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I wonder why nearly all the focus in the US on healthy diets is on the Mediterranean diet and not the Japanese one... (Greece commits a lot of pension fraud to
by sleigh-bells 1y ago
I wonder why nearly all the focus in the US on healthy diets is on the Mediterranean diet and not the Japanese one...
(Greece commits a lot of pension fraud too)
- ninetyninenine 1y agoIf you been to Japan, access to unhealthy food is extraordinarily easy. There’s so much bad food everywhere along with good food. So in short food itself from Japan is not generically healthy… it’s the choices that Japanese people make within this environment that are healthy.
- tetris11 1y agoIsn't it just affordable access to high quality healthcare services?
- zdw 1y agoI think this is mostly a social/societal thing - at an early age in schools they tell kids that they should only eat until they're 80% full. And there's substantial social pressure and bullying of anyone considered even mildly overweight. Also, most people have a lot of walking/biking built into their daily schedule, especially in larger cities where having a car is impractical. This all means that while there is a huge amount of sweets and fatty food, it's usually eaten in moderation, and people get exercise in their daily lives to work it off.
- bobthepanda 1y agoThe public school food system also encourages healthy eating, and also general societal responsibility since children are the ones responsible for serving and cleaning up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fze5s1SlqB8&t=1188s&pp=ygUsZWxlbWVudGFyeSBzY2hvb2wgbHVuY2ggamFwYW4gd2hlcmUgaSdtIGZyb20%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fze5s1SlqB8&t=1188s&pp=ygUsZ...
- adrianN 1y agoThe Mediterranean diet is pretty much nothing like people in the Mediterranean eat today either. Very old people had a radically different diet during most of their life.
- prerok 1y agoI might be missing something but AFAIK that is not true. I live adjacent to the Mediterranean and I still see folks eating at home what is considered their diet. Can you elaborate what you meant?
- stavros 1y agoI'm Greek, and we cook what my mom used to cook, which is what my grandma used to cook. It's something like "meat once a week, fish twice, vegetables the rest". My favorite dishes are peas, beans, lentils, and I don't tend to like steak much, for example. If we do use meat, we use it in dishes with lots of vegetables, e.g. stuffed zucchini with rice and mincemeat (though the mincemeat is optional).
- adrianN 1y agoThe old diet had very little meat for example. The modern diet has meals daily that would be eaten on special occasions only a few generations ago. My great grandmother for example fed her family (more than ten people!) on one pig and a couple of chicken per year. Now the meat consumption in her home country is nearly seventy kilograms per person.
- Aurornis 1y ago> it’s the choices that Japanese people make within this environment that are healthy This is a difficult truth for a lot of people to accept because it’s so much easier to blame invisible factors that are poorly understood: Microplastics, xenoesteogens, microbiome, trace lithium in the water supply, or the other trendy excuses. In some cultures moderating your eating and controlling your weight comes with very high societal pressure. Everyone sees this from a young age and internalizes it. It’s hard to communicate how strong this pressure is and it gets lost when you only look at studies about the food supply.
- eagerpace 1y agoAgree. Hyper-partisanship has Americans on both sides believing any decision they don’t make for themselves is against their interests.
- wanderer_79 1y agoAs a Japanese, I will also mention that what you see out to eat in Japan is not exactly what we eat at home traditionally. I doubt many would know about all the multitude of traditional dishes that my mom regularly made at home that one would typically not go out to eat, such as hijiki salad (ひじきの煮物) or kinpira gobo (きんぴらごぼう). These and others are the types of dishes that remind me of home (and not tamago-sandos and ramen). My mom emphasized eating things of different colors, which came in the form of assortments of various types of vegetables. Also, portion sizes in America are huge.
- evidencetamper 1y agoThis, plus yearly mandated healthchecks with huge pressure and shame on excessive weight.
- pezezin 1y agoIs that true? I live in Japan and maybe my company is different, because we don't get that pressure and shame. My health check reports show a warning sign in the weight/BMI area, and that's it. Plenty of chubby and overweight people in my office too, and nobody shames them.
- wanderer_79 1y agoAre you speaking from experience? Because this sounds like the typical sensationalization of all things Japanese which permeates even this website. Compared to western culture, people in Japan may be more forward about commenting on your weight (as is also common in some other East Asian cultures), but I wouldn't call it "huge pressure and shame". As to the health exam, you may get some consultation and recommendations if your measurements show you are overweight, but it doesn't turn into some draconian process shaming you into losing the weight. I'm Japanese and never heard about such thing.
