Lessons of Hunza By Sir Robert McCarrison
Sir Robert McCarrison was a British officer who was appointed in Gilgit Agency He was impressed with the agriculture techniques used by Hunza people and di research on how the healthy food can be grown with simple decomposed manure from the animal dung there are several books published on the findings. Here is a link to the book in Google books for you to read online. https://books.google.com.pk/books?id=lMfSuHgabYoC&lpg=PP1&dq=wheel%20of%20health&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=true
The importance of minerals, sunshine, and potential better growth of cattle raised on feed from well manured as against artificially fertilsed feedstock, as recorded by J. I. Rodale.
The combination of the level of mineralisation of their glacial water combined with their agricultural practices of returning all organic matter, including non-industrialised composted human waste, to the soil are likely a significant part of the explanation of the health of the Hunza and their crops.
Compare to neighbours they lived in valleys that got plenty of sunshine. This would have effected plant growth, phytonutrient composition, their vitamin D levels, etc. and may be a factor explaining health and behavioral disposition in comparison to those in adjoining valleys which were less sunny.
The video powerfully shows apparent yields and the remarkable quality of crops produced without ‘modern’ fertilisers or pesticides.
Clearly one factor was time and manpower to tend crops including manual removal of pests but none the less the video is truly thought provoking.
The world has changed, but our current waste management practices including disposal of human waste are not sustainable in the long term. We urgently need to find ways to safely collect organic resources including human waste, without mixing them with other pollutants, process them to remove pathogens, man made medical drugs etc., and return them to the land.
J.I. Rodale 1948 The Healthy Hunzas Link
J. I. Rodale Wikipedia entry Link
Rodale (Organic Farming) Insititue Link
“Chapter I
Sir Robert McCarrison
IN NOVEMBER, 1921, a great English physician, Sir Robert McCarrison, visited our country at the invitation of the University of Pittsburgh to deliver the sixth Mellon Lecture before the Society for Biological Research. The subject of his paper was “Faulty Food in Relation to Gastro-Intestinal Disorders,” and its salient points centered on the marvelous health and robustness of the Hunzas, who dwell on the northwestern border of India. This region is located where Afghanistan, China and Russia converge, with Tibet 300 to 1,000 miles to the east.
“”Sir Robert McCarrison first attracted attention when he was but twenty- five years old by discovering that three-day fever, which was so widely prevalent in India, was caused by the bite of the sand-fly. He followed this scientific disclosure with nine years of medical work in the political province called the Gilgit Agency, which consisted of six separate districts, including the villages of the Hunzas. In this section of India, goitre and cretinism were alarmingly rampant, but the Hunzas were strangely immune. McCarrison discovered that goitre could be acquired by the drinking of polluted water. To prove it, he experimentally subjected himself and fifteen volunteers to the disease and then effected a cure by removing the cause. (please see chapter – McCarrison was on the the original researchers into goitre and related conditions. He not suggesting it pollution was the root cause but had identified it as a contributory factor)
PLATE 2: RAKAPOSHI FROM ALIBAD
Travelers who have lived and worked with the Hunzas are unanimous in praising
their general charm, intelligence, and physical stamina. The Royal Geographical
Society in a report in June 1928, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society,
Vol. LXXI, No. 6, said: “The Hunza men were with us two months, continuously on
the move, over what is probably some of the worst country in the world for laden
men. Always ready to turn their hand to anything, they were the most cheerful
and willing set of men with whom we have ever traveled.”” . . .MORE
“McCarrison places the factor of vital food before all others when he says in
his book Nutrition and National Health: “I know of nothing so potent in
maintaining good health in laboratory animals as perfectly constituted food: I
know of nothing so potent in producing ill health as improperly constituted
food. This, too, is the experience of stockbreeders. Is man an exception to a
rule so universally applicable to the higher animals?” To develop this point he
embarked on an ingenious series of experiments with albino rats at Coonoor in
1927. At this time he was director of Nutrition Research for the entire country
of India, an assignment which gave him world-wide recognition as an authority on
nutrition.
