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Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets

213 points by Vindl 6y ago

marricks 6y ago
Not sure a paywalled article with just a subtitle is a great submission
- Vindl 6y ago
  Oh sorry about that. I didn't notice it since I'm registered and logged in, but I didn't have to pay to read it.
ioseph 6y ago
Paywalled so didn't read TFA but: It's always surprised that the longevity in Japan is often attributed to diet. From my travels there my impression is of a diet that largely consists of rice and various meats and a high consumption of alcohol and cigarettes. Although there definitely seems to be far less sugar in everything. 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])
- arjun-menon 6y ago
  > 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]) This, perhaps, is the key to their longevity. The French have a similar attitude as well (based on my time in France).
  - Avshalom 6y ago
    I dunno https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=obese+adults+vs+life+expectancy https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=obese+adults+vs+life+e... doesn't look to have much of a trend line.
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      plotting significantly poorer and underdeveloped countries against rich countries is rather pointless.
- tasogare 6y ago
  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 tasty is like a full time job. Making foreign dishes is usually even more expensive, and usually hard to even get the ingredients in the first place.
  - tidenly 6y ago
    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.
    - presentation 6y ago
      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 recipes to follow on Cookpad if you can read some Japanese. Also are you going to an expensive supermarket? If you can buy vegetables and fruits from a green grocer (yaoya, 八百屋) or from a cheaper supermarket like Gyomu or Big-A or something, it's much cheaper than buying it from a higher-end grocery like Seijo Ishii or Kinokuniya - like several times cheaper sometimes. I didn't know that when I first came to Japan but point is, it's worth it to do your due diligence and find the cheap groceries just like you would in your home country, Americans have complained about Whole Foods being overpriced since the dawn of time.
      - tasogare 6y ago
        > 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.
- 1-6 6y ago
  In the USA, it's called fat-shaming. In Asian countries, you may feel a little bit shamed if you're overweight. You'll even get less food around the table if you're fat. Societal pressures could be both a curse and a blessing.
  - simplemen 6y ago
    Fat shaming is brutal in Asian countries. If one is fat, they will be bullied or they will need to be bully. I know a Pakistani American obese woman who went to Pakistan for a wedding. Every kid in the neighborhood was calling "moti" auntie which is equalant of fatty. I work with a lot of Indians and they will randomly point out that you have gained weight.
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      There’s plenty of motus in PK last I checked so I don’t know where they get off
- ehnto 6y ago
  A normal home meal is fairly balanced, if you were eating out a lot that isn't a great representation of a normal diet. Also portion sizes are much smaller than the west. 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.
  - presentation 6y ago
    It's more than restaurants choosing to limit it, a straight up ban has gone into effect for the last 9 months now [1] - hence it's much better than before. Not sure how or if it's legal, but some divey spots have managed to get exemptions or are just risking it though - a friend of mine who runs a cafe says that the cafe is classed as some kind of social club so it's not subject to the same ban, but that sounds pretty shakey lol. [1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/04/01/national/japan-ban-indoor-smoking/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/04/01/national/japan-...
- presentation 6y ago
  Re diet: putting aside that alcohol-per-capita consumption here in Japan is less than the OECD average [1], and also how the article is actually about how the introduction of meat into the Japanese diet has caused a decrease in strokes (i.e. this is probably off-topic); it is true that if you are eating out cheaply, you'll likely find lots of rice and meat stuff like gyuudon (beef on rice), katsudon (breaded meat on rice) and what not. 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_alcohol_report/profiles/jpn.pdf?ua=1 https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alco... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr4MmmWQtZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr4MmmWQtZM [3] https://apps.who.int/tobacco/publications/prod_regulation/htps-marketing-monitoring/en/index.html https://apps.who.int/tobacco/publications/prod_regulation/ht...
- ip26 6y ago
