Hacker News Reader

Comment by yutopia | Hacker News Reader

After years of experimentation, lately I’ve decided that eating like my grandparents (i.e., eating like a traditional Japanese) is the easiest way to keep myself lean and healthy.

Traditional Japanese meals follow a standard format [1]: a bowl of rice, several small sides (which can change by the day), and an optional cup of miso soup. Sticking to this format every day can be boring, but it keeps my diet reasonably balanced without the need for conscious efforts like counting calories (which I'm too lazy to continue long-term).

[1] https://elemental.medium.com/ichiju-sansai-how-to-construct-...

I think in modern cities we have too much freedom with regard to what we eat, which is great of course but the downside is that we’ve lost a great deal of local culinary tradition, and along with it intuitive understandings of what is and what isn’t healthy eating.

View on HN

> the downside is that we’ve lost a great deal of local culinary tradition

I don't think we've lost anything; it's just that, in an era of cheap economies of scale from mass-production, artisanal anything (including artisanal cooking) is going to cost more—possibly enough to put most "authentic" / "traditional" cuisine out of reach of the working class, unless they're willing to make it themselves. (And who has the time for that?)

If you live in a city, look through restaurant reviews for a couple minutes and you'll probably be able to find a dozen local places in your own neighbourhood that have been open for 80 years or more, keeping up the tradition of serving the same food, the same way, that they always have. The only thing that such places have changed between then and now, are their prices.

Not sure where you live but I have never lived in a city with a dozen restaurants with an 80+ year history with the same way of traditional food prep/ingredients. Restaurants have exceptionally short lives as it is a brutal industry, and supply chains have absolutely changed over 80 years.

The funny thing is that eating rice isn't even that old of a tradition, and neither is eating it in polished, white form. White rice only became ubiquitous when milling technology improved, and spoilage of the oils in brown rice became a concern for storage.

> Despite its long history in Japan rice was, for a long time, a food reserved for the warriors and the nobility. It was consumed by the majority of the population only from the seventeenth century onwards, not becoming the basis of Japanese food until the early twentieth century

https://www.japan-experience.com/to-know/chopsticks-at-the-r...

> A disproportionate share of the rice crop was therefore consumed in the cities and by the political and economic elite, while the diet of much of the rural population continued to depend on the availability of a range of other grains – wheat, millet, barley, etc. – together with vegetables, fruit, pulses and occasional fish or game, grown at home or collected in the locality.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0955580070133003...

I currently work for a company that makes glucose monitors for people with diabetes, but we (non-diabetic) employees sometimes get to try the products out.

As far as I'm aware, all the current medical literature states to avoid simple carbs (like white rice) to prevent insulin spikes, and to eat things like whole grain breads instead. But, we noticed that this seems to only be true for people of European descent - my Asian co-workers were able to process white rice just fine. Which kind of makes sense - East Asian people eat a ton of rice, and yet they're thin.

This is all purely anecdotal of course, and I'm not a doctor, but we do know that different ethnicities process food differently (e.g. lactose), and it's not so hard to imagine that our current dietary recommendations might be a bit skewed, because the people in the datasets are mostly of European ancestry.

I've read elsewhere that East Asians are more prone to diabetes than are other ethnicities. A quick google search for "east asian diabetes" yields links for higher risk, with diabetes occurring at lower BMI values. Also, the nature of diabetes type II appears to be different [2].

1. https://www.clinicalcorrelations.org/2018/11/30/how-diabetes...

2. https://asiandiabetesprevention.org/what-is-diabetes/why-are...

Genetic nutrition optimization is a really interesting topic related to this. There are many other differences related to our genetics that impact how we process food.

That's a good point, I cook my rice with all kinds of millet, barley, and seeds mixed in. My grandparents would probably think that's backwards, why would I eat barley when I could afford white rice.

But it's supposedly healthier (there's a famous story about how eating too much white rice crippled the Japanese navy [1]), and personally I think it tastes better too.

[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e...

I honestly don't know how my grandparents ate. Between their generation and my parents', a lot of traditional food knowledge was lost. My maternal grandmother made all sorts of things from scratch--but I can't recall my mom making anything that didn't come in a box or a can.

I've had great success losing weight and keeping it off with food logging (shout out to Cronometer, the best food logging app I've used), trying to adhere to a keto diet, and time-restricted feeding (18 hours fasted, 6 eating). If I tried to do an ancestral diet instead, I'd fail primarily from ignorance of just what that might be. (Also, I'm from the southern US, so it's not like that ancestral diet is necessarily good for me anyway.)

As a practical matter, does 4 bowls and 2 plates per person, and preparing 4-5 different dishes, every day have a huge overhead in preparation, cooking and washing up?

Not really, I’m not cooking anything remotely fancy and we have all sorts of technology to help us nowadays.

For example, cooking rice is simply a matter of putting rice and water into the cooker and pressing a button [1]. In the past we needed to first rinse the rice by hand.

[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2009/04/16/reference/no-wa...

Rice in USA is often enriched but it's a trade off whether you should wash it these days given the amount of arsenic in rice growing soils.

This is very informative.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com