He decided to find out if rats could be endowed with health equal to that
enjoyed by the Hunzas through feeding the rodents on a similar diet. One group
was, consequently, fed the diet upon which the Hunzukuts and other healthy
peoples of Northern India, such as the Sikhs, Pathans and Mahrattas, subsist. On
the other hand, another group of rats were fed the poor diet of the Southern
India rice-eaters, the Bengali and Madrassi. In his aforementioned book,
McCarrison referred to a nutritional authority, McCay, who twenty-five years
before had written “As we pass from the Northwest region of the Punjab down the
Gangetic Plain to the coast of Bengal, there is a gradual fall in the stature,
body weight, stamina and efficiency of the people. In accordance with this
decline in manly characteristics it is of the utmost significance that there is
an accompanying gradual fall in the nutritive value of the dietaries.” And so
McCarrison found it.
A third group of rats was subjected to the diet of the lower classes of England,
containing white bread, margarine, sweetened tea, a little boiled milk, cabbage
and potatoes, tinned meats and jam. The results were startling. McCarrison
described the first group as being hunzarized. “During the past two and a
quarter years,” he stated, “there has been no case of illness in this ‘universe’
of albino rats, no death from natural causes in the adult stock, and but-for a
few accidental deaths, no infantile mortality. Both clinically and at
post-mortem examination this stock has been shown to be remarkably free from
disease. The Bengali group of rats suffered from a wide variety of diseases
which involved every organ of the body such as the nose, eyes, ears, heart,
stomach, lungs, bladder, kidneys, intestines, the blood, glands, nerves and
reproductive organs. In addition, they suffered from loss of hair, malformed and
crooked spines, poor teeth, ulcers, boils and became vicious and irritable.”
The “English” rats also developed most of these troubles. They were nervous and
apt to bite their attendants; they lived unhappily together and by the sixtieth
day of the experiment they began to kill and eat the weaker ones amongst them.
You would think that the demonstration of the fact that the practically complete
elimination of disease in an entire group could be effected by the mere eating
of proper foods would create a tremendous stir in medical circles, would
crystallize a demand that the mechanism be immediately created for carrying
these findings into actual practice! It didn’t even produce a tiny ripple in the
pond of medical inertia. The doctor is too much involved in the morasses of
disease and physic, to be able to give much time to the question of health. And
the general public either doesn’t give a hoot or is too poorly organized to
demand its right to be shown how to acquire a healthy body. Consequently, except
for the occasional and morbid valetudinarians in our midst, chronics obsessed by
the drive to describe and compare symptoms even over dinner-tables, most of us,
ostrich-like, ignore the subject of health completely. But it is there and can
be disregarded only at an exorbitant eventual cost. This myopic attitude tends
to encourage procrastination, and then, unfortunately the ambulance has to make
an emergency trip. A friend of mine recently expressed this prevailing attitude
of indifference to health by saying, “I’ll take care of my cancer and you take
care of yours.” In other words, all of us are prone to an epicurean policy of
enjoying things blithely while we may, heedless of the morrow. As a lady
facilely said, “I think of health only when I’m sick.”” END CHAPTER
”
Chapter II
Sir Albert Howard
AT THE TIME McCarrison was working among the Hunzas, another great idealist, Sir
Albert Howard, was engaged in agricultural research at Pusa, in southern India.
It is unfortunate that these two men could not have met then, because they would
have supplemented each others’ researches materially. Neither one had as yet
attained to his knighthood. That came later as a reward for brilliant
achievements in their particular fields of work. In the researches of Sir Albert
Howard, whose recent death on October 20, 1947, was a great loss to all
organiculturists, was disclosed the secret of the robust health of the Hunzas.
As a mycologist, or student of fungus growths in the West Indies, he had an
opportunity to observe the diseases of sugar cane. He came to the conclusion
that the existing methods of scientific research under which specialists learned
“more and more about less and less,” while as researchers they were sequestered
in little cubbyholes, playing around with hop-o’-my-thumb experiments in flower
pots, would never solve the problem of plant disease. When in 1905, he was
appointed to the coveted position of Imperial Economic Botanist to the
Government of India, he decided upon a daring course of action. He would get out
of his cubby-hole and break away from the traditional method of using
pocket-handkerchief plots for the experimental growth of plants.