  But- is that what the elders (who will be the subject of current longevity studies) are eating? The elders who, I will note, were born in Imperial Japan and not Westernized Japan.
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > From my travels there my impression is of a diet that largely consists of rice and various meats and a high consumption of alcohol and cigarettes. Although there definitely seems to be far less sugar in everything. 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.
- Xixi 6y ago
  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.
  - brian_cunnie 6y ago
    > 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 lipogenesis_. [0] Sugar, the Bitter Truth, Robert Lustig, MD, Endocrinologist at UCSF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
    - Xixi 6y ago
      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.
    - carlmr 6y ago
      The Japanese like to put sugar in a lot of dishes, too, whether inari, omelettes, sushi rice, sauces, etc.
      - presentation 6y ago
        I think the difference is the amount though - the cheesecake I had at the Cheesecake Factory after getting used to Japanese cheesecakes was shockingly sweet.
        6y ago
- T-A 6y ago
  > I had several locals comment that I was a bit fat [my BMI is ~26] "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-26-mean/ https://www.livestrong.com/article/373940-what-does-a-bmi-of...
the_drunkard 6y ago
Subtitle: Japan’s rate of strokes fell during a period when it began eating a bit of meat Article is paywalled, but the subtitle appears to make a correlation between the consumption of meat in Japan and the decline in the rate of strokes. At face value, this seems dubious.
- delhanty 6y ago
  It seems plausible to me. A small amount of meat could fix a vitamin B12 deficiency.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Rhinobird 6y ago
    a small amount. Not the obscene amounts we eat here in America
  - 3131s 6y ago
    Not killing off the bacteria in soil that produce B12 would also help reduce B12 deficiency, a condition that is also common among meat eaters in the US.
spodek 6y ago
Non-paywalled: https://outline.com/BhvmzU https://outline.com/BhvmzU
greenbush 6y ago
Without the paywall: https://outline.com/BhvmzU https://outline.com/BhvmzU
jnord 6y ago
https://archive.is/RYo7L https://archive.is/RYo7L
thick 6y ago
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 through pop diet literature like How Not To Die, Blue Zone, and others, but it's mostly just people trying to push an agenda in one way or another. I just want the facts, in somewhat of plain as English as possible but I don't mind some technical fluff if it will help clarify things. I tend to find in a lot of this sort of literature that the technical fluff is useless to majority of the readership and yet takes up 80%+ of the content, as the authors try to use as many half-baked analogies and metaphors as they can to explain technical concepts that nobody cares about. At the same time, something more substantial than "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants" would be welcome. You know, how does exercise play a part in it. How does ancestry that has also lived to an old age play a part in it. Is it kind of a big deal, or nice to have? How many consecutive generations of people living to 100 does it take before it happens at a regular basis. These sorts of things. Holistic analysis that compares more than just "Wim Hof has slightly more brown fat than most people and that's the reason why he is superhuman" level of nonsense. The latest bit seems to be from longevity research where cold showers and fasting are in vogue again, for the Nth time. Oh, but our company is the only one that provides this one unique test that checks your age biomarkers. We didn't just name drop the company in there for the sake of baiting you into it or anything. Why is it so bloody hard?
- latch 6y ago
  Isn't Okinawa a good place to start? You get two interesting comparisons: Okinawans vs other Japanese during the last century, and Okinawans then vs now. It reduces the number (or at least the scale) of differences so that you can better pinpoint the factors, right?
  - howlgarnish 6y ago
    Interestingly enough, Okinawa has the highest life expectancy in Japan. They also really got the short end of the stick during WW2 though (a third of the civilian population died during the US invasion), so this may be a statistical/survival of the fittest type quirk too, plus the historically the local diet there was fairly different to the rest of the Japan (lots of pork, less seafood, sweet potato/taro instead of rice, chillies, bitter melon, etc).
gos_abhi 6y ago
American people have reduced longevity by eating fast food
- astrange 6y ago
  Fast food burgers are fine if you don’t eat the fries or soda.
  - ReptileMan 6y ago
    And fries and soda are also fine if you are doing hard labor.
    - saiya-jin 6y ago
