HEALTHY AT 100 (8 page)

Government figures show that American children now obtain an incredible 50 percent of their calories from added fat and sugar. Many health-conscious people criticize official U.S. dietary guidelines for not taking a stronger stand for more nutritious foods, but even as it is, less than 1 percent of U.S. kids regularly eat diets resembling the guidelines.

A few weeks ago I had dinner with relatives of mine who are in their seventies. They typically eat lots of meat and sugar, and their dinner that evening was no exception. Meanwhile, their conversation consisted primarily of complaining about a long list of aches and
pains and about how bleak their lives were becoming. Finally, trying to look on the bright side, one of them said, “Well, old age isn’t so bad, I guess, when you consider the alternative.” He meant, of course, that it is better to grow old, even if you are miserable, than to die.

I appreciated that he was trying to be positive, but I found myself wondering how much more satisfying life could be if we could understand that there really
is
another alternative, if we could recognize that there are ways of living and eating that lead toward a more healthful and fulfilling life than many of us have ever thought to be possible.

There are, of course, real challenges in Vilcabamba, as there are in Abkhasia, and as indeed there are wherever human beings exist. It would be a mistake to be blinded by our nostalgia for a pure and unspoiled way of life and to romanticize life in these regions. Neither Abkhasia nor Vilcabamba is a Garden of Eden. It would be both emotionally self-indulgent and intellectually indefensible to project our own fantasies of an ideal society onto these people.

But at the same time we would be remiss if we failed to notice that there is indeed something inspiring and beautiful about life in these special places. If we want to understand ourselves better, if we want to understand why some people grow old in sickness and despair while others grow old with vitality and inner peace, then we have much to learn from the simplicity and good-heartedness with which the residents of these places live. If we want to understand the factors that are at play in our lives that can produce on the one hand a person who at the age of sixty is already debilitated, defeated, and depressed, or on the other hand someone who at ninety is energetic, alert, and happy, then I am sure their examples have something to teach us.

As in Abkhasia, there is in Vilcabamba an abiding and profound appreciation for the natural transitions of life. Aging is celebrated, and elderly people are held in great respect. How different this is from the modern world’s youth-obsessed culture, where we tend to
look with horror upon aging, as if the goal of life were to remain perpetually twenty-five.

All too often, we seem as a culture to be at war with life’s transitions, viewing death as the failure to stay alive, and aging as the failure to remain young. We do something grievous to ourselves when we buy into this cultural ideology.

The myths and stereotypes we have about old age are so deeply entrenched in American society that they can insinuate themselves into our psyches without our even knowing what they are. It is difficult to escape the messages that our culture sends about the aging process. From birthday cards that decry the advance of age to the widespread use of demeaning language about the elderly (“geezer,” “old fogey,” “old maid,” “dirty old man,” “old goat,” etc.) to the lack of positive images of the elderly in ads and on television programs, each of us is continually imbued with feelings of aversion toward those who are old.

I am fifty-nine, and I consider myself fairly aware of the pernicious nature of how our society views aging, and how we damage ourselves by buying into that view. One morning not too long ago, however, I wandered into the bathroom after an all-too-short night of sleep. Gazing into the mirror, I was shocked by how old the guy was who was staring back at me. My instinct was to recoil, and immediately I saw the man in the mirror grow even more difficult to like as his eyebrows drew together toward the middle of his forehead in a scowl of displeasure. I felt awful, and it took me some time to understand what had happened and what I had done.

I had greeted the signs of aging not with cheerful acceptance, but with trepidation and disdain. I had taken on the widespread cultural repugnance for what can be a natural and beautiful stage of life, and I had looked upon my tired self with contempt rather than with compassion and respect.

When I understood what I had done, I went back to the mirror and actually apologized out loud to the man looking back at me. I resolved, as well, to remember this learning experience, and from now on to greet the signs of aging and vulnerability, wherever I might meet them, with a smile rather than a frown, and with tenderness instead of contempt.

In countless ways, the dominant Western culture teaches us to value younger people and devalue older ones. How often do we notice when movie roles that should be played by mature actresses are played instead by hot young babes? In the 2005 film
Alexander
, for example, the mother of Alexander the Great (played by Colin Farrell) is portrayed by Angelina Jolie, who in fact is all of eleven months older than Colin Farrell.

Occasionally, however, a film is made that dares to convey the message that aging is a normal and healthy aspect of life. In 2003,
Calendar Girls
, based on a true story, told of a group of older women in Yorkshire, England, who belong to the local Women’s Institute, which is staid and traditional and is boring them silly. When the beloved husband of one of the women dies of cancer, she decides to raise money for a new sofa in the hospital waiting room. In previous years, they had raised money for various causes through calendars with pictures of cakes, jams, flowers, and the like, but none of these calendars had ever raised more than a few dollars. Realizing that they need to do something different this year, something that would make more money, they recall a speech the dying husband had written. He had proclaimed that “the flowers of Yorkshire are like the women of Yorkshire. Every phase of their growth is more beautiful than the last, and the last phase is always the most glorious.”

Inspired by the now dead man’s words, the elderly women decide to sell a calendar featuring themselves (tastefully) in the nude.

Calendar Girls
has now been seen by many millions of people, and has done much to publicize the actual events on which it was based. Meanwhile, the actual calendar has in fact raised more than $1.6 million for a new cancer hospital wing (including the new sofa).

Inspired by the film, older women throughout the world produced more than a thousand such calendars in the years 2003 and 2004 to raise money for worthy causes. In almost every case, they found the experience a joyful one, enabling them to celebrate the unique beauty of older women and to defy any cultural assumption that as women age they necessarily become unattractive.

