Death Rides a Slow Bus in Hunza

by Jane Kinderlehrer

How would you like to live in a land where cancer has not yet been invented?
A land where an optometrist discovers to his amazement that everyone has
perfect 20-20 vision? A land where cardiologists cannot find a single trace
of coronary heart disease? How would you like to live in a land where no one
ever gets ulcers, appendicitis or gout? A land where men of 80 and 90 father
children, and there's nothing unusual about men and women enjoying vigorous
life at the age of 100 or 120?

We see a lot of hands going up. Fine. But first, you have to answer a few
more questions before setting out for a place called Hunza, a tiny country
hidden in the mountain passes of northwest Pakistan. Are you willing to live
20,000 feet up in the mountains, almost completely out of touch with the
rest of the world? Are you ready to go outside in every kind of weather to
tend your small mountainside garden, while keeping you ears open for an
impending avalanche? Are you prepared to give up not only every luxury of
civilization, but even reading and writing? We see a lot of hands going
down. But if you want the benefits of the pure air that whips by the icy
cathedrals of the Himalayan Mountains, the pure water that trickles down
from glaciers formed at 25,000 feet, and the mental and spiritual peace that
comes from living in a land where there is no crime, taxes, social striving
or generation gaps, no banks or stores-in fact,-no money- where are you
going to find it outside of Hunza? But don't give up! Not yet, because there
is still one more question to be answered. That is: are you prepared to eat
the kind of food the Hunzas eat? If you are, then you can rightfully expect
to give yourself at least some measure of the super health and resistance to
degenerative disease which the Hunzakuts have enjoyed for 2,000 years.

What kind of exotic, ill-tasting grub do these Hunza people eat, you are
wondering. Strange as it may sound, virtually everything the Hunzakuts eat
is delectable to the western palate, and is readily available in the United
States-at least if you shopping horizons do not begin and end at the
supermarket. Not only is the Hunza diet not exotic, but there's really
nothing terribly mysterious about its health-promoting qualities, Everything
we know about food and health, gathered both from clinical studies and the
observation of scientists who have traveled throughout the world observing
dietary practices and their relationship to health, tells us that it is to
be expected that the Hunza diet will go a long way towards improving the
total health of anyone, anywhere. The Hunza story is only on of the more
dramatic examples of the miraculous health produced by a diet of fresh,
natural unprocessed and unadulterated food.

Redman

Off the top of my head:

Medicine is a well paid job for life, and some are jealous;

They want full control of their lives, so they make believe by pretending
medicine is useless;

Something about a lie being half way round the world, while the truth is
putting on its shoes.

Our Prince Charles is only a step or two away from being like that.  He
intends to be King George.  Can't see it somehow.

Loonies? Myths? wtf, you people are the ones with your fingers in your ears
going la la la I'm not listening, f.cking parasites in the Western Health
system, all you know is how to poison people with synthesised chemicals,
derivatives of mustard gas for cancer treatment etc etc etc, you're a
disgrace but then you really don't know any better, what with the big pharma
companies as your paid employer, telling you which drugs to use etc etc etc,
I despair I really do, the quicker we get away from big corporations running
our so called health care the better, not that I use it anyway.

Redman

Steph wrote :

[ in response to geysers of fatuous spew from Redman and AML ]

"Why do loonies perpetrate these myths ?"

Dear Steph,

The best explanation, I read, of the dynamics of the enduring human desire
for construction of myths of a "golden age," or myths of a people living "at
one with nature" "free" from the "diseases of civilisation" was by Rene
Dubos in his 1987 :

Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress & Biological Change

http://www.amazon.com/Mirage-Health-Utopias-Progress-Biological/dp/0813512603/re
f=sr_1_11/002-1056586-9380053?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190686486&sr=1-11

That was a very long time ago, when I read that book :)  Later, when I read
Jared Diamond's superb "Guns, Germs, and Steel," I was reminded of Dubos'
book. Other authors useful to me in undrestanding the meta-dynamics of human
perceptions of health and illness include Foucault, E. O. Wilson, Susan
Sontag, Peter Ackroyd (for his stunning historical re-creation of the
ambience of the plague years in London in his masterpiece "London : The
Biography").

As long as there are new things to learn, new ways to challenge what we
assume, I'm a happy camper :) If I had another life, I would go into the
biological sciences, genetics, what you might call the Darwinian renaissance
of evolutionary theory of Wilson, Dawkins, Gould, and such novel thinkers as
Pinker at Harvard attempting to move toward the cognitive from the
biological.

best, Uncle Sally