The Misery of the Hunza

[AribertDeckers]

29.9.2026
The Misery of the Hunza


https://x.com/SamaHoole/status/2104865047860150381

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Sama Hoole @SamaHoole

In June 1971 J.I. Rodale, the man who made organic food famous, sat down on The Dick Cavett Show and told America he intended to live to a hundred.

He was 72, slight, with a little goatee, and the day before he had been on the cover of the New York Times Magazine under the headline Guru of the Organic Food Cult. He had founded Prevention magazine and Organic Gardening, popularised the very word organic, published shelf after shelf of books on how to live forever, and took a small pharmacy of supplements every day. Cavett remembered him as very funny, for half an hour. At one point Rodale offered his host some of his special asparagus, boiled in urine.

Then the next guest came on, the journalist Pete Hamill. Rodale, still sitting on the sofa, made a snoring noise. The audience laughed. His head tipped to one side, and Hamill, close enough to see, whispered that it looked bad.

Rodale was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital. The episode was never broadcast.

Among his many books was one from 1948 called The Healthy Hunzas. It was about the people of a remote valley in the far north of what is now Pakistan, and it passed on a story that had been going round since the 1920s: that the Hunza lived to astonishing ages, often past 100, free of disease, on apricots, almonds, grain and vegetables, clean mountain air and hard work. Rodale's magazines held them up for years as the proof of the diet.

The Hunza had no birth certificates. Nobody could check an age.

What could be checked was their health, and in the early 1950s a Princeton geologist called John Clark went and lived in Hunza for twenty months, running a dispensary. He treated 5,684 patients. They had malaria, dysentery, worms and trachoma, among much else, most of it easy to diagnose and quick to treat. In his book he apologised to the travellers who had written up the paradise, and admitted that on his first trip he had fallen for all of it himself, the healthy Hunzas, the land where there are no poor, the lot. Only living there had shown him otherwise.

The longevity valley has never gone away. It moved to Okinawa, Sardinia and Loma Linda, and in 2023 it got its own Netflix series.

The man who sold America the Hunza diet died at 72 on a talk show sofa, and the geologist who went to check it came home with a list of their diseases.

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11:25 AM · Sep 29, 2026
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiGDxXQQ43o

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Dick Cavett spricht darüber, wie der Gesundheitsexperte, der als Gast in seiner Show auftrat, sta...
pellefrank
 
9.785 Aufrufe  17.09.2025

Dick Cavett spricht über den Tod des Gesundheitsexperten, der in seiner Sendung ,,The Dick Cavett Show" zu Gast war. Ausschnitt aus der ,,Tonight Show" mit Johnny Carson von 1982.

@prycerobertson4695
vor 8 Monaten

What actually happened was, when J.I. Rodale began to snore, neither Dick Cavett nor the other guest that night, journalist Pete Hamill, said a word. They looked at each other and noticed that something was bad. Cavett then asked, "Is there a doctor here?" Cavett later said that had he said, "Is there a doctor in the house?", he would have gotten a laugh. (Past reports have suggested that Cavett asked something like, "Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?".) The audience was silent. Medical and fire personnel were called in, but there was nothing they could do to save Rodale's life. He was dead of a heart attack at the age of 71. (The taped show was never aired, but Cavett acknowledged Rodale's death on the air a couple of nights later.)


Transcript
0:00 What was that incident I heard about? I did not see the show. I did.
0:03 Oh, you know, I tuned in. Before we get to that, let's talk about I
     think you are the only person in television who had a guest. The expression in show business is you die.
0:11 You've all heard that. You know, comedian said, "Boy, I I performed and I died." Which means you did not do well.
0:15 You bombed out. But you actually had somebody expire, did you not? On one of your shows one night.
0:22 I did. Yes. It was um I think I I we talked about this once in private that this could happen because of the tension of talk shows. You know that why it's
0:30 amazing you might be talking to somebody and they would keel over.
0:34 Uh the fates fingered me as talk show host uh about six years ago I would say. Now this is a morbid and sad subject.
0:41 Well that someone will laugh within the next few minutes when I tell you that he was a health food expert.
0:51 was in fact and I a year among the things that he had said among the things he had said in the previous half hour was that
1:00 he felt like he was 20 years old something else and that he planned to live to be a hundred and um I was my
1:08 next guest had come out and was sitting where I am. I was where you are, right?
1:12 And he was where Ed is and suddenly and a snoring sound the way someone will on a panel, you know, when they want to
1:19 make a comment on, you know, right?
1:21 And I knew instantaneously that it was bad. And I remember standing up.
1:25 How did you know? Did was there just a maybe if you're that close to death, you somehow intuit it without really realizing it. But I found myself holding
1:34 his wrist. I don't remember getting up and I don't know what I was going to do.
1:37 I don't know what a pulse is supposed to feel like or where to find it or anything.
1:40 You know that when there isn't one though. Yes.
1:43 That the man is probably That's the time to get out your fourleaf clover. Right.
1:47 Speaking of superstition. But uh it is a curious feeling. What did you do? How did you handle it? This you were taping obviously.
1:53 I was taping and uh the control room of course couldn't see because they're in another part of the room. They can't see directly through a window. So they kept the cameras on. So I remember cameraman
2:02 looking through the camera the whole time at at this. And I remember the audience laughing because they thought it was a joke long before I um after I
2:10 realized they began to. And then a kind of wave went back through the audience almost from front to back. And the next thing I knew, some firemen had been
2:18 summoned from across the street and they were pounding on his chest and so forth.
2:22 And I remember thinking, I must call Johnny. Yes.
2:27 This came across my because I've called you. I remember thinking I would call you and ask you how you go out the next night after someone has died and it's been in all the papers and go into and
2:35 now here's Phyis Diller you know yeah I make that transition and it really it really is tough that has got to be a very strange feeling the other strange thing is that in my
2:43 dressing room later I found many articles from his pockets in my pockets uh someone had clearly handed them to me
2:51 as I see you just person was taken away and um the man was not a young man anyway was no it was Ji Rodale who's published prevention magazine.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biP63MZd3Hc