      This is a common misconception - very few people in the west are actually doing hard labor consistently for such a long time that they would burn enough calories to balance crappy diet full of bad calories like raw sugar in sodas. I mean how many do daily effort on the level of running 1-2 marathons to burn all those calories? If you look around you will see plenty of older manual workers being overweight in the US, and not only there.
    - jay_kyburz 6y ago
      There is not enough labor in the day that can work off a soda.
      - ReptileMan 6y ago
        300 ml of soda is 120 calories. An hour of proper swimming could burn a lot more. And the fast sugar actually helps in those situations.
    - astrange 6y ago
      I’m pretty sure fries are very bad for you in ways you can’t work off. Maybe if you put a bunch of antioxidants in the spice mix.
- 6y ago
handmodel 6y ago
For what it's worth, Asian-Americans in New Jersey (and several other wealthy states) have a higher life expectancy than Japanese people in Japan. Source: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/08/asian-americans-men-in-new-jersey-live-longer-than-high-life-expectancy-hong-kong-women.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/08/asian-americans-men-in...
- deeviant 6y ago
  Probably a bad idea to compare a large data set (people in entire county) with comparatively vastly smaller sample set (Asian-American living in New Jersey).
  - yuy910616 6y ago
    agree. but same logic should apply to japan vs united states.
    - corybrown 6y ago
      Japan is over 125 million people, not exactly a small set and perfectly valid to compare to the US
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  Does this control for wealth? Wealthier individuals have longer lifespans. If the average New Jersey Asian American is wealthier than the average Japanese, that could explain the discrepancy.
- trianglem 6y ago
  Asian American in New Jersey overwhelmingly probably refers to Indians so I don’t think you can compare that to the Japanese directly.
  - handmodel 6y ago
    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 http://www.aafny.org/cic/briefs/newjersey.pdf
29athrowaway 6y ago
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).
- bouncycastle 6y ago
  > Japan is not built around cars. 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!
- euske 6y ago
  > 1) Japan is not built around cars. There are more trains. You get to walk more. 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.
  - bouncycastle 6y ago
    ahh, you beat me to it! Yes, good point about the smaller stomachs. Wikipedia says that "Studies show that there is a correlation between small stature and a longer life expectancy. Individuals of small stature are also more likely to have lower blood pressure and are less likely to acquire cancer." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height So this could be it ;-)
- nullsense 6y ago
  I don't think any of this matters. Its clear if you spend a lot of time in the company of Japanese people they actually prioritise their health and most always opt for sensible choices and restrict themselves when necessary.
panny 6y ago
I thought I'd chime in with something that seems to be overlooked. Japanese have the 80% diet rule. Eat until you are 80% full. Hara hachi bun me. Calorie restriction has been shown to increase lifespan in several different species, https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/calorie-restriction-slows-age-related-epigenetic-changes https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/calorie...
- nullsense 6y ago
  My wife tells me this on a regular basis as I proceed to stuff my face. I never cease to marvel that despite us living in the same household I weigh more than twice what she does.
euske 6y ago
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 they looked into Japan. Small clinics are everywhere and they're always filled with anxious patients because they have a benign stomach pain or something. Physical checkup is mandatory for most companies. I also read that the fear of COVID in Japan is the strongest in the world, despite a relatively low infection/death number here. People are always talking about their health, and so is the national media. If you watch the Japanese TV, you'll also feel sick, simply because there's so much fear! Maybe this is good for public health overall, but I bet there's a certain mental toll.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  Japan wearing face mask 24/7 since the 90s I believe (I wonder if it was all started after the diesel scandal)
  - Torkel 6y ago
    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)
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC4gRGPbTqE
bbarnett 6y ago
