5 ms·

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 di

by 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...

by ioseph 6y ago

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...