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)
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)
More (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.
Also 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.
Probably the same reason why people focus so much on diet, and so little on lifestyle.
I’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.
> In other words, it’s way easier to out diet a bad lifestyle than out lifestyle a bad diet,
Depends on the person. If someone is eating such a large caloric excess and consuming highly processed calorie dense foods, changing diet is the only way out. You’re not going to out-exercise a 1000 calorie excess every day.
The average person might only be eating 200-300 calories more than their grandparents did, though. That’s actually within the range where you could overcome it with daily activity.
Really though, this isn’t a situation where you should pick or choose. Most people should be improving their diets and getting a little more activity.
> You’re not going to out-exercise a 1000 calorie excess every day.
I spend 4 hours on my phone every day per recent record. If I spend 2 of those outdoor then I'll have that 1000 calories.
It's realistically a choice.
I know this because I used to average 1500 active calories and around 2 hour of zone 2 training before my baby was born. Now I'm more time squeezed but looking at what I'm doing every day it's still a discipline issue. Getting back there though, goal is cracking 150 miles of running this month.
Its not, your thinking is way to simplistic. Body is not a simple machine. Hormones have dominant role here. Produce more insulin for whatever reason, you can eat whatever and you will be fat. Produce less insulin, you can eat whatever and you will still be lean. Exercise more, have more appetite.
What is unrealistic is caloric deficit, that is unsustainable, not sure why people have such a hard time understanding that. It is never about deficit on the long run.
Gut microbes are only recently being studied as a potential weight gain cause, too.
People having the exact same lifestyle and diet may have very different results.[1]
[1]: The Diet Myth from Dr Tim Spector
Not at all. This is also known for decades. Sterile mice get fat. Low dose antibiotic is used for animal fattening as dominant antibiotic source.
Okay, sure it's been studied for longer but until very recently it wasn't really in the debate—or rather, in the average Joe's mind. Go to a nutritionist and they will tell you to eat less than you consume despite it being much more complex.
So I maintain my point. In fact, most of HN, which I consider educated, probably doesn't know about that. I myself heard about it very recently.
I find HN's general knowledge extremely lacking when nutrition is in question, basically at the level of general population.
You're right that it is fundamentally about caloric deficit and my argument is that you can exercise enough that you can eat essentially as much as you want without gaining any weight.
I'm on double serving most days for breakfast and dinner since I eat 2 meals a day - and insulin wise I think I'm just normal medically speaking.
Your contention regarding diet and out-exercising surplus is generally true but not universal. I am occasionally at one extreme, where for a week or so I'll be expending 7000kcal/day and it's physically impossible to replace that amount of calories even with eating the highest caloric density foods I can stomach.
You allegedly expending 49,000 calories in a week when the discussion is about average people is irrelevant. The post already says it depends on the person too. On the other hand, I am curious how you are possibly exercising that much.
This is why I qualified my experience with being 'occasional.' Basically I do long distance bike races where you're biking for like 18+ hours a day for 2-6 days depending on event. It's an insane thing to do and an insane comparison to make when talking about normal people's diets, but it does illustrate that there is a limit to 'you can't out-exercise the calories.'
Are you running ultras every day?
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
But honestly these sentiments reflect my experience. When I bulk for muscle I will still get 5 miles of walking in daily on top of a cardio/strength workout and manage to still grow.
I've yet to hit a hiking season and gain weight tho, and those are the more interesting data points. Imagine eating 4k calories daily and still losing weight. 8 hours of trotting through mountain passes is a vibe
I think they're saying that diet is easier for people to commit to than going to the gym regularly and other lifestyle changes.
Going 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.
With how car-centric North America is, there isn’t much to walk to for a lot of people. Things are just very far from each other. I’d walk places a whole lot more if I had things at a reasonable walking distance, I used to do it all the time when I didn’t have kids and lived closer to the city. Back then, I sold my car less than a month after moving there, and relied on car sharing services for the odd trip outside of town.
Nowadays, I’m in a medium-sized agricultural town in Canada, not far outside the larger metropolitan area where half the province lives. Realistically, at a walking distance, I have a convenience store, a drugstore, and a small co-op hardware store. The closest grocery store is at least a 30 minute walk. Both my sons’ school and daycare, the closest market or shops I’d go at, they are all 4+ away.
Americans , by the actual numbers of participation, don't actually go to the gym that much -- the ones that do are loud and have a lot of overlap with social media participation.
is radio taiso still a thing? Employee mandated exercise would go over like a lead balloon here.
We have employee mandated exercise in the construction industry in the US, because employers would rather you stretch at the beginning of the day than pay out worker’s comp.
It’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.
There is certainly vanity in Japan, it just looks different in terms of what they prize and how it manifests in cultural spheres like media. https://medium.com/japonica-publication/japans-toxic-beauty-...
Psychotic as usual. Oh well, what are you gonna do.
Or: diet is eaiser to commit to than going to the gym and going to the gym is easier than convincing your neighbours & city council to allow any sort of change to American style land use patterns that prevent destinations being within walkabout distances and destroy the profitability of transit.
It’s not, my mom moved in and I brought her on short daily walks. She lost 70 pounds in one year.
> In other words, it’s way easier to out diet a bad lifestyle than out lifestyle a bad diet.
