preventing illness and treating disease.

By saturating our body with organic, mineral and vitamin rich foods we can not only reverse disease but totally avoid future illness. This is clearly proven by the diet of the hunza people and the experiments of the albino rats.

Even though it isn’t possible for us to go live in the Himalayan Mountains, what we can do it is invest our money into organic healthy foods simular in principle to the hunzas.

Author's bio: Jeremy Carew-Reid is a natural healer in Ayurvedic medicine.

Copyright © 2004 by Jeremy Carew-Reid.