Whole Diets 229also better and follows the ‘immemorial custom of the Far East’. Unusual care is
also taken to protect their drinking water by storing it in separate covered cis-
terns.
Their diet is a very varied one. It consists of
wheat, barley, buckwheat, and small grains; leafy green vegetables; potatoes (introduced
half a century ago), other root vegetables; peas and beans, gram or chick pea, and other
pulses; fresh milk and buttermilk or lassi; clarified butter and cheese; fruit, chiefly apri-
cots and mulberries, fresh and sun-dried; meat on rare occasions; and sometimes wine
made from grapes. Their children are breast fed up to three years, it being considered
unjust to the living child for its lactation to be interrupted by a maternal pregnancy.
The Hunza do not take tea, rice, sugar or eggs. Chickens in a confined area destroy
crops and are not kept.Except for the wider range of small grains and the very occasional meat, this
closely resembles any European lacto-vegetarian diet, and, at first sight, seems to
support the view so widely held by nutrition experts, McCarrison among them,
that of all diets the lacto-vegetarian is the healthiest. That it is a good diet is
incontestable; it will, however, presently be shown that there are other peoples
whose health and stamina is equal to that of the Hunza whose diet is the very
opposite of theirs.
The Hunza foods then are not unlike our own, but there are important differ-
ences in the normal methods of preparation and cooking. Both we and the Hunza
are great bread-eaters, and both prefer wheat bread, but the Hunza wheat is eaten
freshly ground, and the unleavened bread made with it invariably contains the
whole of the grain, with its vital germ and its protective skin, both of which are
removed in the process of milling white flour.
Dr Wrench, writing on the properties of skin in general, points out that skin
does not protect only in a mechanical way as a mere covering, but in a living way.
All skins ‘can regrow themselves if injured, and beneath and within them they
store substances upon which they can call to strengthen their efforts’. The value of
bran, the skin of wheat, is well known to all stock feeders. All carnivorous animals
relish the skins of their prey. The Greenlanders, Wrench points out, eat the skin of
the narwhal: ‘The Chinese and other peoples also eat the skins of animals and
birds. Everything living has a skin of some sort to protect it. It protects it by its
extra toughness, but also if microbes and other minute enemies do attack, it is
there on the frontier that the battle is waged. In and near the skin are marshalled
the protective forces. Any creature that eats the skin of vegetable, fruit, or animal,
also eats these protective materials marshalled on the frontier, and may benefit in
its own protection thereby. Whether such a pretty hypothesis is true or not, there
are suggestions that skins possess a peculiar value... The skin and adjacent part of
the potato is the best part, as the Irish know. So also is it the case with the carrot,
and, it is said, with young marrows, cucumbers, gherkins, artichokes, radishes, and
celery. There is, therefore, a little evidence for the hypothesis.’