This is about those aged over 100, not 110 which is a completely different ballpark...
Besides that, all my relatives lived close to 100 and they certainly hadn't a healthy lifestyle nor are they japanese nor had they access to the current medical breakthroughs. I assume the secret is mostly genetics and it
is easy for me to see how 100k are aged over 100 in Japan.
My maternal grandparents are currently 98 and 96 and the last time I visited them grandpa said that his father didn't live to age 60.
Meanwhile he has an older sister who, while bedridden, is very much alive at 100.
I suppose the necessary medical breakthroughs happened in the second half of the 20th century, as no one, including the people in question, anticipated they would live this long. Grandma even stated in her will that my second oldest cousin would inherit the apartment - supposedly to have "a better start in life when she grows up". That was 30 years ago and my cousin's oldest child should be in high school now right now.
That, but also various factors during one's life - most importantly, ample and healthy food (especially during fetal growth, childhood and youth), a lack of exposure to known damaging factors for physical and mental health (smog, noise, tobacco, alcohol and other drugs), and a lack of wars and other forms of violence.
The top killers in the Western world are cardiovascular diseases (strongly linked to food) and cancers (strongly linked, again, to food but also to drugs). A safe working culture (both in business and in private) is also a good thing to have - the typical lackluster attitude towards workplace safety is a top cause of workplace accidents both fatal and non-fatal but serious.
I worked with a manager that looked after the mainframe and he always told me to never assume. Assuming genetics is the assumption with nutrition and health, with this not always being helpful. Regardless of our genetics, what we eat and how we move can always move the needle on our health outcomes.
Ancel Keys and his work on diet and longevity is pertinent to this article. He discovered that the people that lived the longest had a low saturated fat plant-based diet. This was to be found in the 'blue zones' around the world. This does not mean exclusively vegan, but getting that way.
Keys had to make some recommendations to the U.S. government and he went for the Mediterranean Diet rather than what they were eating in Okinawa. This was because the Second World War was fresh in people's memories at the time and telling Americans to eat like Japanese people was not going to be well-received advice at the time.
The Japanese diet has changed since the post-war years with the processed foods, animal products and saturated fats rather than what you might call a peasant diet. It is also the same with the Mediterranean Diet, which is not 'pizza, pasta, red wine and meat from imprisoned animals'.
Also important is that most Japanese live in walkable neighbourhoods. Japan is a cycling nation so cycling happens too, not this lycra + polystyrene hat cycling from the parking lot and back to the parking lot that passes for cycling in the West, but everyday cycling on bicycles that are designed for comfort and getting about in regular clothes.
We all like our fat, sugar, salt and motor cars, however, those that were deprived from these joys due to war do well in the longevity stakes.
The actual traditional Japanese food consists of obscene amount of carbohydrates taken with pickles flavored salt with little to no protein or fat intakes. The role of carbs and proteins is switched from a stereotypical European dinner, a meal is about how to deal with the grains. This naturally shortens body heights and take diabetics out of family lines. This had changed massively owing to Westernization of diet and had reduced stroke(brain and heart) deaths even as recent as last ~30 years.
This is apparently weird even to Chinese people; an image of ramen with rice and roast dumplings on sides amounts to a ragebait to them(as well as to experts in cardiovascular systems), while it's nothing more than a common lunch menu to students and young workers in Japan.
But I digress - my point is, the real traditional Japanese meal is more like half a football worth of rice with vegetable flavored salt, quite unlike idealized modern interpretations thereof.
Otherwise correct, but the real real traditional Japanese diet was barley (mugi), millet (kibi/hie) and sorghum (awa), not just white rice, which was an unaffordable luxury for many peasants.
It is true that rice was always the prestige food consumed by the upper classes, and the peasantry ate rice too, but it was only one of the five staples (gokoku) and was often extended with other grains (mugigohan etc).
Mugi/awa/hie were untracked substitutes for rice. Medieval Japanese warlords mainly collected taxes in form of bags of rice, and ignored other crops. So peasants mixed those grains into rice at varying ratios of up to 100% depending on local and yearly yields. That doesn't mean those grains were culturally considered defaults.
Your pdf is mostly about the 1870s and later. (Although it does mention the Tokugawa period, which began in 1603, it seems to do so for quite tangential reason.)
In contrast, people in East Asia started cultivating rice 9,000 years ago, and modern Japanese are probably mostly descended from these early rice farmers (who started out in China, then spread to Korea and then Japan) with a substantial contribution from another population called Jomon, which were already in Japan when the heavily-rice-dependent people started to arrive in Japan about 2,300 years ago and who lived mostly by hunting and gathering.
This is relevant because some people here are advocating for everyone to adopt a Japanese-like diet, which might not turn out so well for you unless most your ancestors have 8,000 or 9,000 years of experience getting most of their calories from grains.