The term “ageism” was coined in 1969 by Robert Butler, the founding director of the National Institute on Aging. He likened it to other forms of bigotry such as racism and sexism, defining it as a process of systematic stereotyping and discrimination against people because they are old.
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The consequences of ageism are similar to those associated with discrimination against other groups. People who are subjected to prejudice and intolerance often internalize the dominant group’s negative image and then behave in ways that conform to that negative image. Thus older people often hold ageist views about their contemporaries, about those who are slightly older than they are, and even about their own worth.

From our culture, we learn what is expected of us, and to a considerable extent we then conform to those expectations. When the prevailing image of aging expects older people to be asexual, intellectually rigid, forgetful, and invisible, many elderly people will take on these characteristics even though doing so may run counter to the way they have previously lived their lives. If society’s view is that an appropriate solution to the health problems of very old people is to warehouse them in nursing homes and exile them from the mainstream of society, then sure enough, many old people will end up languishing in short-staffed and soulless institutions.

Ageism represents a prejudice against a group that all people will inevitably join if they live long enough. As a result, an ideology that equates aging with deterioration steals hope from everyone, and from every stage of our lives.

We can acquiesce in our society’s script for our later years, succumbing to a perspective that defines those years as ones of loss and defeat. But I would rather challenge the assumptions of a culture that has lost touch with what aging really is: a transformational process as full of wonder and beauty as any other stage of the human journey.

If we want to create a healthy relationship to aging, then cultures like Abkhasia and Vilcabamba have much to offer us in how we
understand our place in the life cycle. In these cultures, elders are looked up to and appreciated for their wisdom. They feel socially useful and needed, and even the oldest people typically retain their mental faculties and physical abilities. In the modern industrialized world, on the other hand, older people often feel useless and disconnected. As we grow older we are put out to pasture where we are left with only our ailments to think about and with ever fewer opportunities to contribute to the well-being and happiness of others. After a long life we may have learned a few things, but the prevailing social context provides us ever fewer ways to express what we have learned for the benefit of our community. From the Vilcabambans, as from the Abkhasians, we can learn a more fulfilling and joyful way to experience our aging and a better way to inhabit our lives.

While I have several friends who have moved to Vilcabamba, and I understand why they have done so, I don’t plan to move there for my own final years. And I certainly don’t want to go back to a way of life as devoid of modern technologies as the Vilcabambans have traditionally known. I’ve lived without having a soft place to sleep and I’ve lived without food refrigeration, so I know it is possible to be happy without them, but I enjoy such comforts and am grateful for them. I do not want to live in a barely heated house with a mud floor, and I’d rather not live without running water and indoor plumbing. I also treasure the low rates of infant mortality that have ensued from advances in public health and sanitation, and I appreciate many of the complexities and challenges of the modern world. I love my life in the modern Western world, and even with all its faults and limitations, I still cherish it as my home. I recognize as well that some of the toxicities of the modern world are beginning to encroach upon and alter the traditional Vilcabamban way of life, a development I’ll discuss more fully later on.

No, I don’t want to move to Vilcabamba, but I do want to bring something of the Vilcabamban spirit and wisdom into life here in the modern world. I want to understand and incorporate the principles that have enabled these people, even in the midst of primitive conditions, to live with so much vitality and beauty.

I do not want to imitate the
viejos
, the old ones of Vilcabamba,
but I want to honor them, and to hold them as guides, as reminders, as friends. Their lives, like those of the Abkhasians, can show us that aging is not a disease, that growing old need not be a calamity, and that people can, when we love each other, look forward to lives that are rich at every stage with vitality, presence, and joy.

T
he Abkhasians and the Vilcabambans are not the only people who have long been the topic of stories attributing to them extraordinary longevity and health. There is yet another region that has if anything been the subject of even more fabulous claims, and that also was visited and studied by Dr. Alexander Leaf for
National Geographic.
This is the fabled land of Hunza.

Hunza lies at the northernmost tip of Pakistan, where Pakistan meets Russia and China. The setting is awe-inspiring in its majesty, for here no fewer than six mountain ranges converge. The average height of the peaks in these mountain ranges is twenty thousand feet, with some, such as Mount Rakaposhi, soaring as high as twenty-five thousand.

The people of Hunza live in an extraordinarily fertile valley that is nestled between rocky ramparts that reach toward the stars. This valley has sustained a population of from ten thousand to thirty thousand people for two thousand years in almost complete isolation from the rest of the world. Until recently, it was almost totally inaccessible, the only entry or exit for most of the year being an extremely
hazardous trail winding through the towering mountains which encircle the Hunza valley. In some places, the trail was only two feet wide. In other places, there were perilously frayed rope bridges to cross. In yet other places, the trail was actually cantilevered out from sheer rock walls on platforms of creaking timbers.
¹
The historical degree of isolation is reflected in the fact that the Hunzans, as the people of the region are sometimes called, speak Burushaski, a language with no known relatives.

One of the first things Leaf noticed after he arrived in Hunza was the remarkable good cheer and vitality of the elders he had come to study. Everywhere he went he kept meeting elderly people who were extraordinarily vigorous and who hiked up and down the steep hillsides with what seemed to him amazing ease and agility.
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Leaf wrote of one elderly gentleman he believed to be 100 years old. The elder

appeared lean and agile and still works breaking rocks for the road. He showed us the iron sledgehammer which he…flourished with ease with one hand.…Coming up the hill from our guest house we were overtaken by three elders who walked up the twenty- or thirty-degree incline without pause or difficulty while we stopped every few steps to catch our breath and quiet our pounding hearts.…[Another elder] served as our porter, shouldering a heavy box of photographic equipment and bounding with it over the forbidding terrain like an agile mountain goat.
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