Secrets of the Happy, Healthy Hunza: The Magical Qualities of ‘Natural Foods’
A Talk by Prof. Harvey Levenstein
Report by A. Lynn Martin
The Hunza of the title is a valley in the Himalayan foothills of northern Pakistan. The Hunza people are best known for their healthy diet and lifestyle that supposedly result in people living to the age of 150 and having an active sex life until the age of 200 — or something like that. According to Harvey Levenstein, the popularity of the Hunza diet in the United States, and especially in California, is due to an unlikely source, namely a New York tax accountant named Jerome Irving Cohen. In the 1940s Cohen left his government job in New York and began promoting and practising organic farming. In 1947 he published a book entitled The Healthy Hunza, based on the observations of British military officers serving on the subcontinent. The officers claimed that the Hunza diet and lifestyle produced a people that were remarkably healthy, disease free, and long living.
The book and the diet it promoted had little impact until 1960s when popular concerns developed about chemical fertilizers and chemical additives to food. The Hunza diet was free from both. At the same time increased scientific studies of the Hunza diet were conclusively demonstrating that far from being healthy the Hunza suffered from malnutrition, vitamin-deficiency diseases such as goiter, and high rates of infant mortality, and they had a normal life span. One could expect that these studies would mean the end to the Hunza diet fad in the United States. Far from it; if anything the Hunza diet became even more popular, especially — once again — in California.
Levenstein explains this paradox by referring to what happened to religious practice in England at the time of the Protestant Reformation. The Reformers insisted on having a church free from the "magical" elements of medieval Catholicism — the miracle-working relics, the prayers to saints for help, the pilgrims seeking cures, the church bells turning away hail storms. While rational Protestantism became the dominant paradigm, many people turned to the enchanted world of magic for alternative explanations. The dominant paradigm of the modern world is science. As science demonstrated that the claims for the Hunza diet were false, many people turned and still turn to the enchanted world of magic for alternative explanations.
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