Hmm. When I look at the graphs, I see nothing spectacular here, except for one. In all cases, they pretty much mirror every other country, which over time shows gradual declines. That is, except for Cerebrovascular. I have to wonder, what of WWII? 1) Almost every single Japanese city of any size was firebombed, and the cities being mostly wooden, most of those cities burned extensively. https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=217 https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=217 (scroll down a bit for a chart of some of the cities bombed, 50+? More, even?) In fact, the number of deaths from firebombing dwarfed the two nuclear bombs dropped. Now imagine all of that smoke, burning varnish + paint + wood for days or weeks on end. You may think that burning wood is not an issue, but people have died from burning pressure treated wood, as an example, due to the chemicals in it. I don't know what sort of treatments 1940s Japan had in its mostly wooden cities of the time, including buildings 100+ years old, but you can be sure they had something. Pressure treating has been around since the early 1800s, but even staining/coating wood with chemicals to kill pests (insects), is almost a certainty. How does this affect a person's body? There is a lot of talk about diet, and diet is important, but what about creosote, a common preservation agent used on wood at the time? There are all sorts of potential side effects, and as we known from some other conditions, it can take a long time to manifest. https://www.science.gov/topicpages/t/tar+creosote+exposure https://www.science.gov/topicpages/t/tar+creosote+exposure Or, perhaps, damage is done... but does not exhibit itself until old age. Meaning, "near the end", the thing which gets you is "what has been most weakened." 2) Of course, there were the bombs. There were birth defects, raised cancer rates, on and on. 3) People with 'bad outcomes' in those graphs peaking up to the 1970s, would have been 20 to 30 years old or so in the 40s. I guess what I'm saying here is, 20-30 year olds during WWII would show as a peak in graphs during the 70s, potentially. Why do the graphs start right when those who experienced WWII as adults, would be perhaps dying due to the effects of those conditions? Ah well. Just thoughts.
hntrader 6y ago
As a non-expert, the thing that bugs me about the notion that varied diets are ideal is that hunter gatherers often didn't have varied diets. Quite the opposite. Also, having a diet that isn't varied is a way to naturally regulate hunger/ghrelin. I know we don't want to commit the naturalistic fallacy or anything like it, but it does give me pause given how little we know about the microbiome. Presumably, in human evolutionary history, we coevolved with a microbiome that relied on a very homogeneous diet. What is the impact of suddenly having a diet with 50+ food types instead of 5? We already know that this sorta screws up our hunger regulation mechanism, but could there be other deleterious effects? I easily accept that a whole foods diet is ideal, however.
- quietbritishjim 6y ago
  > hunter gatherers often didn't have varied diets 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.
  - hntrader 6y ago
    Did he go through specific examples? The Hadza only eat five foods and have a diet that's significantly less varied that modern society. I'll see if I can find counter-examples. However I will say, even though the Hadza only eat five foods, they eat everything in the animal including the organs, which definitely adds variation.
christiansakai 6y ago
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.
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  It could be something environmental that we haven’t identified yet.
  - andrekandre 6y ago
    maybe high-fruitcose corn syrup?
- anti-shill 6y ago
  What sort of food did you and your wife eat in japan?
baxter001 6y ago
Can't let this pass without the old classic: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1 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 low per capita incomes and a short life expectancy. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.
- haltingproblem 6y ago
  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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- froh 6y ago
  "This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review" also the first comment there (http://disq.us/p/25lpyed 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
tmm84 6y ago
Here's another way of looking at this. After WWII and other events the amount of salt in the Japanese diet had gone down. This reduced all kinds of problems associated with high salt diets. Many things (soy sauce, pickles, dried meat) were staples in Japan since they did not have non salted ways of preserving food (ie: refrigerators). In other words, Japanese may be living longer because the DNA of living harder got passed down (hard labor, high salt diet, low calories and only two meals a day/when available). However, Japanese seem, at least to me, to be getting different diseases. In Japan there is plenty of talk about diabetes, arthritis, alzheimer's, etc. in media and in social circles. To me it seems while the Japanese may be more heart attack/stroke resistant they are getting more Western diet related diseases. Having lived in Japan for almost a decade my view of the Japanese diet is highly biased from what I have seen but I think the stereotype of all Japanese being healthy needs to be based on seeing regular Japanese people eat day in and day out.

