American people have reduced longevity by eating fast food
Fast food burgers are fine if you don’t eat the fries or soda.
And fries and soda are also fine if you are doing hard labor.
Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets
81–90 of 268 posts
Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets
#82Earlier 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…
The Japanese like to put sugar in a lot of dishes, too, whether inari, omelettes, sushi rice, sauces, etc.
Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets
#83I 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 Mindspan Diet, by Preston Estep has a lot to say about the Japanese diet. I think he makes many convincing arguments. Some key take-aways: Iron is very bad for longevity, refined carbs that aren't sugar and that have relatively low glycemic indexes (long grained rice and many pastas) are actually quite good (rice/pasta), meat bad but seafood ok, don't over do the saturated fat in general, drink moderate alcohol if at all.
I got a lot from How Not to Diet. I also got a lot from the Mindspan diet. I think the truth is out there, but as you have already put it, it's pretty bloody hard to get anything definitive. It's hard because it takes decades to prove anything and it's hard because food is big business and entrenched food production pipelines protect themselves against disruption the best they can (looking at you, sugar industry).
Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, article (title) is hard to believe. The affordable food is rice, noodles and fried things like chicken and some fishes. Every other thing (meat, vegetables, fruits) is really expensive. It’s often not worth the hassle to cook lunch meal in comparison to the cost of raw ingredients in the supermarket. To add insult to the injury Japanese cooking involves a lot of steps, tools and preparation so cooking something…
> To add insult to the injury Japanese cooking involves a lot of steps, tools and preparation so cooking something tasty is like a full time job. I have to disagree here. A large number of Japanese recipe are highly homecook-able especially for Japanese people living in Japan, who probably already have the right tools/ingredients. It all depends on what you usually shelf at home. In fact, even as I live in US, I find…
What're your go-to choices?
Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets
#85I 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.
Modern lifestyle advice dictates people to eat more, to move less, to be alone and sleep less ?
Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets
#86What'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…
There's also the different family organization. My impression in Asia was that the elderly there spend a lot of time with their grandchildren, to the point where they cannot travel because they're on babysitting duty.
Many people feel younger after playing with kids. I wouldn't be surprised if it also affects you on a more chemical level, for example by triggering different methylation and thereby changing gene expressions.
Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 nutrition…
If I dont make breakfast for my boyfriend he'll make 一汁三菜 for breakfast or miso with a tsukemono and TKG. None of these things take an abundant amount of time to buy or prep for. We both work full-time jobs. Again, this sounds like a lack of knowledge about meal prep rather than a actual time issue.
Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets
#88What'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…
Long-term resident of Japan here with no particular expertise or insights on longevity or health. Something that has struck me recently are the government-led educational efforts focused on nutrition for infants and children.
My daughter and one-year-old grandson live with me, and ever since he started eating solid food she has been feeding him exclusively homemade, vegetable-centric meals. When preparing the food, especially at first, she referred to guidelines for ri’nyū shoku (“weaning food”) in the Maternal and Child Health Handbook issued by the government for all babies [0, 1] as well as some cookbooks she bought. The emphasis of ri’nyū shoku guidance is on handmade, nonprocessed food; my daughter has yet to buy any commercial babyfood. She hasn't been able to have much interaction with other young parents (for obvious reasons), so I don't know how typical her approach to babyfood is. But my impression is that she is not unusual.
For older children, the government promotes something called shokuiku (food and nutrition education, [2]) that is incorporated into the school curriculum and is coordinated with the food that children actually eat at school. (Most schoolchildren eat school-supplied hot lunches.)
The specific guidelines for ri’nyū shoku and shokuiku seem to reflect both scientific research on nutrition and a nationalist nostalgia for traditional Japanese diet and eating customs.
[0] https://www.med.or.jp/english/journal/pdf/2010_04/259_265.pd...
[1] https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jaih/27/2/27_121/_pdf
[2] https://www.maff.go.jp/e/policies/tech_res/shokuiku.html
Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets
#89Earlier 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…
Gyomu for chickpeas, tahini, real peanut butter and all my frozen vegetables, and then Hanamasa for the bulk meats.. my freezer is basically overflowing 24/7 but its so cheap it feels like daylight robbery haha
Re: Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
IIRC, I've also read that they consider it helpful for allergy season. Japan supposedly has one of the worst allergy seasons in the world due to misguided industrial policy around timber.
TL,DR; After WWII Japan heavily incentivized reforestation to provide cheap domestic timber for industrial and defense purposes, but only with two types of trees, Japanese cedar and Japanese cypress. It turns out that even with this explicit industrial policy, it's cheaper to import timber, so trees weren't being cut down as fast as expected and the forestry industry had a declining workforce that couldn't maintain the forests. The resulting bi-cultural conifer forests grew so thickly that no sunlight reached the forest floor and these forests became devoid of biodiversity. And now all of these trees release a lot of pollen.
10 minute Youtube video explaining all this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC4gRGPbTqE