Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets

In Italy, instead, it is pretty common that every couple of years you get a complete blood analysis just to see if everything is ok and whether you need to change something in your lifestyle.

Additionally, Sardinia (another "blue zone" with great life expectancy) also has a different diet compared to mainland Italy. Loads of seafood and relatively small amounts of livestock proteins.

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

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/

Edit: by health I meant fitness, obviously many people have health issues that they cannot help.

In China, it's even more so. If you're an obese person and many will throw "wow you're fat" and "you should really lose some weight" right in your face.

Although it sounds terrible, most of the time they're more concerned about you rather than trying to hurt you intentionally. But it does make people feel more guilty about being fat or eating high-calorie foods.

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.

I’d expect the former to cause the latter.

It seems better than "body positive" movements telling us that being overweight is "healthy" despite it being pretty common knowledge that it isn't. To me it's the equivalent of saying that smoking a few cigarettes a day is healthy.

Ah, this explains how the rapey, but criminally attractive, bisyounen love interest in my favorite Japanese love fiction always rushes the protagonist to the infirmary in schools at the slightest cough, missing valuable lessons, and at the approval of the teacher, for merely walking their on one's own ambulance would be too much of a risk, if one have recently caughed.

From what I understand, in the U.S.A. and U.K. schools also have an infirmary and a licensed nurse that works there. — here in the Netherlands, no such thing existed, and a simple cough or headache was certainly not a reason to miss lessons.

You mau want to reconsider your sources because having a promotional campaign to enhance travel during the midst of the pandemic has made lots of Japanese travel all over the place in crowds and stack in small restaurants. Does not match at all with a supposed fear of COVID.

I'm trying to weigh this over the model in my country where even in private healthcare the doctors tend to downplay the severity of your ailments.

A friend of mine is currently suffering from multiple afflictions and this is his experience.

I've only ever got roped into unnecessary treatments (only affecting aesthetics really), so it was a surprise for me that even those who have all the incentive to look closely at your problems tend to leave it unless it something that can be done quickly.

If you're very obese, you're costing all other taxpayers a substantial amount of money. You're being careless with your health, and everyone collectively pays for it.

It's socially irresponsibly to be unhealthy.

What are you talking about ? They are filled woth old people most of the time because of the large elderly population in Japan. Most salary men are too busy with their jobs to even take a break from office work which is why the OTC market is so large in Japan to treat various ailments without seeing doctors.

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.

also the first comment there (http://disq.us/p/25lpyed) which I take the liberty to reproduce here:

Greetings,

With all due respect, the allegations in the article, namely, that supercentenarians are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans is false. By the study of the Gerontology Research Group, International Database on Longevity and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research among others, we know that supercentenarians are extremely rare, yet an existent and validated population. The Gerontology Research Group takes the global view on the subject, using stable and defined validation criteria outlined by Dr. Poulain of Belgium in the Supercentenarians monograph (2010). I invite all of you who would like to learn more about the GRG data and its characteristics.

www.grg.org

Sincerely,

Waclaw Jan Kroczek

GRG Administrator for Case Validation Reports

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.

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 conventional knowledge, for example we're pretty much dead-certain that exercise is good for you and time in nature improves your well-being.

     - eat few
     - eat varied
     - move more
     - be with others
     - sleep nice

I sometimes wonder if the right thing for westerners wouldn't just be a big sequence of photos of mid-tier Japanese restaurant food -- like what's served at train stations -- with all the components broken down, along with a description of how a person fits those things together every day to have complete story for food. After going there a few times, I was surprised by how much healthier I ate, and figured out how to reproduce some of the effect back in the United States.

One category of difference with Japanese diet is things that are somewhat healthier at baseline. That is the way Japanese junk food is. A mochi is pounded rice, sugar and beans; and many sweets are actually filled with bean paste. A common kind of savory Japanese snack is grilled seaweed.

Another category of difference is eating the same thing but just in slightly different proportions. It's quite common in the USA that you go somewhere and get a meal and it's literally a piece of meat and a potato. Even at a good restaurant; but especially at less expensive restaurants. This isn't about Japanese food versus other kinds of foods. If you got a German restaurant in Japan (they are somewhat more popular in Japan than in the USA) and you get a plate it will be like three different kinds of sausages (in small sizes) and one or two salads and one or two vegetable items.