213 points by Vindl 6y ago

marricks 6y ago

Not sure a paywalled article with just a subtitle is a great submission

Vindl 6y ago
Oh sorry about that. I didn't notice it since I'm registered and logged in, but I didn't have to pay to read it.

ioseph 6y ago

Paywalled so didn't read TFA but: It's always surprised that the longevity in Japan is often attributed to diet. From my travels there my impression is of a diet that largely consists of rice and various meats and a high consumption of alcohol and cigarettes. Although there definitely seems to be far less sugar in everything. 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])

arjun-menon 6y ago
> 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]) This, perhaps, is the key to their longevity. The French have a similar attitude as well (based on my time in France).
- Avshalom 6y ago
  I dunno https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=obese+adults+vs+life+expectancy https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=obese+adults+vs+life+e... doesn't look to have much of a trend line.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    plotting significantly poorer and underdeveloped countries against rich countries is rather pointless.
tasogare 6y ago
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 tasty is like a full time job. Making foreign dishes is usually even more expensive, and usually hard to even get the ingredients in the first place.
- tidenly 6y ago
  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.
  - presentation 6y ago
    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 recipes to follow on Cookpad if you can read some Japanese. Also are you going to an expensive supermarket? If you can buy vegetables and fruits from a green grocer (yaoya, 八百屋) or from a cheaper supermarket like Gyomu or Big-A or something, it's much cheaper than buying it from a higher-end grocery like Seijo Ishii or Kinokuniya - like several times cheaper sometimes. I didn't know that when I first came to Japan but point is, it's worth it to do your due diligence and find the cheap groceries just like you would in your home country, Americans have complained about Whole Foods being overpriced since the dawn of time.
    - tasogare 6y ago
      > 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.
1-6 6y ago
In the USA, it's called fat-shaming. In Asian countries, you may feel a little bit shamed if you're overweight. You'll even get less food around the table if you're fat. Societal pressures could be both a curse and a blessing.
- simplemen 6y ago
  Fat shaming is brutal in Asian countries. If one is fat, they will be bullied or they will need to be bully. I know a Pakistani American obese woman who went to Pakistan for a wedding. Every kid in the neighborhood was calling "moti" auntie which is equalant of fatty. I work with a lot of Indians and they will randomly point out that you have gained weight.
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    There’s plenty of motus in PK last I checked so I don’t know where they get off
ehnto 6y ago
A normal home meal is fairly balanced, if you were eating out a lot that isn't a great representation of a normal diet. Also portion sizes are much smaller than the west. 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.
- presentation 6y ago
  It's more than restaurants choosing to limit it, a straight up ban has gone into effect for the last 9 months now [1] - hence it's much better than before. Not sure how or if it's legal, but some divey spots have managed to get exemptions or are just risking it though - a friend of mine who runs a cafe says that the cafe is classed as some kind of social club so it's not subject to the same ban, but that sounds pretty shakey lol. [1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/04/01/national/japan-ban-indoor-smoking/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/04/01/national/japan-...
presentation 6y ago
Re diet: putting aside that alcohol-per-capita consumption here in Japan is less than the OECD average [1], and also how the article is actually about how the introduction of meat into the Japanese diet has caused a decrease in strokes (i.e. this is probably off-topic); it is true that if you are eating out cheaply, you'll likely find lots of rice and meat stuff like gyuudon (beef on rice), katsudon (breaded meat on rice) and what not. 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_alcohol_report/profiles/jpn.pdf?ua=1 https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alco... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr4MmmWQtZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr4MmmWQtZM [3] https://apps.who.int/tobacco/publications/prod_regulation/htps-marketing-monitoring/en/index.html https://apps.who.int/tobacco/publications/prod_regulation/ht...
ip26 6y ago
But- is that what the elders (who will be the subject of current longevity studies) are eating? The elders who, I will note, were born in Imperial Japan and not Westernized Japan.
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> From my travels there my impression is of a diet that largely consists of rice and various meats and a high consumption of alcohol and cigarettes. Although there definitely seems to be far less sugar in everything. 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.
Xixi 6y ago
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.
- brian_cunnie 6y ago
  > 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 lipogenesis_. [0] Sugar, the Bitter Truth, Robert Lustig, MD, Endocrinologist at UCSF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
  - Xixi 6y ago
    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.
  - carlmr 6y ago
    The Japanese like to put sugar in a lot of dishes, too, whether inari, omelettes, sushi rice, sauces, etc.
    - presentation 6y ago
      I think the difference is the amount though - the cheesecake I had at the Cheesecake Factory after getting used to Japanese cheesecakes was shockingly sweet.
      - 6y ago
T-A 6y ago
> I had several locals comment that I was a bit fat [my BMI is ~26] "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-26-mean/ https://www.livestrong.com/article/373940-what-does-a-bmi-of...