We're not really disagreeing here? But wet paddy rice farming requires flat land, which in mountainous Japan is in notably short supply, so they planted other crops too.
This parallels China, where the warm, wet south is rice country but the colder, drier north grows other grains. The five grains (gokoku) idea is itself originally Chinese:
That's pretty close. If I had to sum it up in one word, it would be: trains.
Car culture makes Americans fat and lazy. 40% of US adults are obese. 80% are overweight.
Walking and good food, yeah, that helps. But trains introduce short sprints into everyday life. It starts with "He's too late, he's never gonna catch it... well I'll be damned, he did it." and pretty soon, you're saying "We can catch it, just run!" Everyone on the train has a shopping bag, because trains don't have huge trunks like a car. You want groceries? Carry it. Good exercise. Trains also remove the road rage from your life, the daily stress of defensive driving in a fast moving freeway full of other angry drivers. Trains eliminate the premature death caused by road accidents which not only lower life expectancy directly, but indirectly as bread winners are taken from families. The car exhaust is gone too. Trains reshape how towns are built, with higher density and less parking. More walking! Everything mushrooms out from the decision to travel with trains. It's little wonder why Japan has the lowest obesity rate in the world.
I don't disagree, but to add I think the retirement culture probably helps a lot for longevity too.
The Japanese retirement attitude is "I've worked my ass off all my life. Contributing to the society all my life. Finally I have some time to spend on my hobbies! I should be active!" and they pick up quite active hobbies: if you go hiking mountains you'll see many old retired people with serious gears. Also still trains.
Contrast it to ime, western retirement which is more "finally I can relax" and people become sedentary. Hanging around in parks, cafe, or focus more on socializing and diet. And starts to rely more on cars and other senior services.
Yes. My Japanese wife’s father and mine are the same age. FIL had a heart attack last year and almost died. Yet he’s still the president of the rotary club, travels every two weeks across the country to attend events or give lectures. Recently hosted an international student exchange at his workshop and is still making new pieces of art to be exhibited.
My father spends all day watching football or horses and has visibly started going senile.
Feels like a much more likely explanation. Heard my parents talk a lot about people who retire, make their primary activity be vegging out, and then health issues start popping up. Japanese also seem to have a big culture of everyone needing to have hobbies.
The answer to that should be fairly obvious after Iryna Zarutska and Emily Carlson happened so recently. American and Japanese trains are not qualitatively the same. Vagrants and solicitors wander the local trains here like it is their asylum. Amtrak is a lot safer since they have conductors checking tickets, but that is still very loud and unruly.
If you'd like a more direct comparison to Japan, try Hong Kong, another place where I have spent a fair amount of time riding the trains. They also have world leading life expectancy.
Life expectancy in NYC is 82.6 vs 78.4 overall for USA. Lots of variables and such, but NYC must be doing something better than the rest of the country and I wouldn't doubt trains (and walkability) are a contributing factor.
I recently had an experience where I needed to do physical labor about 16 hours a day for two weeks, at the same time there was hardly any time to eat so I had to eat very small and simple meals. At the end of the two weeks I felt amazing.
Be careful with that feeling and don't underfuel, or at least keep it at "sane" levels. I feel pretty amazing and full after 62km/2700mD+ XCMs as well, as an extreme example... which is at least partially due to the immune system (and resp. inflammation/etc) being suppressed. Long, light/moderate efforts without adequate food intake and rest can lead to the same thing.
Stress hormones. Read up on cortisol's effects. XCM - cross country marathon (MTB race). 2700mD+ - 2.7km of vertical gain. A reduction of inflammation is a general effect of anti-inflammatory drugs, which tend to make you feel better. There's a LOT more than that (i.e. say, all the things that fall under the umbrella of "runner's high"), but the TL:DR is that significant physical activity / energy expenditure, combined with a lack of proper rest & nutrition leads to long-term undesirable effects that can definitely be masked and/or disregarded.
Did a major house cleaning a few years ago, got me out of the chair and the couch for a couple of weeks. Probably not as intense as your experience but I definitely felt better and was more flexible for about a month afterwards.
Lifespan genetics research is all over the place, partly because it is hard to get adequate statistics. There's currently a new preprint paper by Shenhar et al. that suggests life expectancy is actually heavily influenced by genetics if you account for the confounding factors correctly.
Many diseases that shorten lives have increased chances due to genetics from Alzheimer’s to diabetes or some heart diseases(the leading cause of death) .
While longer lives may not be directly inheritable, shorter lives absolutely can be, good genetics does play a role to living long .
Seems like something similar could still be a problem here, although it seems less likely since the number here is significantly less than article I've linked.
