161–170 of 268 posts
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The more I try to read, the less I know, the more I believe the answer is: - eat few - eat varied - move more - be with others - sleep nice Basically, avoid modern lifestyle advice.
Modern lifestyle advice dictates people to eat more, to move less, to be alone and sleep less ?
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Re diet: putting aside that alcohol-per-capita consumption here in Japan is less than the OECD average [1], and also how the article is actually about how the introduction of meat into the Japanese diet has caused a decrease in strokes (i.e. this is probably off-topic); it is true that if you are eating out cheaply, you'll likely find lots of rice and meat stuff like gyuudon (beef on rice), katsudon (breaded meat on…
> anything served cold besides ice cream is disgusting, In the west there are salads. They're cold. In Japan salads are rare and usually nothing but iceberg lettuce and cherry tomatoes. > who thinks that anything pickled is gross, The pickled isle of a western super market has more pickled things than the corresponding Japanese super market. They're just different kinds of pickled things. > normal Japanese meal gener…
What's not mentioned in the OP: - INSANE peer pressure. If you're skinny as a twig in the US, you're probably considered normal in Japan. If you're actually an obese person (again, in the US standard), people here wouldn't even look at you straight. This kind of environment put a huge pressure for one to stay in shape. - INSANE obsession for health. I hear that Americans are obsessed with health, but oh boy, have the…
As an Italian person (also our life expectancy is really good on average) this hits home. An anecdotal example: I now live in Switzerland and my current doctor was shocked when I ask to get some blood analysis without being sick. He believed that I lied to my insurance company and hid some pre-existing condition. In Italy, instead, it is pretty common that every couple of years you get a complete blood analysis just…
In Sardinia they eat a lot of blue fish (or oily fish), not surprisingly the European pilchard also called "sardine" of the genus "Sardine" has a very similar name to "Sardinia".
According to some recent study Aristotle himself named the fish after the population of Sardinia Island that were the first ones to trade it in ancient Mediterranean markets (looks like the most popular way to prepare it was in salt, as we still do nowadays).
But that's probably not why they are a "blue zone", an important difference is the kind of meat they eat: there is an abundance of sheep meat but much less beef red meat.
But that's probably no it either, Sardinians have genetic markups that protects them from entire classes of diseases, being a quite homogeneous population from the DNA point of view, they passed them on from a generation to the next.
What's not mentioned in the OP: - INSANE peer pressure. If you're skinny as a twig in the US, you're probably considered normal in Japan. If you're actually an obese person (again, in the US standard), people here wouldn't even look at you straight. This kind of environment put a huge pressure for one to stay in shape. - INSANE obsession for health. I hear that Americans are obsessed with health, but oh boy, have the…
As an Italian I wouldn't call it peer pressure, but attention to ones health.
I have a mild condition of high blood pressure, it runs in my family, when my doctor visited me the first thing he said was "you're a bit overweight, let's lose 4-5 kg, it usually helps and if it doesn't we'll work on the drug dosage" (my current intake is a "kids' dose") and it actually worked, I went from a minimum of ~85 to 70 just by losing some weight.
Some body shapes, like being to skinny or too fat, are linked to "not being well".
> but I bet there's a certain mental toll.
We talk about three things in Italy: food, health and weather (and soccer if you are into it, I am not).
There's no real mental toll to it, we just talk about it, but there is no real pressure around it (except those who spread fear for personal or political gain, but that's not different from Trump saying that Mexicans bring 'tremendous infectious disease' to the US).
What's different, I think, it's that we grow up with the notion that "good health begins at the table" meaning that eating well is the most important thing to stay healthy, we keep doing it and teach it to our children.
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Also a tremendous amount of walking. Japanese urban planning is much more pedestrian friendly than say, almost anywhere in the US.
Europe has that, too but we're not that skinny.
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Anecdotal data - as a Sardinia native, we do eat seafood, but to be honest around me at least that's at most a once a week practice. My grandpas, which lived to 96, 98 and 101, didn't eat much fish either. Lots of veggies though. One of my grandfathers died young due to a heart condition. All of them were regularly checking their health and doing regular blood tests. I can confirm we don't see getting tested as being…
Goes to show how important culture and religion can be in diet. Eating seafood instead of meat once a week, usually on Friday, is a widespread Christian practice called the Friday Fast. [1] In Europe, I know a lot of people that still stick to this practice even without practicing Christianity. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_Fast
most of that's still meat though?
What's not mentioned in the OP: - INSANE peer pressure. If you're skinny as a twig in the US, you're probably considered normal in Japan. If you're actually an obese person (again, in the US standard), people here wouldn't even look at you straight. This kind of environment put a huge pressure for one to stay in shape. - INSANE obsession for health. I hear that Americans are obsessed with health, but oh boy, have the…
As an Italian person (also our life expectancy is really good on average) this hits home. An anecdotal example: I now live in Switzerland and my current doctor was shocked when I ask to get some blood analysis without being sick. He believed that I lied to my insurance company and hid some pre-existing condition. In Italy, instead, it is pretty common that every couple of years you get a complete blood analysis just…
What's not mentioned in the OP: - INSANE peer pressure. If you're skinny as a twig in the US, you're probably considered normal in Japan. If you're actually an obese person (again, in the US standard), people here wouldn't even look at you straight. This kind of environment put a huge pressure for one to stay in shape. - INSANE obsession for health. I hear that Americans are obsessed with health, but oh boy, have the…
As an Italian person (also our life expectancy is really good on average) this hits home. An anecdotal example: I now live in Switzerland and my current doctor was shocked when I ask to get some blood analysis without being sick. He believed that I lied to my insurance company and hid some pre-existing condition. In Italy, instead, it is pretty common that every couple of years you get a complete blood analysis just…
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I tried searching for one a few months ago when my Economist subscription was expiring. Unfortunately, not even a single one comes close. The Atlantic is often advertised as the other high-quality publication. The target audience, however, is overwhelmingly the US. Economist makes me feel like other countries exist, and there is enough going on outside the US. On the ideological front, I fell into this trap of findin…
> they clearly are centre-left They’re Liberal, not Left.
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Probably a bad idea to compare a large data set (people in entire county) with comparatively vastly smaller sample set (Asian-American living in New Jersey).
agree. but same logic should apply to japan vs united states.