Whole Diets 227in themselves; vitamins as things in themselves; but whether these can be things in
themselves and are not really relative to a host of other conditions in nutrition is as yet
scarcely considered...
Our health or wholeness has fragmented no less than our diet. A swarm of special-
ists have with the invention of science settled on the fragments to study them. A great
deal is found out about each several disease; there is a huge, unmanageable accumula-
tion of knowledge, and this and that disease is checked or overcome. But our wholeness
has not been restored to us. On the contrary, it is fragmented into a great number of
diseases and still more ailments. We have lost wholeness, and we have got in its place its
fragmentation with a multiplexity of methods, officially blessed and otherwise, dealing
with the fragments in their severally.This fragmentation has resulted, among other things, in a host of contradictory
views among dietitians, each one of the different diets advocated possessing a com-
pany of followers ready to argue its exclusive merits with almost religious fervour.
Thus you have the vegetarian; the fruitarian; those who never eat proteins and
starch at the same meal; and those who stew all their foods together in the same
pot; those that say you must drink before meals; others that believe in drinking
after meals; those that drink between meals, and besides all these, and many more,
there is the vast majority that eat what they want when they want it (or can get it)
and drink when they are thirsty. This majority is given to labelling all the others as
faddists, and indeed there does not seem to be a very noticeable difference in
health between any of these groups. No wonder then, that the average person is apt
to be a little sceptical when he is told that health depends on diet.
What then should be the reply to the would-be seeker after health who asks:
‘What shall I eat that I may be whole?’
For an answer let us go to those people from whom Dr Wrench, in his student
days, felt instinctively that such knowledge should be sought, namely the ultra-
healthy. Not the occasional individual of whom one says that he is ‘abnormally
healthy’ (a revealing adverb) but to whole groups of people to whom a state of full
health is normal.
Five such groups exist, or have existed, about which a good deal of statistical
data is available. We will examine these in turn, noting how they live and what
they eat, and see if we can discover among them a common factor of which it per-
missible to say – here lies the secret of health.
We will take first the people of Hunza, a small native state in the extreme
northernmost part of India attached to the Gilgit Agency. The origin of these
people is somewhat of a mystery. Both in physical characteristics and language
they differ from their neighbours, and indeed from all the other peoples of the
Indian subcontinent. Only one thing seems certain, that they have inhabited
their valley since the extremely distant past. The massive stone walls, the building
of which must have preceded their admirable terraced agriculture, have a parallel
only in the masonry left by the Peruvian civilization which preceded the Inca
conquest.