Original article (in Serbian) was published on 5/2/2026; Author: Teodora Koledin
NajŽena (part of tabloid Alo) portal published an article claiming that the people of the Hunza Valley in Pakistan live on average up to 130 years. At the same time, the headline of the article also claims that they “do not know heart disease or bad cholesterol.” However, we found several studies suggesting the opposite. In a response to Tragač, researcher Saul Newman from the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing stated that the claim is a myth connected to the fictional book “Lost Horizon” by the British author James Hilton, who had not even visited Asia before publishing the book.
A scientific study published in 2011 titled “Typologies of Extreme Longevity Myths” mentions the myth of the longevity of the people of the Hunza Valley. The study states that myths about the longevity of this population – as well as populations in Ecuador and the Caucasus – were debunked through objective scientific research conducted in the early 1980s. In the case of the NajŽena article, it can clearly be said that it exaggerates the longevity of the people of the Hunza Valley by claiming that they live on average up to 130 years. This would imply that many members of this population live significantly longer than that, which is unlikely considering that the Guinness World Records lists the Frenchwoman Jeanne Louise Calment as the “oldest person ever,” having lived to the age of 122.
To learn more about the topic, we contacted researcher Saul Newman, who has worked extensively on demographic issues of aging and mortality. In his reply, Dr. Newman referred us to a “beautiful” quote by the American gerontologist Erdman B. Palmore regarding the alleged longevity of the Hunza people, from a research note published in 1984:
“Nobody has yet investigated claims of longevity among the Hunza because the Hunzukuts have no written language and no birth records.”
The same point had been made about a decade earlier by the Soviet scientist Zhores Medvedev. “Since then, almost nothing has changed,” Newman notes. He himself was recently awarded for research focused precisely on debunking myths about regions of the world where people are believed to live unusually long lives.
The authors of a 2024 study on “exceptional” longevity on the Japanese island of Okinawa note that the assumption that such regions exist became widespread in the 1970s when the American physician and scientist Alexander Leaf organized expeditions around the world sponsored by the National Geographic Society. In a 1973 article in National Geographic, Leaf described three long-lived populations and their “exceptional longevity”: in Abkhazia, in the Hunza Valley, and in Vilcabamba.
However, Leaf himself admitted in another paper that estimating the ages of people in the Hunza Valley was nearly impossible because they had no written language or official documents. As he explained, the only thing he could do was ask them when they were born or whether they remembered the British invasion of 1892. In that paper, also from 1973, Leaf wrote:
“Although it seemed that many exceptionally old people lived in Hunza [the valley], and in neighboring regions it was believed that the Hunzakuts generally outlived everyone else, I would rather not make any claims about how old they actually are. I simply accepted what they said about their ages and moved on to other topics, such as their remarkable fitness and strength.”
American journalist John Tierney also once visited the Hunza Valley and wrote the following about their longevity for The New York Times:
“The great Hunza longevity secret turned out to be – the absence of birth records. Illiterate old people did not know their ages and tended to overestimate them by a decade or two, as I discovered by comparing their memories with known historical events.”
Do the people of the Hunza Valley “not know heart disease”?
The claim by the NajŽena journalist that the people of the Hunza Valley “do not know heart disease or bad cholesterol” is also unfounded. As early as 1955, a group of scientists from Kyoto University conducted a scientific expedition to examine the health of residents of this Pakistani valley, during which they thoroughly examined 277 individuals. One of the main conclusions of the researchers was that “heart disease, malignant diseases, and appendicitis – previously reported as nonexistent there – were in fact found.”
They also diagnosed a 35-year-old woman with cholecystitis (inflammation of the gallbladder), a condition most often caused by gallstones, which are largely composed of cholesterol.
While researching the widespread myths about the Hunza people, we also encountered several fact-checking portals that addressed misinformation claiming that people in the Hunza Valley do not develop cancer (or are “immune” to it) because they consume apricot seeds (1, 2, 3).
Similar claims have recently appeared on the portals Srećne.rs (a subdomain of Republika.rs, part of the Srpski telegraf network) and Nova.rs.
