HEALTHY AT 100 (11 page)

What is the Hunzans’ secret? Part of it, I believe, is that when faced with hardship and privation, they have responded with courage and creativity. In countless ways, these resourceful people have turned around what would seem to be disadvantages.

They have a shortage of fuel, so they eat much of their food raw, thus enhancing its nutritive value. They have no refrigeration, so they harvest their food just before eating, once again gaining a nutritional advantage. They have no electric lighting, so in the long winters they sleep longer hours, thus conserving their energy at a time when the sun’s radiance is at its lowest ebb. Living in an extremely rocky and steep area with almost no flat land on which to grow crops, they have built the most ingenious terraces in the history of the world. Faced with a serious lack of soil, they have wasted nothing and carefully put back into their gardens anything that could nourish the earth, over time producing gardens of extraordinary fertility. Situated in a rocky environment that provides almost no pastureland, they have adopted a healthy vegetarian diet. Lacking the many laborsaving devices of the modern world, they are extraordinarily active, thus generating
a vitality and level of fitness almost incomprehensible to those of us accustomed to modern conveniences.

How is this relevant to life in the modern world? I’m certainly not suggesting that everything about the Hunzan way of life is worthy of (or possible for) our emulation. But we can learn from these people. While we have developed a mass consumption lifestyle and a throw-away culture that are doing terrible harm to the earth, they seem to have created a balanced and healthy life with the limited resources at their disposal. While the modern world seems to require excessive and unsustainable levels of resource consumption, the Hunzans have, of necessity, come to understand the role of moderation and restraint in leading balanced and healthy lives. They have learned to waste nothing and to find a use for everything.

What makes these people remarkable to me is not that they have known no suffering, but that they have found ways to use their obstacles and challenges to become stronger as a people. What I love about them is not that their lives are perfect, but that in their responses to adversity they have discovered their powers. They remind me of Friedrich Nietzsche’s maxim “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”

It has always been a mystery to me why some of life’s deepest insights and larger truths are ushered into our lives by limitations and sorrow. As a child, I often wondered why God didn’t put more vitamins in ice cream, which tasted so sweet and delicious, but instead put them in vegetables, which to me at the time did not. But as I’ve grown I’ve learned something that the Hunzans seem as a people to grasp. There is no such thing as a problem that isn’t somehow also a gift. Very often it is in our hardships and trials that we are strengthened. Suffering can be a form, as the spiritual teacher Ram Dass puts it, of “fierce grace.”

Certainly all of us have our share of suffering in this life. In a world of great diversity, this is one thing we all have in common. The Reverend Dale Turner reminds us that

each of us has a handicap of one kind or another. For some, it is a physical, mental or emotional infirmity; others suffer estrangements within the family circle; and there are others who struggle
through a lifetime with feelings of inferiority or timidity. There are millions who suffer the handicaps that accompany economic privation.…One has this handicap, and one that. The race of life is run in fetters.
²⁶

No, I don’t want to live entirely as the Hunzans do. But I am inspired and heartened by the courage and creativity with which they deal with their difficulties, turning challenges into opportunities. There is something about the modern world, on the other hand, that leads people to respond to problems and suffering with distraction and consumption. When we respond in this way, something precious is lost.

I have known too many older people in the modern Western world who have gotten into the habit of shrinking from challenges. They try to avoid all discomforts. They aren’t handicapped or disabled, but they might as well be. Disappointed in themselves and in life, they have bit by bit abandoned their visions and hopes. Somehow they have become so discouraged and disheartened that their passion for life has been replaced by an obsession with convenience and security. They are perfectly healthy, yet use their age as an excuse not to pursue their dreams.

In their resourcefulness and perseverance, the Hunzans stand for another possibility entirely. And this is what makes their example so pertinent to life in the modern world.

In spite of your best efforts, the process of aging may bring with it the loss of certain abilities. These may be abilities you have possessed for almost all of your life, abilities you have relied upon and taken for granted. But you do not have to allow this loss to undermine your spirit, to stop you from contributing your unique gifts to this world and those you love, or to blind you to the opportunities and choices that still exist in each moment.

I do not believe that by following a healthful lifestyle you can guarantee that you will never fall ill. The longer I’ve lived and the more of life I’ve seen, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that in the
course of our lives each one of us will encounter more than our share of hardship and misfortune. No one—the Hunzans, the Abkhasians, and the Vilcabambans included—is immune from suffering and sorrow. But the examples of these cultures suggests that there are indeed steps you can take that will greatly lessen the suffering in your life and make you more capable of responding consciously and creatively to whatever adversities may come your way. These are steps that will make you healthier, stronger, less prone to illness, and more aligned with the powers of healing and joy. The more I’ve learned about these remarkable people, the more I’ve understood that—at every age—you can respond to whatever life brings you with the power of your aliveness and the beauty within your heart.

I’m thinking now of Samuel Ullman. He lived most of his life (1840–1924) in Natchez, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama, where as a white businessman and lay rabbi he devoted his life to securing educational benefits for black children similar to those provided for whites. Today, his life and commitment to social justice are enshrined in the Samuel Ullman Museum at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Though he became totally deaf as he grew older, he did not let that stifle his creativity or his passion. Instead, he continued to express himself and to work on behalf of others. Long after becoming deaf, he wrote a poetic essay titled “Youth” that has touched people all over the world with its eloquence:

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.

Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in an adult of 60 more than a child of 20. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust. Whether 60 or 16, there is in every human
being’s heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing childlike appetite of what’s next.

In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from people and from the infinite, so long are you young.

Of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest.

—Marilyn Ferguson

F
rom our look at a few of the cultures in which elders have led extraordinarily healthy and long lives—the Abkhasians, Vilcabam-bans, and Hunzans—we know they have each traditionally eaten a low-calorie, plant-based, whole-foods diet. We also know of the respect for elders and the other social and environmental realities that have helped them to live with such vitality and vibrancy. But the lack of reliable age verification data for these societies has been a problem. Unfortunately, none of the elders in any of these societies have been studied with rigorous scientific methodology. Additionally, these regions have become less pristine in recent years, making it that much harder to understand their traditions and health realities.

What would be ideal for our effort to comprehend the factors that influence the health and longevity of human beings would be to find a present-day culture where people live extraordinarily long and healthy lives, where infant and childhood mortality are low, and where the diseases that plague our society are rare. In order to be ideal for our purposes, such a fabulously healthy and long-lived society would
also be part of our modern world. Thus, its example would be directly relevant to our lives, and it would be sufficiently accessible that it could be methodically studied by teams of trained scientists.

In the best of all worlds, scientific researchers with impeccable credentials would already have been investigating and assessing these long-lived, healthy people for decades, subjecting them and their medical data to many different kinds of tests and analysis. We would have the data—complete medical files, comprehensive biochemical test results, dementia screens, Activities of Daily Living (ADL) surveys, nutrition surveys, age verification documents. Ideally, this data would give us incontrovertible proof that the people in this culture have far less heart disease, breast cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, and dementia than is the norm in the Western world. We would have at hand thorough and irrefutable documentation on the lives, ages, and health of a society where an inordinately large number of individuals have reached more than 100 years of age in vibrant health and enjoyment of life.

If there were such a present-day society and we had that kind of data on its members, we’d have a major clue to knowing how to live as long as possible and how to have the good health to enjoy it.

Remarkably, such a society does exist, and its members have indeed been the subject of thirty years of scientific investigation of the highest credibility. We’ve found quite likely the nearest thing to a modern Shangri-la, and we’ve got the documentation to prove it.

The southernmost Japanese prefecture (state) of Okinawa is made up of 161 beautiful islands that are the dwelling place of 1.4 million people. Adorned with palm trees and blessed with an abundance of flora, fauna, and pristine rain forest, these subtropical islands form an archipelago stretching for eight hundred miles between the main Japanese islands and Taiwan. Okinawa is often called “Japan’s Hawaii” because the weather is so pleasant, with an average temperature of 82 degrees Fahrenheit in July and 61 in January.

To most North Americans, Okinawa is known for being home to
the largest American military presence in the Far East as well as for having been the site of the longest and bloodiest battle of World War II. Some of us recall that more people were killed during the Battle of Okinawa than were killed by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The war memorial built by the Okinawans at Itoman at the southern tip of the main island is reminiscent of the Vietnam memorial in Washington. But it is much larger, and it is the only such memorial on earth that lists the names of all the people killed, civilian and military, on both sides of the battle.

More recently, Okinawa has become known for something quite opposite to the death and destruction of war. Its new renown began to emerge in 1975, when the Japan Ministry of Health and Welfare began to fund the Okinawa Centenarian Study—a study that continues to this day. The purpose of the study has been to assess whether there is any validity to the numerous reports of extraordinary health and longevity in Okinawa.

After three decades of study, the results have exceeded the expectations of even the most optimistic researchers. The Japanese prefecture of Okinawa has now been scientifically established to be the home of the longest lived and healthiest people ever thoroughly studied. These results have been published in many scientific papers, and were popularized in a bestselling 2001 book titled
The Okinawa Pro-gram.
¹

The most important evidence needed for any study of longevity and health is reliable age verification data. This has unfortunately been lacking in Abkhasia, Vilcabamba, and Hunza. In Okinawa, however, this problem is solved. In Okinawa, every city, town, and village has a family register system that has scrupulously recorded births, marriages, and deaths since 1879.
²
Thanks to the meticulous keeping of birth and health records, there is no doubt about the claims to longevity. The data, in this case, are reliable.
Okinawa is home to the world’s healthiest documented elders, to the world’s longest recorded life expectancies, and to the highest concentrations of verified centenarians in the world.
³

The word “centenarian” refers to someone who has lived to the
age of 100 years or more. Scientists consider centenarians particularly important to study because they are usually living examples of successful aging. Many studies, including the New England Centenarian Study as well as the Okinawa Centenarian Study, have found that people who make it to 100 and beyond have often been remarkably healthy for most of their lives.
⁴
In medical terms, they typically experience a rapid terminal decline very late in life, resulting in a compression of morbidity to their final years. This means that any health problems they might experience tend to take place at the very end of their very long and otherwise very healthy lives.
Studies of centenarians have found that 95 percent of those who make it to 100 have been free of major diseases into their nineties.
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