This is not due to some kind of technical balancing or something like that; Japanese consumers just demand somewhat more varied food with more vegetables.

There isn't a recipe or some weights or formulas. I just went there for 1-2 weeks at a time 5-6 times and tried a bunch of food and got used to it, came back and then wondered about what I could do differently. Everything that has changed in my diet as a result is entirely a matter of small adjustments -- adding vegetables at certain times of day or something like that -- but I did lose weight and have enjoyed other benefits like no acid reflux, no food coma, &c.

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.

Why is it that the term “western" is so often at some point introduce with some implication some culturally cohesive unit called “the west” exists any time Japan in particular is mentioned somewhere?

I find that very often when this happens, and when attributes of this supposed “western” culture are listed, it seems to mostly mean “The Anglo-Saxon world”, not so much “the west”.

The last time it happened on H.N. where someone complained about a sensationalist “western" article about Japan, it was pointed out that it was posted in a Japanese newspaper, and a translation from an original Japanese article, however sensationalist it might be.

Other than that, yes, there is probably not a single simple rule that governs it but a myriad of factors that contribute with many no doubt also working in the opposite direction, such as Japan's famously stressful workplace life and the high suicide rate of office workers.

A diet of a lot more plants like the Mediterranean diet meant I met all my RDI's, whereas a normal meat and 3 veg, cereal for breakfast western diet didn't - things like vitamin E and so on were a lot easier to get with the Mediterranean diet, though for things like Zinc I had to start eating nuts and so on - something I'd never done much.

It surprised me that the things that seem to stop cancer (according to some studies) were exactly the same things that are more prevalent in the Mediterranean diet, it became a bit of a no brainer. Give it a go (I'm just a happy customer - its free any way with a paid tier)

[1] https://cronometer.com

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).

It takes 100 years to get one data-point. For us to track a person's habit throughout their life that eventually ends up living to 100 years is not an easy or quick task.

And even if you had the best tracking in place, isolating cause and effect given how so many variables are involved is no easy task either.

So instead we have to rely on small experiments, low sample size studies, and studies where variables are hard to isolate.

But there's a lot that's known that's pretty clear, exercice is good, cardio or strength or flexibility, they all seem good. We don't know how much of it is needed, but more doesn't seem to hurt.

Having lower body fat, eating at a slight deficit, that's pretty clear as well.

Cutting out bad nutrients, chemicals, processed foods, etc. That's not totally proven, but at least it helps with weight control, and it definitely doesn't seem to be beneficial, so at best it's neutral at worst harmful.

Pollution of all kinds has negative effects. That's pretty well established. Nothing much you can do about it since about everywhere and everything is polluted it seems nowadays.

Having low stress and good nights of sleep, that seems pretty well established as well.

Genetics, ya genetics for sure. But can't do anything about it so no reason to worry about it.

Now eating good foods also help. There's ton of micro-nutrients with small studies that show benefits. So just make sure you eat plenty of all kind of good micro-nutrients. You'll get the most out of vegetables, legumes, fruits, herbs, seeds, nuts, and all that. Fatty fish are good, and other fish and seafood have some good micro-nutrients as well. Except the larger the fish, the more pollutant it contains, so don't exaggerate either on fish.

Meats are uncertain. At least keep them on the lower side, especially red meat since there might be links with some form of cancers. That said, if you do eat meat, make sure it's grass fed and all, cause meet from grass fed animals have way more good micro-nutrients in them.

Also seems you want to keep your brain active as well, continue to learn new things, helps prevent dementia and other brain degenerative issues.

Apparently good company, having people to laugh and socialize with is good as well, but unsure how much, again it clearly doesn't hurt and might be good.

That's it, but, the sad part of all this, all those things just help a little bit, mostly with quality of life and not that much with longetivity. What has helped the most with longetivity has been modern medicine and surgeries, which is pretty much the single reason why people live longer now then before.

Edit: Oh and it also seems that there are other things that can affect you a lot, like which bacteria and viruses you've been exposed too thorought your life at different stages. Exposure to these can be good or bad depending.