- evidencetamper 1y agoIf you never heard about the weight maintenance company wide competitions (let's fitness!), the labor doctor telling you that it might be difficult for you to handle stressful management work with high blood pressure, the kids saying that they were laughed at because their dad is fat... You're blessed.
- damontal 1y agoThey have vending machines with hot pizza! I’d be in big trouble there.
- prerok 1y agoWe have them in Europe too. Creates a pizza from scratch (well, ok, the dough is preprepared) in about 5 minutes. Never tried it, though, but folks tell me it's ok.
- krapp 1y agoWe have them in the US too. Weirdly the one I used when I was in school was an A&W branded machine, which I only ever associated with root beer.
- Tiktaalik 1y agoNorth America is a car captured hellscape where so many people have zero options but to sit in a car to get everywhere they want to go. Meanwhile in Japan and so many other regions in Europe that are pointed to as healthier people have the option to simply walk to do so many of their daily tasks. No real surprise that the regions where people have to actively work harder to be active are in poorer health than others where being active is the default easiest choice. The built environment is a critical thing here we can fix to make a healthier society.
- carlosjobim 1y ago> North America is a car captured hellscape Have you been to North America? Or have you been outside North America?
- Tiktaalik 1y agoOf course I've done both.
- Barrin92 1y ago>it’s the choices that Japanese people make within this environment that are healthy. Precisely that they don't need to make choices due to their environment is what makes the difference. In the US and EU people love their individualism, spend a gazillion on fitness interventions and most people are overweight, it's probably the most visible sign of the importance of culture. As Russ Ackoff said, the correct way to address problems is not to solve them, but to dissolve them. Not to fix individual issues but to create conditions under which they do not occur. The best way to lose weight is actually to move to a place that's full of thin people, not "do" anything. It's funny that the reverse is common wisdom, everyone who moves to an unhealthy place will always proclaim how they gained 20 pounds immediately
- Mawr 1y agoWhat a horrible post, missing the entire point by a mile and worse yet, misguiding everyone about the most basic facts :( I assume you're from a western society, so I can't possibly imagine how you could have possibly reached such a conclusion. The contrast should be obvious at first glance. The default Japanese diet is greatly more healthy than the default western diet, especially the American diet. As a person living in the west and willing to put in some of my limited effort into eating healthy, I'm screwed. There's barely any healthy options available, I'm flooded by an ocean of awful food and it takes significant effort and cost not to drown in it. I can't emphasize this enough, it absolutely does not matter what you can technically do or not. Defaults are what matters. By default in Japan you eat a reasonably healthy diet and walk/bike regularly. By default in America you eat fast food and drive everywhere.
- majkinetor 1y agoBy American standard, basically anything is more healthy, so that is not really a good point. Do you think Italians, French, Spain or Serbians have worse food than Japan - they do not. Researchers thought it was something in red vine, then something in blue cheese, then olive oil, then fish, etc. Maybe its about so much Iodine, that is specific to Japan. I doubt its pristine environment and unique genetics.
- firefax 1y ago>If you been to Japan, access to unhealthy food is extraordinarily easy. But so is healthy food. Imagine saying "I ate nothing but 7/11 food for two days and I feel the best I have in years" in America. Where I'd be having a hot dog or pizza I was having onigiri. Small things like that add up. And yes, they do walk a lot -- I spent a whole evening just walking around Shinjuku in awe of the place.
- PUSH_AX 1y agoAre we to believe only one or the other contains the key or is very healthy?
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoProbably the same reason why people focus so much on diet, and so little on lifestyle.
- buzzerbetrayed 1y agoI’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at, but if you’re referring to weight, diet is significantly more important than lifestyle. In other words, it’s way easier to out diet a bad lifestyle than out lifestyle a bad diet, if your goal is to not be overweight. Obviously that doesn’t apply to all health metrics.
- water-data-dude 1y agoI think they're saying that diet is easier for people to commit to than going to the gym regularly and other lifestyle changes.
- bobthepanda 1y agoGoing to the gym regularly is a strictly American thing. Americans are obsessed with gym culture in a way that other countries generally aren't. Most exercise in Japan takes the form of constant walking. You can walk from most homes to stores and restaurants, from many homes to train stations, from many workplaces to train stations, etc. For many Americans, the most walking they do is the walk from the door to the car. It's substantially easier to build up a lot of time exercising by just walking as part of the things you do in daily life; a dedicated workout is generally only about 45-90 minutes. And the people going to the gym in Japan are also participating in all that walking, generally.
