Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 268 posts

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

#71

Post by Torkel »

agumonkey wrote: post #56
euske wrote: post #47

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…

Japan wearing face mask 24/7 since the 90s I believe (I wonder if it was all started after the diesel scandal)

This is not correct. Before covid only people who felt like thay might have a cold or similar wore face masks, to reduce risk of infecting others.

(This is my understanding after living there for one year and then travelling for a month every other year for ~20 years. I’m not native though so there may be some nuance to mask wearing I’m missing)

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

#72

Post by agumonkey »

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 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.

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

#73

Post by M5x7wI3CmbEem10 »

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…

I'm assuming one underestimated facet is the nonviolent culture. Many injuries due to violence in the U.S. go unreported, leading to chronic health problems which can further cause mental health problems.

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

#74

Post by M5x7wI3CmbEem10 »

astrange wrote: post #58
lemoncurd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

read deep nutrition, i can summarize sinple. eat all kinda meat, organ, muscle all of it, egg and milk also good. plants have evolved to protect themselves using chemicals so they're bad. seed oils are the root of all evil and illness. good nutrition of ancestors means better looks for next generation.

Eating “chemicals” designed to defend against nonhuman species isn’t going to be bad for you. That includes capsaicin and caffeine which are if anything healthy. There’s also the xenohormesis effect, if you believe in that, where small amounts of poison are good for your defenses.

I think they're talking about goitrogens.

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

#75

Post by ValentineC »

activatedgeek wrote: post #57
zkirill wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's an alternative to the Economist? I can't find a better publication short of an academic journal or literature. Someone recommended Foreign Affairs but I've yet to buy one.

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…

> Economist makes me feel like other countries exist, and there is enough going on outside the US.

I think it helps that the Economist is not headquartered in the US, but in the UK.

(The Financial Times has its headquarters in the UK too.)

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

#76

Post by reedf1 »

howlgarnish wrote: post #66
euske wrote: post #47

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…

> people here wouldn't even look at you straight Quite the opposite! Random strangers will stare, and friends and colleagues will make blunt comments in a way that would send them straight to HR in the US: you'll be told to your face you're fat, asked how much you weigh, get poked in the belly, asked if you've tried sumo wrestling, etc. A random デブちゃん's experience: https://www.tofugu.com/japan/fat-in-japan/

I've had a real example of this! I've never even been overweight but a Japanese friend, who was an exchange student, would poke me in the stomach and if there was the slightest pudge he would yell "Hamburger!"

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

#77

Post by tasogare »

presentation wrote: post #32
tidenly wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested what dishes you're specifically talking about here? Japanese cooking is not complicated, just different. Me and a lot of my friends here can all meal prep <500yen per meal and that ranges from Japanese food to Indian/Italian/Mexican. You just need to make smart adjustments and substitutions.

Agreed, it's pretty dead simple and cheap to make some miso soup, some kind of stir fried veggie dish, sear a piece of fish and throw in some tsukemono from the market - which is exactly the kind of easy, healthy meal me and my wife eat at home all the time. Perhaps I got the crash course for eating cheap in Japan on easy mode by having a Japanese wife who already knows how to do it, but there's plenty of simple reci…

> it's pretty dead simple and cheap to make some miso soup, some kind of stir fried veggie dish, sear a piece of fish and throw in some tsukemono from the market

Sure if you are going for the lowest of low effort you can make something edible, but that doesn’t mean it’s tasty nor something one would like to eat everyday. The miso soup meme is funny once a week but let’s be honest and not pretend it has good nutritional value. The pork soup is a way better upgrade but it already requires two times more ingredients and more step and doing a steak and fries. One time a friend cooked a ratatouille plus some meat aside for three persons and it’s cost us 2000 yen each... (ok I could have lowered the price by 500 but not more given how expensive vegetables are)

In fact your message hints at the root of the problem when mentioning your wife: the Japanese cuisine is based on the model of the housewife who had a full day to go shopping for various ingredients, do many processing steps, use various sauces and let things soak in it to prepare the 3-4 side dish of a Japanese meal for a family. This kind of organization is impossible for a working people living alone.

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

#78

Post by ben_w »

euske wrote: post #47

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…

> I also read that the fear of COVID in Japan is the strongest in the world, despite a relatively low infection/death number here.

I’d expect the former to cause the latter.

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

#79

Post by carlmr »

astrange wrote: post #62
solidsnack9000 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you have some divergent ideas here. On the one hand, you ask about practical, actionable stuff; on the other hand, you ask "How many consecutive generations of people living to 100 does it take before it happens at a regular basis.". The answer to the latter question is not something you can really use for anything. I sometimes wonder if the right thing for westerners wouldn't just be a big sequence of pho…

Do all Japanese actually eat that healthy? I can believe it of some of them, but there’s little fruit and many salarymen seem to live on a diet of fried chicken, hard liquor and cigarettes.

>many salarymen seem to live on a diet of fried chicken, hard liquor and cigarettes.

That's what surprised me the most visiting Japan. All the skinny people in Japan eating fried chicken, fried mashed potatoes, fried everything.

The only thing I could make out for why they were skinny was insane levels of portion control. Since they definitely didn't have time to do sports.

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

#80

Post by Xixi »

brian_cunnie wrote: post #59
Xixi wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The single biggest difference between Japanese and American diet is the amount of food. Just going for US servings to Japanese servings is enough to shed quite a bit of weight, although you are likely to go hungry if you are used to American sizes. Otherwise the Japanese diet is indeed carb heavy (rice, soba and udon), but I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

> The single biggest difference between Japanese and American diet is the amount of food What about sugar? There's a big difference there, too. Americans put sugar in everything, even things you'd think wouldn't need it, like salad dressing and pizza dough. Sugar (sucrose) is made up of glucose & fructose, and I don't think fructose is healthy for us. And its metabolic pathway makes us fat [0] via _de novo lipogenesi…

There's a ton of sugar in Japanese food. Usually it's added either directly as sugar (sucrose) or as mirin (sweet sake), although food from the south of Japan might be sweeter than in the north.

I personally never add sugar to anything I cook unless it's a desert, but I can only cook French food.

Post reply on HN