the_drunkard 6y ago

Subtitle: Japan’s rate of strokes fell during a period when it began eating a bit of meat Article is paywalled, but the subtitle appears to make a correlation between the consumption of meat in Japan and the decline in the rate of strokes. At face value, this seems dubious.

delhanty 6y ago
It seems plausible to me. A small amount of meat could fix a vitamin B12 deficiency.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Rhinobird 6y ago
  a small amount. Not the obscene amounts we eat here in America
- 3131s 6y ago
  Not killing off the bacteria in soil that produce B12 would also help reduce B12 deficiency, a condition that is also common among meat eaters in the US.

spodek 6y ago

Non-paywalled: https://outline.com/BhvmzU https://outline.com/BhvmzU

greenbush 6y ago

Without the paywall: https://outline.com/BhvmzU https://outline.com/BhvmzU

jnord 6y ago

https://archive.is/RYo7L https://archive.is/RYo7L

thick 6y ago

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 through pop diet literature like How Not To Die, Blue Zone, and others, but it's mostly just people trying to push an agenda in one way or another. I just want the facts, in somewhat of plain as English as possible but I don't mind some technical fluff if it will help clarify things. I tend to find in a lot of this sort of literature that the technical fluff is useless to majority of the readership and yet takes up 80%+ of the content, as the authors try to use as many half-baked analogies and metaphors as they can to explain technical concepts that nobody cares about. At the same time, something more substantial than "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants" would be welcome. You know, how does exercise play a part in it. How does ancestry that has also lived to an old age play a part in it. Is it kind of a big deal, or nice to have? How many consecutive generations of people living to 100 does it take before it happens at a regular basis. These sorts of things. Holistic analysis that compares more than just "Wim Hof has slightly more brown fat than most people and that's the reason why he is superhuman" level of nonsense. The latest bit seems to be from longevity research where cold showers and fasting are in vogue again, for the Nth time. Oh, but our company is the only one that provides this one unique test that checks your age biomarkers. We didn't just name drop the company in there for the sake of baiting you into it or anything. Why is it so bloody hard?

latch 6y ago
Isn't Okinawa a good place to start? You get two interesting comparisons: Okinawans vs other Japanese during the last century, and Okinawans then vs now. It reduces the number (or at least the scale) of differences so that you can better pinpoint the factors, right?
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  Interestingly enough, Okinawa has the highest life expectancy in Japan. They also really got the short end of the stick during WW2 though (a third of the civilian population died during the US invasion), so this may be a statistical/survival of the fittest type quirk too, plus the historically the local diet there was fairly different to the rest of the Japan (lots of pork, less seafood, sweet potato/taro instead of rice, chillies, bitter melon, etc).

