Ilgdzīvošana

No Dr. Džona Fieldera lekciju materiāliem

1. stāsts

Various Greek writers speak of the Pelasgians who preceded the Greeks in Greece. They say that the average life span among them was from one hundred-and-ten to one hundred-and-sixty years, and they describe the life of Pelasgians generally. They write that the Pelasgians lived on fruits, particularly on figs, grapes, oranges, and other so-called Mediterranean fruits, and that they also ate honey and a little cereal and the milk of various animals.

Approximately thirty authorities on the Pelasgians describe their mode of living as a completely natural and simple life. They always lived in the fresh air and in the sunshine; they swam a lot and climbed mountains and practiced many games and sports, they used no artificial drinks or foods. After the Pelasgians in Greece, when the people of Athens and Sparta began to drink hydromel, which was a popular Greek drink, many Greek statesmen and philosophers who were the champions of their ancient patriarchal customs, denounced this drink on the ground that their Pelasgian ancestors had taken no artificial foods or drinks.

In general, the Pelasgians showed great endurance in long distance running and in swimming. All the authorities agree that they represented an ideal muscular and athletic type. Apart from accidents among the mountains or wounds received while hunting, they were never ill. So in general, these authorities are also documents which prove that the preconditions of health and longevity are living a simple and natural life.

2. stāsts

When the great navigators of Pacific Ocean like Bougainville and Captain Cook discovered the Polynesian Islands, they found a magnificent human race, the Maori race, which belonged to the Caucasian race. In appearance the Caucasian race is generally not black but brown, the colour we acquire after much sun-bathing in the summer. They saw with great astonishment the athletic form of this people—the extraordinary muscular strength of the men and the beauty of the women. Both Bougainville and Captain Cook describe that when they see their men talking with the indigenous people of the Islands, they could not help noting that the Europeans were small-statured, pale, sickly weaklings in comparison.

When at Tahiti, Bougainville wished to carry some boxes weighing 400 pounds or more from one part of the island to another. He saw with the greatest surprise that cases which needed four white men to carry them were easily lifted by a single native and carried some hundreds of yards.

Both Bougainville and Cook describe the life and appearance of the Polynesians, whose teeth were more perfect than any to be found in Europe. In general, the various physiological qualities of the Polynesians awakened the interest of the scientists accompanying the expeditions of Bougainville and Cook.

The natives lived in houses, but very simple houses made of leaves and vegetation. There were some tribes who lived on the sea coast and others who lived in the mountains in the interior of the island. The majority lived in the mountains and ate exclusively various native vegetables and fruit growing on the island. Those who lived by the sea caught and ate seafood also, but Bougainville observes that those who lived among the mountains were taller and stronger than those who lived by the sea.

Meat eating was the privilege of the tribal chiefs, but was taboo for the people, which meant that they could not eat meat at all. And it is interesting to note that whereas they found various diseases among the chiefs, they found none among the people.

Bougainville had difficulty establishing their ages, for there were no registrars of births. By finding out how many generations of descendants an individual had living, he established their minimum possible age. He found the age of the mountain people varied from one hundred to one hundred-thirty years, while those by the sea and eating fish lived from eighty to one hundred years.

These observations were of great value to the science of Macrobiotics, for not long afterwards these native and untouched populations came into contact with civilisation and all its disadvantages. Until Europeans came into contact with them they went almost naked, wearing a simple pareu made of a vegetable cloth, and were thus always in contact with fresh air and the rays of the sun. Bougainville noticed that they never ate until the sun reached its zenith, that whenever they crossed rivers and streams they always bathed and swam in them and, incidentally, that they only ate once or at most twice a day. When the sailors offered them alcoholic drinks, they refused them with repulsion, as they did tea, coffee, and all other artificial foods. They knew nothing of money or working for a living, as the fruits growing in the woods were at the disposal of all, as were the trees for building their houses. They lived a carefree life.

New explorers appeared and civilisation slowly planted itself in this island paradise. Traders arrived and brought alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, opium, and other highly valued products of our civilisation, and thus little by little the people of the islands grew accustomed to eating our foods and practicing our habits. They had to pay for these products with coconuts which were transported to Europe to be sold.

When the International Cosmotherapeutic Expedition came to these Islands some years before World War II it did not find at all the same natives as those found by Captain Cook and Bougainville. The size of the population one hundred-seventy years ago in the time of Bougainville and Cook was two hundred-forty thousand, calculated by the number of their canoes. After three or four generations there are only ten thousand inhabitants in Tahiti instead of two hundred and forty thousand. [Ed: as of 1933.] So we can see that changing their natural life to our own artificial ways of life has resulted in the virtual extinction of this magnificent race in less than two hundred years. And of the ten thousand inhabitants, one third are immigrant Chinese. There are also many people of European descent, so the real number of the indigenous people is even less than ten thousand. But they have not diminished only from the point of view of quantity. Let us now examine the quality of the vitality.

The expedition had occasion during a year and a half to study the diseases among the people of the Islands. They treated approximately two thousand natives and came to the conclusion that, relatively, they were suffering from more diseases than Europeans. First, they had tropical diseases, leprosy, elephantiasis, malaria, etc, and then on top of those, diseases imported from Europe, like tuberculosis, syphilis, and various diseases of the digestive system which have decimated the indigenous people of these Islands.