It's almost as if both are important, but people tend to over simply and focus and be reductive and think if they just eat enough goji berries, they'll live forever.
While diet is obviously essential to a long life, it is not sufficient. There is a mountain of evidence that regular cardiovascular exercise is a pretty essential part of keeping your body working, as well as your mind.
What do you mean by "lifestyle" here?
Ima guess they mainly mean exercise, but also sleep.
Personally I obsessed about diet for a decade before I finally got religion about running for 30+ mins every day coming up on 2 years ago(I now typically run for more like an hour). It has made far more of an impact on my well being than any diet or fasting regimen… which, mind you,I was extremely strict about, like eating disorder levels of obsession. It has also made catching quality sleep a complete non-issue. I won’t lie, it took many months of consistency to feel these benefits, and I personally didn’t really see them when I was doing cardio only 3 times/120mins total per week on a bike and resistance training. My understanding is that this is probably a result of metabolic adaptation. Much the way I learned that the bacteria in your gut is a culture you grow and maintain, happy gut = happy me, I now think of my muscle mass as a crucial metabolic organ that needs to be properly conditioned for my bodies energy systems to function properly. Strong metabolism = little metabolic waste accumulating in your tissues and more of the machinery your body needs to work.
Unfortunately we live in a society where you have to make this a lifestyle, I personally find I have to keep my run very high on my list of personal priorities to stay consistent, as it is rather disruptive to my day. I have reflected that a lot of that is around cultural norms, so if this sort of routine was much more normalized it would be easier to integrate socially while still maintaining it. Sweaty people are only really annoying if you aren’t sweating with them. With how much sharper, more energetic, and emotionally regulated I feel, it amazes me that more employers don’t incentivize it-maybe someday.
That said, I’m in my mid 30s and I’ve never felt better in my life, so I’d say it’s worth while. I feel strong, faster, and much more durable, with virtually no pain and less illness/infection/inflammation than I had even in HS. Meanwhile my contemporaries are complaining of back and knee pain, frequent illness, poor sleep, dietary intolerance and out of control and appetite. They say, “I’m getting old” and I just shake my head.
I know it’s cliche as hell to say we were born to run, but seriously, our species almost certainly has an evolutionary legacy of running a lot, and I think many of us can tap into that legacy if we so desire.
dieting is a part of your lifestyle, and has one of the largest impacts. Assuming you aren't a chronic smoker of course.
If 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.
As 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.
This, plus yearly mandated healthchecks with huge pressure and shame on excessive weight.
Are 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.
If 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.
I can't tell if you are speaking from experience or not. I tried googling about this company wide competition and cant find any hits about this, searched "lets fitness" in english and Japanese, cant find anything.
High blood pressure is a medical condition, and you are telling me that a suggestion from the doctor regarding stress levels at work is bad?
And kids, cmon. Kids will make fun of anything. I did some schooling in the US and I was made fun of purely for being of a particular race.
Oh, I see. You're not actually Japanese.
applause fantastic conclusion
None of these are even remotely unique or attributable to Japan. You can find them anywhere in the developed world.
Is 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.
Ah yes, the food we eat at home (my wife is Japanese) is quite different from a lot of the food you get when you eat out. And we use way less salt at home, and there are no additives unlike the pre-made ramen kits bought in shops. Lots and lots of fresh vegetables and other fresh food.
>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
> 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.
Agree. Hyper-partisanship has Americans on both sides believing any decision they don’t make for themselves is against their interests.
I 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.
The 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=ygUsZ...
North 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.
> North America is a car captured hellscape
Have you been to North America? Or have you been outside North America?
Of course I've done both.
The 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.
I 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?
I'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).
The 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.
>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.
They have vending machines with hot pizza! I’d be in big trouble there.
We 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.
We 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.
What 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.
By 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.
Isn't it just affordable access to high quality healthcare services?
No, it's the opposite - an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of a cure. Not getting sick in the first place is way better in every way than trying to fix the damage.
Unlikely that health care drives the population’s daily food choices and caloric intake.
Because 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.
Because 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.
It 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.
Because 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.
Probably 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.
Mainly because most Americans don't want to eat a (real) asian diet, unlike Mediterranean style food.
What would that diet consist of?
Mostly vegetables, sizable amount of seafood, and rice (if we speak of coastal east asia generically)
That sounds like my Greek diet!
Does the Greek diet consist of flavourless plain white rice?
We eat plenty of rice in Spain, but not white like East Asians do...
Usually short grain white rice, but it's mixed in food. Things like stuffed peppers and tomatoes or stuffed grape leaves. Not a plain side dish.
Okinawan (“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”.
I thought this was established that the med diet had no effect and was merely correlated with genetics in blue zones?
Everybody loves the Mediterranean, right? It has just the right mix of “down to Earth,” and sophistication.
Where's the sophistication? It's mostly vegetables.
It´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.
> 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.
It'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
Anything 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.
I would go and say that good ramen have lot more elements than Neapolitan pizza. And those elements are more complex.
Let us not conflate sophistication with number of ingredientes.
One of the most refined food I know is classic French omlette with just two ingredients, eggs and butter.
I don't say the Japanese lack refinement (sushi is one example of this), still there are a lot of complex Italian dishes as well.
I just mean the general vibe, it is a very popular region.
Are we to believe only one or the other contains the key or is very healthy?