For years in the West Indies he had been thinking along revolutionary lines. He
believed he had found the basic cause of disease in growing plants, but to prove
his point he intended to be practical and to apply his theory on a farm scale,
not in little glass tumblers. He experienced a little difficulty in getting the
higher-ups to agree to such an unheard of practice, but finally, after
stubbornly adhering to his objective, he obtained 75 acres of land with
sufficient money and no restrictions of any kind to hinder the carrying out of
his revolutionary idea. His theory was, not to wait until the plant got sick,
not to use the artificial method of spraying poisons to prevent disease
organisms from taking hold, but to endow the plant with such strength that it
could resist disease organisms. He stood for preventive as opposed to corrective
measures.
PLATE 3: THE HUNZA VALLEY
Sir Albert had an instinctive feeling that the use of chemical fertilizers was
doing more harm than good, that it was destroying the life and vitality of the
topsoil, that it was merely a “shot-in-the-arm” which gave a momentarily
stimulated spurt in yield, but struck back viciously later in bringing about
conditions that actually invited disease.
Around Pusa he noticed that the natives never used artificial fertilizers or
poison sprays, but were extremely careful in returning all animal and plant
residues to the soil. Every blade of grass that could be salvaged, all leaves
that fell, all weeds that were cut down found their way back into the soil,
there to decompose and take their proper places on Nature’s balance sheet. But
in our country this “law of return” is flagrantly violated by the modern,
scientific farmer, with proper coaching from the professors in the agricultural
colleges. The old method, they contend, involves too much manual labor. They
resort instead to the factory-made “devil’s dust” powders which come in
convenient bags and which allow them plenty of time to go to Grange meetings.
Perplexed, they listen to the advice of the apostles of the new agriculture on
how to spend a great deal of time and manual effort in coping with plant and
animal diseases which their grandfathers, who more or less practiced the “law of
return,” knew very little about. The minute they forsake the methods of their
fathers and grandfathers and become scientific, they have set up a process of
slow but sure devolution which will cause them to do twice as much work
eventually.
Sir Albert applied the Pusa methods to his farm for five years and wasn’t
surprised when he observed a gradual lessening of disease. The most amazing
development occurred with respect to his work-oxen, which were fed the lush
crops raised on land that was becoming more and more enriched with living,
organic fertilizer material, and not with dead chemicals. Sir Albert’s small
farmyard was separated from the large cattle-shed of a neighboring farm by only
a low hedge and his oxen often rubbed noses with foot-and-mouth cases. In spite
of the fact that they had not received inoculations, his cattle did not contract
the disease. Sir Albert Howard duplicated this test on different occasions at
other experimental stations, notably at Quetta (1910-1918) and Indore
(1924-1931). He proved again and again that disease could be eradicated through
proper nutrition.
Howard became famous for his development of a process (it has been termed the
Indore method) for making a compost fertilizer. In observing the ways of Nature
in field and forest he discovered that there is a relationship between plant and
animal matter of three to one: three parts plant to one part animal. Animal
matter takes in bird droppings, the decaying bodies of dead earthworms, insects
and other animals in the soil. Plant matter includes dying weeds, fallen leaves,
etc. His Indore compost method is based on this three-to-one ratio.
Sir Albert’s idea spread. It was put into practice on coffee, sugar-cane
plantations and tea-growing estates and by cotton, sisal and rice growers, as
well as by many farmers in England. Wherever the use of common synthetic
fertilizers was abandoned and compost substituted, there resulted a tremendous
reduction in disease, a higher quality of crop and comparable if not superior
yields. Sir Albert Howard sums up his work with the classic statement,
“Artificial chemical fertilizers lead to artificial nutrition, artificial
animals and finally to artificial men and women.” Another author put it in a
different way. He said, “The only crop that can be raised on poor land is poor
people.”
