In Bama with population of 220 000 people there are 81 long-livers, who are above the age of 100

The oldest citizen in Bama is aged 130

One day a British chemist visited China. After that she returned six times for the last 28 years. Before her first trip she had faced two breast cancer operations and four courses of chemo- and radiotherapy. During her first visits she discovered that the morbidity of breast cancer in China is very low. She decided to start a research and found out that there is very big difference in her diet regimen and the one of the Chinese people. And what was the biggest difference? She used to eat big quantities of dairy food while Chinese people eat mainly soy milk and soy products.

The famous village of longevity – the Bama in Guanxy province in China,

is a place where in a 220 000 people population there are 81 long-livers, who are above the age of 100 – with the oldest aged 130. During the 1991 World Natural Science Convention, they were proclaimed the fifth longest-lived folk in the world. It’s still not uncommon to see 100 year old farmers working their fields, and 90 year olds are everywhere. In a conversation with three of them, two at the age of 109 and another 106-year-old, the answer they gave to the question “What do you do in order to be healthy?” was absolutely the same – “gua sha”. Gua sha is a form of folk medicine. Literary it means “to scrape away fever”. Every time when someone feels ill they cure themselves with Gua sha.
Bama people don’t have special diets. The main food they consume is yellow corn, beans, potatoes, and vegetables. One of Bama’s local delicacies is hemp soup. Eaten daily, hemp seed are first ground and mixed with water. Aside from that corn gruel and tofu are the main dishes served in their tables. To the question “Do you drink milk?” the main answer is “Never but we drink a lot of soy milk”.