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Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets

economist.com

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Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets

#241

Post by missedthecue »

29athrowaway wrote: post #26

Some observations... 1) Japan is not built around cars. There are more trains. You get to walk more. 2) Food portions are smaller, making it harder to overeat. 3) Fish is more popular than meat. Fish section in supermarkets is larger. Most kitchens have fish cooking equipment. 4) They do not put cheese in goddamn everything. I guess they get to eat more mercury (from fish) and arsenic (from rice).

" Japan is not built around cars. There are more trains. You get to walk more."

I hear this a lot, but what does this really amount to? I live in a city without a car, and all my walking on my daily commute (during non-covid times) burns 125 calories or so. That's nothing. Eating two oreo cookies is more calories than that.

Moreover, consider that America is no more car centric than it was in 1970 or 1980, but people are much larger now than then.

Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets

#242

Post by anti-shill »

christiansakai wrote: post #174

When my wife was working in NYC, she gained weight considerably, with her normal eating portion. After she went home back to Japan, and still had her normal eating portion, she lost her weight. At the same time, every time I visited Japan for 2 weeks I usually splurge daily, above my normal portion, and I did not gain weight at all. I might've even lose some occasionally.

What sort of food did you and your wife eat in japan?

Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets

#243

Post by agumonkey »

faceplanted wrote: post #218
agumonkey wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern lifestyle makes you chase technohopium based ideas. Often they'll sell you complex solutions for a non existent problem. Modern life is never calling for bad ideas loudly, but tons of incentives that make you go the wrong way slowly. Bad job -> stress -> comforting with premade meals too tasty due to sugar and additives. No more walking because you want to leverage your car. You delay sleep to work later (bad…

You two are talking different things, you originally said "modern lifestyle advice ", but now you're saying "modern lifestyle", which are very different things, the "advice" agrees with you, that's what the guy was asking about it.

Let's not play on words. Consumerism sell you promises of better life which turned out to be false most often. It might only be an implicit advice but anyway.

Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets

#244

Post by Terretta »

thick wrote: post #14

I would sincerely like to get a breakdown of all the factors that contribute to the Japanese living to such an old age, rather than the usual "this one weird trick" bullshit that Economist and others try to swindle on the Western readership. It's quite frankly annoying, although I've lost the last ounce of respect I've had for the Economist years ago so I'm the idiot for expecting them to be any better. I've gone thr…

The blue zone studies and conclusions seem, to me, to be the opposite of “one weird trick” and run in the face of pop diet literature.

At some point, a holistic lifestyle offering statistically higher quality of health outcomes could risk sounding like an agenda, I suppose, but perhaps only if something about that lifestyle makes one feel guilty.

As you go into particular questions, you might find the material around blue zones goes more into those than most. Along with temperance and mostly plants, commonalities included natural exercise and positive disposition, for example.

Or perhaps, is our disdain of the simple holistic findings a result of our convenience culture? Are we actually just unhappy there is not one weird trick, preferably in a tablet form, that wouldn’t inconvenience our own “modern” ways?

Disclosure: My mother’s side had many siblings making it to 100, some were part of the California blue zone, while others lived in Scandinavia, farming and fishing by the sea. The realization these lives are differently healthy is hardly pop: there’s a body of health knowledge behind that tracing back to late 1800s, Kellogg (the family behind the cereal whose home page now says “one of the original plant-based wellbeing companies”), and the like.

Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets

#245

Post by agumonkey »

DrRobinson wrote: post #99
agumonkey wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Follow this advice and you'll increase your chances of growing older increases quite a lot, and you'll stay healthier in your older years as well. There is only so far these things can take us though. A lot of (but still too little) research is being done on slowing down or maybe even reversing aging, which could increase our lifespan to 150 (or maybe even longer). Not only would we live longer, but we would stay hea…

Thanks for the links.

ps: the discords are a bit slow activity though IIRC

Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets

#246

Post by uep »

bluedino wrote: post #185
uep wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Annual blood tests are standard for all patients with my current GP in the US. He is a younger doctor, so that might be a factor. I'm a bad patient in that I don't go every year.

Yup. We get told our cholesterol is high, our triglycerides are high, our blood pressure is high, we're pre-diabetic, we ignore it and come back the next year and get prescribed more pills.

I suppose that might be true of a lot of the western world. The good thing about regular blood tests is that, in theory, you can catch things early before you have symptoms and they become serious problems.

Every blood test I've had, has come back with good results. I have low blood pressure, and I don't take anything other than a few dietary vitamins daily. I'm fortunate in that I established good dietary habits back in my early twenties. It can be difficult to break old habits though, so we'll see how I fare now that I've crossed the age where things start going downhill.

Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets

#247

Post by trianglem »

handmodel wrote: post #68
trianglem wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asian American in New Jersey overwhelmingly probably refers to Indians so I don’t think you can compare that to the Japanese directly.

This is a good point - though they definitely aren't a majority. Lots of different people of different backgrounds but your point stands they may not be comparable to Japanese http://www.aafny.org/cic/briefs/newjersey.pdf

It’s the largest Asian group.

Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets

#248

Post by mensetmanusman »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #209
yowlingcat wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps after covid people will take their health more seriously? I'm not hopeful of it. The problem is that it's just such good business to keep people in poor health. Consider all the products that can be sold to them: - addictive junk food to exacerbate the cycle - type 2 diabetes medication - plus-size clothing - plus-size identity media - weight loss programs and medications Now, I'm not saying that all of thi…

It’s unlikely the problem will be solved until we can get some agreement on what is causing it. There isn’t consensus on this one. Why are people now overweight in many countries when they weren’t 50 years ago? What changed?

Your using it. The computer.

All the interesting things in the world compressed into a device that you mostly use while immobile.

Also, cost per calorie has never been lower, so technology has made it super cheap to feed us.

Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets

#249

Post by ip26 »

toshk wrote: post #142
ip26 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the short answer is quite simply nobody really knows . Your best bet IMO is to ignore genetics (can't change it), pick a "Blue Zone", and emulate what you can- within reason. This is something we still haven't solved, so the next best thing is to try to follow a proven playbook. You could call it cargo cult'ing, but until we crack the code it's the best we've got. Then you can sprinkle in rock-solid conventio…

Blue zones are pretty cherry picked to fit the narrative of the authors.

Your criticism about cherry-picking is relevant if you are trying to distill the secret ingredients of longevity. However, I'm saying just forget about all that. Pick a healthful region of your choosing with proven long-term success, and emulate it as possible/reasonable. The end.

Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets

#250

Post by [deleted] »

haltingproblem wrote: post #210
baxter001 wrote: post #190

Can't let this pass without the old classic: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1 In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. In Italy, which has more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by l…

Measurement error. How many people forget this detail and build whole lives around faulty studies like the Blue Zones. The Blue Zones is also selective in other ways. Utah has similar life expectancy to Loma Linda seventh day adventist. This was left out in the Blue Zones "study" since it did not fit the data.

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