Can't speak for the one you're replying to, but when it's just about the age of 100 it's not particularly difficult to verify. Take my great-grandfather, for example, who died at nearly 100. I have photos with him and my father, when the latter was a child, and I've seen photos of my father from his whole lifespan of course. I have photos of my great-grandfather from way way back in time, with references (including newspaper articles with photos). And so on and so forth. There's no way his birth certificate and church records could have been faked. And that actually goes for my great-great-grandfather too.
On my mother's side, I was a little boy when I met my great-great grandmother who was already 90, and witnessed her living to, guess what, nearing that other age mentioned. And, again, there are records and photos going way back to when she was born.
At an old people's home nearby I got to know a gentleman for some years, he died this year at 99. Again there are records in numerous places documenting his age and where and when he was born (and he grew up nearby my grandfather's place). And at that same old people's home there's a vital lady who's 105, and, again, unless you believe all public documents and church records are fake, she's as real as it gets. She has a daughter who visits, she's in her seventies. That daughter has children of her own, and her children also have children.
It's when you get to all the 115-120 year olds in remote regions you start to see the fakes. And it's not difficult to spot when you look, the statistics are all skewed - unlike in places like most of Japan, just to get back to the original story.
But nobody is doubting that these people exist, or saying that their documents were faked maliciously. Back in my grandparents' time, they had a child, then a few years later they went to register the child, the clerk asked "how old is she?" and they said "7 or 8" when she was 11, for example.
My grandmother never knew her birthday, or her birth year. We just estimated, even though she was very much real.
Depends on where you live, I suppose. I know a lot about how it was done back as far as my great-greats and sometimes older, because the church records are meticulous and written with a lot of comments, and notes if there's been any kind of delays. And never would a child be registered years after birth.
It definitely depends where you live. My great grandparents wouldn't make the day's trek down the mountain to the city and sleep in the open just to register a child.
I don't doubt that the people you mentioning are the age they say they are, but even when there are multiple documents verifying somebody's age, they all take get data from a single original document. Apart from this I see things the same way as you've detailed.
The thing is - what I'm talking about is _not_ coming from a single original document. Yes, the birth certificate is a single document, but there's other documentation where children are mentioned. I looked up everything I could find about the 99 year old gentleman I mentioned, and because of certain "interesting" things about two of his grandparents the family had been traced by multiple sources before and through his birth.
Newspapers were around, and photos too. The situation is different now than when people claimed to be extremely old back when the rage about super old people in certain east-European / west Asian regions began. Now we're talking about people born way into the 20th century, which means that for many regions in the world there aren't many options to fake it.
They are not within 10% of each other when you consider human mortality rates.
Ie if you live to 100, you do not have 10% chance of living to 110.
Eg this study says:
"Three percent of females and 1% of males in the 2019 birth cohort, given age-specific mortality rates in that year, are projected to survive to 100 years old. Only 0.4% of females and 0.09% of males will survive to 105 years which is 10 times rarer than survival to 100. Survival to 110 years is 150 times rarer for females and 333 times rarer for males (0.02% for females, 0.003% for males) than living to 100. "
A link to the paper on biorxiv[0], Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud. A bit of the abstract:
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, England, and France, which have more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by poverty, low per capita incomes, shorter life expectancy, higher crime rates, worse health, higher deprivation, fewer 90+ year olds, and residence in remote, overseas, and colonial territories. In England and France, higher old-age poverty rates alone predict more than half of the regional variation in attaining a remarkable age. Only 18% of ‘exhaustively’ validated supercentenarians have a birth certificate, falling to zero percent in the USA, and supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on days divisible by five: a pattern indicative of widespread fraud and error. 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.
I also found an interview with the author [1], which had some choice quotes, one that popped out to me,
For example, Costa Rica, 42% of the centenarians in Costa Rica turned out to be lying about their age after the study was conducted. And once you corrected those errors, they went from world leading to, quote, near the bottom of the pack, in terms of late life expectancy. And so the question I have for those researchers is how do you explain that, for example, 82% of Japanese centenarians were missing or dead in your sample? And this wasn't discovered by demographers. This was discovered by the government of Japan.
After reading a couple of articles on fraud or just sloppy record keeping almost always behind centenarians, now I'm extremely skeptical on claims of people having past 100 years of age.
While there are a few people who seemed to be nearly immortal, as in "being around since forever", like the Queen Of England or recently deceased https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Iliescu ... they didn't actually push past 100.
With all the care and life standard, seems to be a hard limit in our genes, so until something is done about that, better get realistic expectations.
My grandfather made it to 98, but holy cow he was frail. The last few years of his life he couldn’t move much. Shuffle walked only a few inches. Drooled on every meal in front of him. I loved my grandfather but watching him in that state, we were all relieved for him when he passed.