I also forgot good amount of fibers can prevent diverticulitis and other possible digestive issues. Proper levels of vitamins (best if obtained from foods), including D (which is best obtained from the sun). Good hydration (helps some of your organs function). And amortize sugar intake, so you don't spike your blood sugars.

I am by no means an expert (not a great start to a comment I realise), but from what I've read about it (e.g. in Sapiens by Harari) hunter gathers typically did have a diverse diet. In fact it's hard to imagine they wouldn't. For a start, different foods obviously have different availibility with the seasons. And, as the name suggests, there was typically a hunter/gatherer split (along gender lines) and hunting has this very bimodal distribution of getting a big kill that lasts for days or getting nothing at all, so the balance between the two is very variable. As for the content of both what is gathered and what is hunted, that varies a lot due to both natural variation (a natural forest isn't just filled with a single type of tree) and desire for variation. The desire for variation presumably evolved from both the nutritional benefit of having a varied diet and the fragility of relying on a single food source - if you don't learn how to hunt more than one type of animal then you'll end up starving if their numbers dwindle (e.g. because you hunted them too much).

> coevolved with a microbiome that relied on a very homogeneous diet

... so this unlikely to start with.

I think you are right about fitness, in general there is a lot of riding and walking in daily life. Unlike in a lot of the west, where you can go from sitting at home to sitting in your car to sitting at your desk without more than 100m of walking.

I will admit that it's amazing the smoking is rarely mentioned. It's everywhere oh my god, I got head spins from one cafe. Your clothes smell like cigarettes half the time. I think it's getting better, lots of places choose to ban smoking inside now. But it's still pervasive.

This, perhaps, is the key to their longevity.

The French have a similar attitude as well (based on my time in France).

"According to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NIH), a BMI of 26 falls into the overweight range of 25 to 29."

https://www.livestrong.com/article/373940-what-does-a-bmi-of...

Otherwise the Japanese diet is indeed carb heavy (rice, soba and udon), but I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

But a normal Japanese meal generally has a pretty good mix of stuff - some fermented side dishes (tsukemono), some veggies, miso soup, some rice or noodles, some fish, maybe some meat. Perhaps my wife is an outlier, but every meal she's cooked for our household has had at least 3 dishes of different categories as a part of it, and my impression from seeing other households and just looking at a typical bento box, is that that's a pretty normal expectation for any healthy meal. Someone else pointed me to this Youtube video on the topic on a different thread, and I'd say it's pretty accurate [2].

When I go to drinking bars, izakayas, with Japanese people they usually tend to do the same and order a variety of small dishes too - it's not common to just get fried chicken (karaage), but rather people almost always also throw in salty drinking foods (otsumami), which usually include seafood, pickles and vegetables (shiokara, takowasa, various tsukemono and so on). Even then, if someone orders sweets or something, they tend to be a lot less unhealthy than American counterparts (use of less calorific ingredients like adzuki beans or black sesame, compared to a cheesecake or something; and if you did order that cheesecake, it'll be 1/4 the size of what you got at the Cheesecake Factory, and be a whole lot less sweet and rich, as you've pointed out).

It's not straightforward to get a really authentic food experience if you're coming as a tourist who doesn't know locals nor the local food scene well. My first impression was also that it's a ton of rice and meat, but after living here it turns out that that is the case... if you think that Japanese food is all sushi and ramen, and are being sold food to satisfy a standard American tourist, who thinks that anything pickled is gross, anything served cold besides ice cream is disgusting, and that a meal that doesn't include a giant hunk of meat, isn't a meal at all. Get past that, and you'll find that most Japanese people don't eat like that at all.

So yeah, I think diet probably does make a significant difference, as you can tell plainly by how few obese people there are in Japan; and recently the government finally seems to be doing things to reduce tobacco consumption (you can't smoke in most bars and restaurants in Tokyo anymore, when you can it's generally e-cigarettes only, fueling a huge shift to IQOS/other brands e-cigs which have as of 2019 taken over around 16% of the tobacco market [3]; anecdotally it feels like a lot more than that as of 2021 living here).