gos_abhi 6y ago

American people have reduced longevity by eating fast food

astrange 6y ago
Fast food burgers are fine if you don’t eat the fries or soda.
- ReptileMan 6y ago
  And fries and soda are also fine if you are doing hard labor.
  - saiya-jin 6y ago
    This is a common misconception - very few people in the west are actually doing hard labor consistently for such a long time that they would burn enough calories to balance crappy diet full of bad calories like raw sugar in sodas. I mean how many do daily effort on the level of running 1-2 marathons to burn all those calories? If you look around you will see plenty of older manual workers being overweight in the US, and not only there.
  - jay_kyburz 6y ago
    There is not enough labor in the day that can work off a soda.
    - ReptileMan 6y ago
      300 ml of soda is 120 calories. An hour of proper swimming could burn a lot more. And the fast sugar actually helps in those situations.
  - astrange 6y ago
    I’m pretty sure fries are very bad for you in ways you can’t work off. Maybe if you put a bunch of antioxidants in the spice mix.
6y ago

handmodel 6y ago

For what it's worth, Asian-Americans in New Jersey (and several other wealthy states) have a higher life expectancy than Japanese people in Japan. Source: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/08/asian-americans-men-in-new-jersey-live-longer-than-high-life-expectancy-hong-kong-women.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/08/asian-americans-men-in...

deeviant 6y ago
Probably a bad idea to compare a large data set (people in entire county) with comparatively vastly smaller sample set (Asian-American living in New Jersey).
- yuy910616 6y ago
  agree. but same logic should apply to japan vs united states.
  - corybrown 6y ago
    Japan is over 125 million people, not exactly a small set and perfectly valid to compare to the US
HenryKissinger 6y ago
Does this control for wealth? Wealthier individuals have longer lifespans. If the average New Jersey Asian American is wealthier than the average Japanese, that could explain the discrepancy.
trianglem 6y ago
Asian American in New Jersey overwhelmingly probably refers to Indians so I don’t think you can compare that to the Japanese directly.
- handmodel 6y ago
  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 http://www.aafny.org/cic/briefs/newjersey.pdf

29athrowaway 6y ago

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).

bouncycastle 6y ago
> Japan is not built around cars. 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!
euske 6y ago
> 1) Japan is not built around cars. There are more trains. You get to walk more. 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.
- bouncycastle 6y ago
  ahh, you beat me to it! Yes, good point about the smaller stomachs. Wikipedia says that "Studies show that there is a correlation between small stature and a longer life expectancy. Individuals of small stature are also more likely to have lower blood pressure and are less likely to acquire cancer." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height So this could be it ;-)
nullsense 6y ago
I don't think any of this matters. Its clear if you spend a lot of time in the company of Japanese people they actually prioritise their health and most always opt for sensible choices and restrict themselves when necessary.

panny 6y ago

I thought I'd chime in with something that seems to be overlooked. Japanese have the 80% diet rule. Eat until you are 80% full. Hara hachi bun me. Calorie restriction has been shown to increase lifespan in several different species, https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/calorie-restriction-slows-age-related-epigenetic-changes https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/calorie...

nullsense 6y ago
My wife tells me this on a regular basis as I proceed to stuff my face. I never cease to marvel that despite us living in the same household I weigh more than twice what she does.

euske 6y ago

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 they looked into Japan. Small clinics are everywhere and they're always filled with anxious patients because they have a benign stomach pain or something. Physical checkup is mandatory for most companies. I also read that the fear of COVID in Japan is the strongest in the world, despite a relatively low infection/death number here. People are always talking about their health, and so is the national media. If you watch the Japanese TV, you'll also feel sick, simply because there's so much fear! Maybe this is good for public health overall, but I bet there's a certain mental toll.

