ETERA/AL YO(ITH - Sibu Beauty

Recommendations

Info

THE VILLAGERS ATE A YELLOW BERRY THAT KEPT .HEM FROM GETTING SICK. NO OI{E HAD DIED IN 40 YEARS. THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD Snowcapped mountains are the backdrop on the meandering road out ofLeh. COCONUT OIL cojr BERRTES A good-for-you saturated fat. The benefits i The Chinese have been munching on gojis for centuries of a diet that incorporates coconut oil include improved heart health and metabolism, a i : to lengthen their lifespans. Besides an anti-aging effect, the potent immune-boosters are also thought better-supported immune system, and to regulate cholesterol, protect vision, and younger-looking skin. have a calming effect on the psyche. based on sea buckthorn-and process them into consumer products. Among these is Sibu Beauty, a company co-founded by a Mormon named Bruce McMullin rnzooS. McMullin had been on the executive board of the Salt Lake City charity Choice Humanitarian, and his philanthropic work often took him to India. In Calcutta one year he met an exuberant Indian herbalist, entrepreneur, and specialist in a5,'Lrrvedic medicines named Nico Khanna, who had spent 25 years in the Himalayas exploring unusual herbal cures. Khanna told him of the so-called holy fi:uit he had encountered in several of the country's Himalayan states over a period of several decades. No one knew much about sastalulu scientifically, but Khanna had heard of villages where it was regularly consumed and where no one seemed to get sick. McMullin was intrigued. Khanna insisted that the best sea buckthorn berries came not from China where most of the world's crop is grown, but from the Indian side of the Himalayas. The idea for a collaboration was born. If Khanna could get the highest-quality berries and guarantee their shipment to America, McMullin would guarantee American investment and market profits. And the fretting middle-aged people of America would have their wrinkles smoothed away. Khanna went to Leh, the capital of India's Ladakh region, situated at an altitude of rr,ooo feet and with a population of about 27,5oo. Leh was once an important trade nexus between India Tibet, and China; hashish, cashmere, and indigo were its lifeblood. It sits near the headwaters of the Indus River. ftom which India takes its name, but its culture is almost entirely Tibetan. Leh's steep alleys are crowded with trekking companies and the markets and schools of exiled Tibetans, who do not forget that Leh was founded in the roth century by a warlike Tibetan prince, Nyima Gon. Today the Dalai Lama spends part of the year here, and his image is everywhere-dangling from dashboards, plastered to the walls of caf6s. Leh is also heavily militarized due to its proximity to the volatile Chinese border. A permit is needed to venture anywhere outside the town. Leh Palace, which looms over the town, was built in the rTth century and modeled after the Potala in Lhasa. Great grlded prayer wheels stand at the corner$ and strings of prayer flags loop across the streets. At night the lanes fill with dogs and shivering cows. At dawn you hear prayers being sung in the first-floor windows over cups of incense. At the Omasila Hotel, where I stayed, the staff came out at first light to pray to the flower beds. Ninety percent Buddhist, Leh is a place that seems to exist within a deliberate quietness framed by the giant glaciers on the horizon. Ten miles east of Leh lies the ancient citadel at Shey, around which white cltortens (better known as Buddhist stupas, those moundlike reliquary shrines you see in this part of the world) stand ruined in the desert. The Tibetan past is vividly present here, and in this austere, bright highland, sea buckthorn plants thrive effortlessly as they have for centuries, glittering like golden rose hips along the roads. It was the perfect place to meet Nico Khanna. Now 69 and a Delhi millionaire, Khanna looks 15 years younger ("Sea buckthorn every d^y, ^y dear fellow!") but he was hobbling that day because his leg was acting up. One of his giant dogs had bowled him over and broken his leg, and the steel plate in it seemed to have sffied. Jaunty and elegant nevertheless, Khanna walked me to the edge of a farm to look at great mats of mashed sea buckthorn berries drying in the sun and to show KOMBUCHA Beloved in health and fashion circles. the notoriously smelly fermented tea is believed to promote general well-being, stave off hunger, and even cure hangovers. Many devotees have taken to DlYng their own brews. JANUARY zotz | 97
