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Members of the Hunza tribe are always smiling, kind and strong. They look so youthful that many outsiders are sometimes shocked by their actual age.
Sometimes they look as if they were from another planet. But they are not.
The Hunza tribe lives in the mountains of northern Pakistan. Their population numbers only around 87 thousand people.
They are interesting mainly because they on average live to over one hundred years. Many of them, without health problems, even to 120.
Legends say that a few individuals lived up to 160.
Diseases
They are sick only very rarely, they do not even know what tumors are, they have a youthful appearance and their women give birth up to the age of 65 (of course only those who have many children, because childless women usually lose their supply of eggs by around 50).
The people of the Hunza tribe are living proof that diet and lifestyle really have a great impact on us.
They bathe in icy water, even when outdoor temperatures are below freezing.
They eat only the foods they grow themselves.
Most of their diet consists of fresh fruit and vegetabla, nuts, many dried apricots, various types of cereals (mainly millet, buckwheat and barley), legumes and small amounts of cheese, milk and eggs.
They walk a lot, but eat little. They do not have a morning or afternoon snack. Only breakfast and lunch.
Every day they walk on foot 15 to 20 km.
They very rarely consume meat. It is approximately twice a year, either lamb or chicken.
They also laugh a lot.
How they do it
For a certain period they eat nothing, only drinking juice from dried apricots. It is their tradition since ancient times, which they respect. It takes place in the season when the fruit on the trees is not yet ripe.
Doctors agree that the Hunza people’s diet and the periods without food contribute to their robust health and longevity.
Their habit of consuming large quantities of apricots is apparently responsible for protection against cancer. It’s not so much the apricots themselves as the kernels from their pits.
Apricot kernels are rich in the so-called vitamin B17, which has anti-cancer effects.
They make oil from these kernels.
They consume the oil regularly, but in small amounts, because vitamin B17 can be toxic to the body in high doses. It contains cyanide, which kills cancer cells, but if there is a lot of it, it can harm the body.
A family’s prestige is measured by how many apricot trees it has in its garden.
Unfortunately, today even they are sometimes infiltrated by unhealthy industrially produced foods and the result did not take long to appear.
It manifests as an increase in tooth decay and digestive problems, which they had almost never known before.
These resilient people say of themselves that they are direct descendants of Alexander the Great and his army.
Some soldiers stayed there after conquering the local territories and married local women.
In 1984 the media reported on Said Abdul Mobudu, a member of the Hunza tribe, who flew into an airport in London and confused local officials when he showed them his passport.
It listed his year of birth as 1832.