- ivape 1y agoIt’s because America is built on insecurity. You never know if you’re rich enough, smart enough, skinny enough, pretty enough … I wonder what anyone in Japan can say of the state of vanity over there. Is it relegated to an age ranges or genders, or is it beginning to pollute the culture entirely like in America? My opinion is that Japan’s primary sin is pride and not necessarily vanity.
- gedy 1y agoMainly because most Americans don't want to eat a (real) asian diet, unlike Mediterranean style food.
- bee_rider 1y agoEverybody loves the Mediterranean, right? It has just the right mix of “down to Earth,” and sophistication.
- epolanski 1y agoWhere's the sophistication? It's mostly vegetables.
- alkyon 1y agoIt´s like saying that the Japanse diet is mostly about rice and ramen. I find a lot of sophistication in Italian cooking, especially accompanied by a good wine. The problem is that in the US Italian food is mostly some fastfood abomination that is not really what is eaten in Italy.
- epolanski 1y ago> I find a lot of sophistication in Italian cooking, especially accompanied by a good wine. You can find sophistication in ramen too. But Italian cuisine revolves mostly around very simple dishes with little preparations (including the most famous pasta or pizza) and in our every day life we eat lots of vegetables, often raw. Other cuisines in Europe are generally require way more steps/preparations/ingredients.
- alkyon 1y agoIt's easier to prepare ramen than pizza IMO. Even if ingredients are simple, you need a lot of skill to make a good Neapolitan pizza. Risotto is even harder for various reasons. And what about Sartù di riso? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sart%C3%B9_di_riso https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sart%C3%B9_di_riso
- epolanski 1y agoAnything requiring skills may require a lifetime to be perfected, that includes making a burger. But that doesn't make dishes or a cuisine sophisticated per se. To me sophistication requires knowledge and mastery even if you need to make a very basic and the result is not good, think of a beef Welligton or roast beef or a soup d'onion. Those are all much more complex dishes than making a pizza, they require more work, more ingredients, more time, more preparations.
- odiroot 1y agoBecause it's not about diet, at least not mostly. It's about societal pressure. There's plenty of unhealthy easily accessible food even in Japan.
- dfxm12 1y agoMore (many more?) of us are familiar with and have familial connections with the Mediterranean. We also have easier access to, say, olive oil than pickled plums. Remember, the goal of marketing a diet is selling books. Books telling you to find, prepare and eat seaweed are a harder sell than books telling you to eat ingredients you're probably already cooking with (but maybe in different quantities) and use tools and techniques you're already familiar with.
- bobthepanda 1y agoAlso we have a much longer tradition of western European cooking on a pedestal. Asian recipes really only start showing up in American media in the 90s, and blew up in a serious way in the 2010s. Japan in particular is not food self sufficient and has a declining agricultural production so is not spending as much money on convincing people to export food. Plus technically a lot of Japanese food is not grown or caught in Japan and so can be made elsewhere using the same recipes.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoI thought this was established that the med diet had no effect and was merely correlated with genetics in blue zones?
- matusp 1y agoBecause it's easier to emulate Mediterrean diet as all the ingredients are more likely to be accessible? Japanese cuisine has a lot of funky ingredients that are not really produced outside of Japan or East Asia.
- Theodores 1y agoIt all comes down to the work of Ancel Keys. He was the guy that got American soldiers to eat the right rations during the war and did all the research into what diets led to the best outcomes. In his recommendations to the government (after the President had a heart attack), he could have gone with what folks were eating in Okinawa, but this was just after the war when Americans didn't have a lot of love for Japan. Hence the Mediterranean Diet was the recommendation. Chris MacAskill is the source of my understanding of this and his Viva Longevity YT channel.
- andrewmcwatters 1y agoBecause a Japanese breakfast of rice and fish, and a lunch of rice and fish, and a dinner of... you guessed it, rice and fish isn't appealing, and fish itself distributed across the contiguous US lends to poor and narrow selection. I'm partly exaggerating on Japanese meals, but not by much.
- Klonoar 1y agoOkinawan (“blue zone”) is technically a different cuisine, or subset depending on how you choose to view it, of Japanese cuisine. It’s not like you can just blanket label it “Japanese diet”.
- dheera 1y agoProbably because Mediterranean ingredients are accessible to most of the US, a but you're pretty much out of luck making Japanese food unless you live near one of the major cities of the US. Japanese food is probably also an unacquired taste to many.