Eventually Howard and McCarrison met and the missing link in the Hunza chain was
supplied. McCarrison embraced Howard’s work with enthusiasm. In his series of
Cantor lectures delivered before the Royal Society of Arts in 1936 (published in
book form under the title Nutrition and National Health) McCarrison said,
“Further, the quality of vegetable foods depends on the manner of their
cultivation; on the condition of soil, manure, rainfall, irrigation. Thus we
found in India that foodstuffs grown on soil manured with farmyard manure were
of higher nutritive quality than those grown on the same soil when manured with
chemical manure. Spinach grown in a well-tended and manured kitchen-garden was
richer in vitamin C than that grown in an ill-tended and inadequately manured
one. Examples of this kind might be multiplied, but these suffice to indicate
ways in which agricultural practice is linked with the quality of food. . . .”
In 1926, at Madras, India, McCarrison again proved that grains grown with
compost as the fertilizer element contained more vitamins than those on which
artificial fertilizers were employed. The Journal of Indian Medical Research
(14:351, 1926) gives a full description of these tests. In the Journal of the
Royal Society of Arts January 2, 1925) McCarrison said further, “Does the
nutritive and vitamin value of cereals vary with the conditions of their growth?
During the course of an exhaustive inquiry into the food value of the various
rices in common use in India, I had reason to suspect that such might be the
case. I found that various paddies varied considerably in their nutritive
values. I could find no reason for this in their chemical composition. So it
occurred to me that it might be due to differences in the content of vitamins, i.
e., of substances which are incapable of detection by chemical means. Such
differences might, I thought, be brought about by differences in soil or manure,
or other conditions of growth of the grains. It was not possible to put this
conception to the test in the case of rice, but it was possible to do so if I
used millet, which is another staple grain largely used in India. Accordingly,
Dr. Norris, Agricultural Chemist to the Madras Government, had nine of the
experimental plots at the Agricultural Farm, Coimbatore, sown with the same
millet seed. These plots have been in existence for 15 years or so and have been
manured in different ways. One had no manure in all this time; another was
manured with nitrates; another with phosphates; another with potash; others with
various combinations of these, including one which received a complete chemical
manure; the ninth plot has been manured with the natural manure of cattle. When
the time came these various plots were cropped, the crops weighed and samples
from each crop analyzed by Dr. Norris. There were the usual variations in
quantity of the crops, and the usual differences in chemical composition
associated with different forms of manuring, but the chemical analysis provided
no consistent evidence that the nutritive value of the different samples might
vary because of variations in certain chemical constituents of the grain. When I
came to test the quality of these grains by feeding-experiments on animals, I
found that the millet grown on soil manured with natural cattle manure was more
nutritious and contained more vitamins than that grown on an exhausted soil, the
latter being the worst of all in these respects. I was in the middle of this
work when my researches came to an untimely end owing to financial retrenchments
in India, so I was not able to repeat the experiments, nor to extend them to
other grains. I wish, therefore, to be very guarded in drawing conclusions from
them, but it does seem that the nutritive and vitamin values of millet seeds
depend on the manurial conditions of their growth.” This observation is of
tremendous significance and opens up a field of investigation which may prove to
be of great importance not only for India, but for other countries.
Several other investigators, M. J. Rowlands and Barbara Wilkinson, carried out
tests which gave similar results. In the Biochemical Journal (Vol. 24 No. 1,
1930) they say, “This research was undertaken because one of us (M.J.R) had
noticed that pigs which were fed on home-grown and home-ground barley and wheat
always did much better than those pigs which were fed on purchased barley and
wheat, and that certain cattle did better on certain fields. It was decided to
find out whether this was due to the lack of lime or other mineral constituents
of the land. The results of this investigation were not satisfactory. It was
then decided to try the effect of artificial manure versus dung.
“A crop of clover and grass was grown, one-half fertilized with dung, the other
half with chemical fertilizers including basic slag, kainit and sulphate of
ammonia. Then rats were tested by feeding them the product of these fields . . .
.
“. . . . the rats were divided into two lots; one lot was put on a deficiency
diet with 20 per cent of the ‘artificial’ seed . . . The rats on the ‘dung’ seed
showed good growth or a slightly subnormal growth. . . . The rats on the
‘artificial’ seeds all grew very poorly, not one giving normal growth. . . . It
can be seen that the former have gained nearly twice as much as the latter. . .
. The rats on the ‘artificial’ seed were in a poor condition; in some the hair
was falling.””
Abstract from
J.I. Rodale 1948 The Healthy Hunzas
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