agumonkey 6y ago
Japan wearing face mask 24/7 since the 90s I believe (I wonder if it was all started after the diesel scandal)
- Torkel 6y ago
  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)
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC4gRGPbTqE

bbarnett 6y ago

Hmm. When I look at the graphs, I see nothing spectacular here, except for one. In all cases, they pretty much mirror every other country, which over time shows gradual declines. That is, except for Cerebrovascular. I have to wonder, what of WWII? 1) Almost every single Japanese city of any size was firebombed, and the cities being mostly wooden, most of those cities burned extensively. https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=217 https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=217 (scroll down a bit for a chart of some of the cities bombed, 50+? More, even?) In fact, the number of deaths from firebombing dwarfed the two nuclear bombs dropped. Now imagine all of that smoke, burning varnish + paint + wood for days or weeks on end. You may think that burning wood is not an issue, but people have died from burning pressure treated wood, as an example, due to the chemicals in it. I don't know what sort of treatments 1940s Japan had in its mostly wooden cities of the time, including buildings 100+ years old, but you can be sure they had something. Pressure treating has been around since the early 1800s, but even staining/coating wood with chemicals to kill pests (insects), is almost a certainty. How does this affect a person's body? There is a lot of talk about diet, and diet is important, but what about creosote, a common preservation agent used on wood at the time? There are all sorts of potential side effects, and as we known from some other conditions, it can take a long time to manifest. https://www.science.gov/topicpages/t/tar+creosote+exposure https://www.science.gov/topicpages/t/tar+creosote+exposure Or, perhaps, damage is done... but does not exhibit itself until old age. Meaning, "near the end", the thing which gets you is "what has been most weakened." 2) Of course, there were the bombs. There were birth defects, raised cancer rates, on and on. 3) People with 'bad outcomes' in those graphs peaking up to the 1970s, would have been 20 to 30 years old or so in the 40s. I guess what I'm saying here is, 20-30 year olds during WWII would show as a peak in graphs during the 70s, potentially. Why do the graphs start right when those who experienced WWII as adults, would be perhaps dying due to the effects of those conditions? Ah well. Just thoughts.

hntrader 6y ago

As a non-expert, the thing that bugs me about the notion that varied diets are ideal is that hunter gatherers often didn't have varied diets. Quite the opposite. Also, having a diet that isn't varied is a way to naturally regulate hunger/ghrelin. I know we don't want to commit the naturalistic fallacy or anything like it, but it does give me pause given how little we know about the microbiome. Presumably, in human evolutionary history, we coevolved with a microbiome that relied on a very homogeneous diet. What is the impact of suddenly having a diet with 50+ food types instead of 5? We already know that this sorta screws up our hunger regulation mechanism, but could there be other deleterious effects? I easily accept that a whole foods diet is ideal, however.

quietbritishjim 6y ago
> hunter gatherers often didn't have varied diets 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.
- hntrader 6y ago
  Did he go through specific examples? The Hadza only eat five foods and have a diet that's significantly less varied that modern society. I'll see if I can find counter-examples. However I will say, even though the Hadza only eat five foods, they eat everything in the animal including the organs, which definitely adds variation.

christiansakai 6y ago

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.

amanaplanacanal 6y ago
It could be something environmental that we haven’t identified yet.
- andrekandre 6y ago
  maybe high-fruitcose corn syrup?
anti-shill 6y ago
What sort of food did you and your wife eat in japan?

baxter001 6y ago

Can't let this pass without the old classic: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1 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 low per capita incomes and a short life expectancy. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.

haltingproblem 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago
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froh 6y ago
"This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review" also the first comment there (http://disq.us/p/25lpyed 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

tmm84 6y ago

Here's another way of looking at this. After WWII and other events the amount of salt in the Japanese diet had gone down. This reduced all kinds of problems associated with high salt diets. Many things (soy sauce, pickles, dried meat) were staples in Japan since they did not have non salted ways of preserving food (ie: refrigerators). In other words, Japanese may be living longer because the DNA of living harder got passed down (hard labor, high salt diet, low calories and only two meals a day/when available). However, Japanese seem, at least to me, to be getting different diseases. In Japan there is plenty of talk about diabetes, arthritis, alzheimer's, etc. in media and in social circles. To me it seems while the Japanese may be more heart attack/stroke resistant they are getting more Western diet related diseases. Having lived in Japan for almost a decade my view of the Japanese diet is highly biased from what I have seen but I think the stereotype of all Japanese being healthy needs to be based on seeing regular Japanese people eat day in and day out.