me his neatly parted hair. Only a few gray strands. "l make a jolly mean sea buckthorn shampoo. I can do the same for you. No more gray for you-a harem of girls you will be having!" One of the women from the collective came with us. Her name was Tsering Yangsleet, and she explained how hard it was to strip the tiny berries ftom those low-lying barbed branches, whose thorns were like little daggers. Yet they managed to harvest tons of them every August and September and ship them to America. Plump sacks of them were piled up at the edge of the mats. The harvesters made gzooo each and lived offthe proceeds for the rest of the year. It was excellent money by Leh standards. "l can work for six weeks," Yangsleet said, "and spend it the rest of the year. Two months of work, ro months of money." It was, for once, globalization gone right. So much so that in zoog the Dalai Lama gave his blessing to the effort. I noticed that the bushes carpeted the desert as far as the eye could see, the leaves pale gray and olive, the thorns metallic in the sun. There was no need to farm them like other crops; they grew everywhere like weeds, so effortlessly that the plant In zoo5 foldan obtained a license from the Indian government to regulate the sea buckthorn harvest in Leh and at the same time began to work with Khanna. The processing plant the two of them set up together lies off the road near Shey, under a rocky mountain range and within view of distant glaciers. Khanna could barely contain an epic and missionary enthusiasm. "This is going to be the biggest nutrition story on eafth. Sea buckthorn will be used in ways we have never even imagined. Already my own herbal company in India has 43 sea buckthorn products. Did you know the Indian Army has developed a sea buckthorn supplement for its soldiers posted here at high altitude to fight the bloody Chinese?" (Anti- Chinese sentiment, I noticed, runs high in Ladakh, not least because of Chinas treatment of Tibet.) Sea buckthorn grows all over the world. It can be found in Canada and in Finland. But nowhere else does it grow at such tremendous heights. Khanna explained that it was the Himalayan altitude that forced the plant to defend itself by sucking in huge amounts of nutrients. "This The iourney Iiom berry ,o;",.. * ,0..3l,l#.*o,tt llsJ,.ttt o- u.t", are harvested, ancl then separated, washed, and sorted. Finally they are processed tlrough a machine to obtain the thick Fanta-colored juice that will eventually be shipped abrcad. Oppoite: A,herd ofcamels linger contenteilly in the shadows of the Himalayas north of Leh. had, Khanna said, been overlooked as a resource. Some of the difficulty of harvesting, he explained, is alleviated by special tools that shake the branches and rake the berries off. He gestured rather grandly at the piles of crushed skins, pulp, leaves, and pits laid out on the mats. The leaves of the male plant, which are often overlooked, were now being used to create a potent tea. The harvesting of the berries for commercial purposes had an unlikely beginning. I was told the story by Tadbar foldan, the assistant commissioner for labor in Leh. |oldan was one of the first people to understand the possibilities of sea buckthorn in the context of a remote and impoverished economy. "We think that sea buckthorn was 'discovered' as a nutrition aid by an NGO called the Leh Nutrition Program back in the mid-r99os," he said. "They and the fact that it grows wild make it the best longevity product ever discovered. The concentration of nutrients is unparalleled." He brought me into a long shed that serves as a factory. There were about a dozenworkers and three machines for separating, washing, and finally juicing the berries. Out of the last machine carne a frotlry pale orange liquid that cascaded down a metal chute and into a tub, from which it was ladled carefirlly into a blue plastic drum that would eventu- ran a cooperative of ally be sent to Sibu Beauty for bottling. Each drum was marked with the date of the harvest. The workers offered me a glass of this raw juice. It was so bitter as to be undrinkable, but a few moments later another glass appeared, this time diluted with water and sweetened with sugar. It was like a tart apricot juice, pleasantly refreshing and it was essentially the same concoction that Sibu now sells online in the United States for women harvesters under an Englishman whom everyone called Nick. $zg.gs for a75o milliliter carton. It was this rather mysterious Englishman who seems to have stumbled We went out into the intense sun, and I saw that allthe workers had upon the idea of harvesting sea buckthorn berries on a larger scale. assembled to drink their daily glass of sweetened sea buckthorn juice. Nick and these z6localwomen, they were the first." I realized then that it was difficult to guess their [coNrNUED oN pAcE 108] e8 l TOWN&COUNTRY MANGOSTEEN This small purple fruit full of polyphenol antioxidants has been used in Southeast Asia for more than 400 years to slow aging and soothe inflammation of the skin. lts benefits were noted by a Cerman scientist in the mid-1800s. ACAI The little berry that could, this Brazilian-born superfruit landed in the U.S. in the mid-aughts. The anti-aging, antioxidant, and amino acid-rich aEai was quickly championed by health gurus like Dr. Oz and scooped up by beauty brands like Kiehl's.
Page 1 and 2: THE 'f GROVES ETERA/AL YO(ITH In th
Page 3: long the roads that border the Indu

ETERA/AL YO(ITH - Sibu Beauty

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?