Re culture: Agreed, here in Japan (and in other parts of Asia too) it's pretty normal for friends to tell you things like, "wow, you got fatter since we last met!" to someone who's much less than 26 on the BMI index. It's not really considered insulting like it is in the West. That said, female Japanese models tend to be insanely skinny, creating an unrealistic concept of beauty - but that's hardly unique to Japan.

[1] https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alco... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr4MmmWQtZM [3] https://apps.who.int/tobacco/publications/prod_regulation/ht...

That really depends on what you eat, donburis are typically their version of fast food, which as you said consists of some basic elements: rice, protein, veg etc... But just consider that the basic tare has extraordinary amounts of sugar, albeit fermented for long periods of time if done correctly. This is critical, so much of their foods are fermented and pickled and I think having a healthy gut biome is far more important to overall physical and mental health that I think is entirely overlooked in so much of Western Medicine. Kombucha is only a recent phenomena in the West, but how long has something like miso shiro been the accompanied soup of choice in set meals (Teishoku). Yakult has been a thing there since the 30s I think, which is also incredibly sweet!

But sugar is present in a lot of things, the tri-fecta of Japanese flavour is building off of shoyu-mirin-sake (mirin being a sweet sake) but dashi and sugar can often be quite as prevalent as bases.

One of my favorite donburis, gyudon, can be overly sugary for my tastes when others make it and I prefer a more savoury feel to accompany the beef, so I use like 5x the amount of onions (ideally Maui ones) and slow sweat/saute to bring out the natural sugars in the onions to mask my rather overly savoury tare: I use quite a lot of kombu and katsubushi/niboshi in my dashis as I like the brinier taste when I cook as I do in my miso soup. You feel more satiated eating smaller portions this way, too and is a hack/trick to reduce over consumption as you tap into the innate metabolic/feedback satiation mechanisms if you're healthy.

But think about it, Teishoku is a very healthy balanced meal and coupled with their active daily lives in and our of cities you get pretty good averages on healthy people. Japan has many Sociological issues (some outright toxic) that I won't go into depth into that impact their image as the 'pinnacle of health' but those are solid baselines.

The issue you raise is well taken, especially for me whose repertoire is Japanese and has an obsession with topics related to food/diet in relation to health and disease.

And it is definitely a multi-variable equation, but I think diet--especially in contrast to the American one so many of us grew up on--and an active lifestyle (car ownership is super expensive and has lots of complications that promote limited ownership as well as logistical issues in big urban cities) really explains most of the observations.

I'd like to nerd out about ichiju-issai, and the history and significance of Kaiseki and trace the origins of the composition and structure of meals in relation to Seasons, but you get what I'm trying to say.

> Culturally it seems that fitness in general is encouraged, combined with a very different attitude toward being overweight (I had several locals comment that I was a bit fat [my BMI is ~26])

In a World where anything even remotely suggesting people's health is being obviously compromised due to excessive consumption (of all things but specifically food in this case) is considered fat shaming, I find it rather refreshing and it's something I too have adopted. It's not trying to be mean, its just a reminder that things related to diet seem to be out of synch and could explain a wide array of maladies and symptoms, which are often brought up as topics of conversation.

I never cease to marvel that despite us living in the same household I weigh more than twice what she does.

This is false. About half of the population lives outside big cities, where you'll need a car to survive. I don't see people's shape changes in the rural areas.

> 2) Food portions are smaller, making it harder to overeat.

I think you got this backward. Food portions are smaller in Japan because people's stomach is smaller. Junk foods are cheap, so it's still easy to overeat.

That's true for Tokyo and some big cities, but not true in the rest of Japan, which is very much built around cars with crumbling public transport.

As for food - lots of fried stuff in Kyushu everywhere you go. I'm thinking it must be the metabolism rather than the diet. However, yes, food portions are small by default. You have to ask "omori" to get the bigger one, and there are even bigger sizes offered sometimes!

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.

A small amount of meat could fix a vitamin B12 deficiency.

The size of dish here is very large.

I moved from Thailand and was surprised how big a Thai dish in US was.

There is some sort of default expectation that a dish needs to be large.

I'm sure that contributes to obesity to some degree.