Diets of the Healthiest People in the World

The healthiest populations in India in the early 1900s were from Northwest India: the Hunzakuts (from the Hunza valley), Mahrattas, Sikhs and Pathans, who were all renowned for their energy, stamina, health and their long, vigorous lives.

Diets among these populations differed between villages, but always included whole grains such as wheat or millet, vegetables, milk, butter and cheese; fruit; and meat (when available). To duplicate this diet as closely as possible, McCarrison's rats were given chapittis lightly smeared with fresh butter, sprouted lentils and chickpeas, raw, fresh vegetables (cabbage and carrots), as much whole milk as they wanted, the hard crusts of bread (to keep their teeth in order), and a small ration of meat and bones once a week.

The rats were watched over a period of five years, and during that time "there was in this stock no case of illness, no death from natural causes, no maternal mortality, no infantile mortality."

The least healthy people McCarrison found were the Bengalis and Madrassis. Bengalis ate mostly rice, with some dhal (lentils), a few vegetables, a little fish and a little milk. Their health and life expectancy was only slightly better than the Madrassi, who ate almost nothing but rice, due to their extreme poverty and not enough fertile land.

Sir McCarrison took pictures of average men of the healthy and unhealthy villages he studied, and also took pictures of the rats who ate the same foods served in these villages, and the differences were remarkable. The results of his research were presented in a number of lectures given in the United States and Europe, and were published in scholarly papers and books. At the time, little notice was taken of his findings.

Any parent who sees the difference in stature and vitality between the healthy Hunza man, and the undernourished Bengali should be willing to do whatever it takes to assure that his or her own family eats the most nutritious foods available.

After McCarrison studied the common diets of India, he designed a study to see what would happen if his rats were fed on the foods normally eaten by the lower-class British citizens back home.

In the very early 1900s the poor of England typically ate a diet consisting of "white bread, margarine, over-sweetened tea with a little milk (of which the rats consumed large quantities) boiled cabbage and boiled potato, tinned meat and tinned jam of the cheaper sorts." The "European rats" fared almost as badly as the poorest people living in India.

McCarrison gave a very long list of diseases that his poorly-fed rats succumbed to, and the list was almost identical to the diseases found in the short-lived Bengalis and Madrassis of India and the lower-class citizens of England. Ailments included cancers, reproductive difficulties, nutritional diseases, and less common illnesses that took almost a complete page to list. His 'Hunza rats' continued to be extremely healthy, and showed no signs of the 'diseases of civilization.'

Of course, McCarrison was not the only researcher who wanted to know why some cultures appeared to have almost perfect health, while others (notably the modern, industrialized groups) had declining health.

Between 1914 and 1940, many prominent nutritional researchers and medical professionals traveled to areas of the world where people still ate the foods of their ancestors. Some of these men visited areas for the express purpose of studying their health and cultures, and others moved to the villages and set up permanent medical practices.

The doctors who lived among traditional groups and who wrote extensive reports on the general health of the traditional people, included Albert SchweitzerLambaréné Hospital in Gabon, west central Africa, in 1924.

In almost every country, indiginous people could be found who displayed excellent health. Doctors all over the world sent back reports that the people they served displayed no diabetes, no heart disease, no cancer, no dental cavities, no crowded and crooked teeth. These doctors also reported that the people who adopted a Western diet had all these maladies, and were much more likely to be sickened by infectious disease.

Of most importance to us in this discussion, is the complete lack of obesity among these healthy traditional peoples, and the fact that obesity is now just as common in those societies as it is in our own, because trade foods have now become almost universal.

Once a member of a healthy traditional community moves to a local non-traditional village and begins eating industrialized food, dental caries, apendicitis, obesity, diabetes, ulcers, arthritis and cancer are among the first symptoms of deteriating health.

This is even true among the famous people of the Hunza Valley in Pakistan (formerly northern India), who were studied extensively by Sir McCarrison, and whose findings were popularized by G.T. Wrench in the book called The Wheel of Health: The Sources of Long Life and Health Among the Hunza . Since McCarrison's day, a highway now makes access to the Hunza communities much easier, and imported foods are now much more common. Recent visitors to the area report seeing all the 'civilized' illnesses among the Hunza - illnesses that were unknown only 80 years ago.

Visit www.RealFoodDietRevolution.com for more information.