He smoked only during WW2, was an army corp of engineers colonel when he retired from the military, came from a dirt farm in Michigan, engineered all kinds of civil and military projects. In the end, he still managed to engineer a smile. He absolutely loved maps/atlases/GIS.
My wife grandmother made it to 102 and when she died (from an infection)it was a surprise as she was still very active and was walking everyday. Genetics and luck play also a big role.
I knew a woman that had 101 years when she died. She was vital until 99 or so, not even wearing glasses. She had a very hard life, including the fact that both her husband, only son died. So, I guess, luck is out of question for this case.
Its anybodies guess why she was living that long. Genetics for sure do not exist in vacuum and environment may activate or do nothing to your genes. You can also brute force specific genetic dissorders by taking copious amounts of vitamins.
> I'm extremely skeptical on claims of people having past 100 years of age.
People do live past 100.
Look at a chart of how old people are when they die and you’ll see a consistent distribution with a downward curve. There really are people in the tail of that curve.
There is no hard cutoff in the body that can precisely track time passed over 36,500 days and then shut it all down.
Not only are random people on the internet and a few select media outlets aware of the problem, but governments are also aware. Since the problem is costing governments money, usually in the form of retirement benefits, they have been working to eliminate the problem. In fact some governments have been working reducing and eliminating the problem for decades.
Probably but stats aside there certainly are a lot of very old people in Japan living near-normal lives compared to other developed countries.
After an hour in any town and I'd seen more 95+yos walking about than 10 years in Britain. And the number of times I saw 4 generations of men from one family in the bathhouse!
When there's money to be made from dead relatives, and an incentive for governments to make it look like people live beyond 100 so that they can claim superiority, yeah, that's a good recipe for massive fraud.
Anecdotal, but living in Japan now and I do eat much healthier and walk way more than I ever did. Sometimes it's just for fun since the city I live in is walkable, but also my commute to work involves at least an hour of walking to and from stations which I have gotten used to.
As others have mentioned, social pressure plays a role in fitness, but there definitely is an abundance of unhealthy food. A previous generation may have had less unhealthy food options, so I'd be interested to see if this trend continues. All the greasy fast food chains exist here too and they are always packed.
Funny that you say it, but I think Japan doesn't eat any healthier than the average European country. Coming from the USA, I can see how the conclusion might change.
I come from a country that isn't well-known for its cuisine but live quite long lives, but I still gained (and lost when I left) about 7kg when I lived there.
Nothing about their high-sugar, high-sodium, no-fruits diet seemed particularly healthy.
Okinawans eat very differently than people who live in Tokyo, I guess.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Okinawa, Japan is famously one of the world's five "blue zones" and much ink has been expended on figuring out why. Bitter gourd or certain types of seaweed, perhaps?
What's less often discussed is that it's also Japan's poorest prefecture to this day, with spotty record keeping since it was effectively a Japanese colony (it was previously the Ryukyu Kingdom, which was annexed by Japan in 1879). Vast slabs of the main island were razed to the ground during the WW2 Battle of Okinawa and much of the civilian population simply starved to death.
I remember a paper from last year in which they are suggesting that basically Blue Zones are made just by a combination of clerical error and pension fraud: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3
I actually lived in Japan for 2+ mths , ate like how I ate more than what I ate in Singapore , literally lost 5kg. I was remote working there but do travel out and walk during weekends.
I actually miss the dirty oil fried food from Singapore , it’s much nicer when it’s greasy. Japan cooking oil is very clean , food quality is much higher too, less processed.
Traveling somewhere where you walk more and then losing weight is such a common story that it has become a meme.
People also don’t accurately judge how much they eat. The portion sizes were likely smaller and the food composition was different than what you ate in Singapore, even if you thought you were eating the same. A lot has been written arguing about hidden factors in food, but in actual studies it always comes down to eating fewer calories. Eating less calorie dense foods and smaller portion sizes will do it. Even the GLP-1 studies revealed that the magic of their weight loss is directly proportional to reduction of calories eaten, even if patients eat exactly the same foods (but in smaller quantities or less frequently)
* You can use cheaper types that are nothing but omega 6
* You can heat them too high for their smoke point
* They can oxidize and go rancid
* You can use an enormous amount of it
Likely one of the main reasons a lot of restaurant food may not settle as well as home cooking. But in principle a restaurant could do the reverse of these four points.
The two most common oils in Japan are canola and soybean, and that's also historically been the case, not a modern change. They definitely do not believe there's anything wrong with seed oils.
> The two most common oils in Japan are canola and soybean, and that's also historically been the case
Umm, canola oil has only been available since the 70s. Even rapeseed oil has only been used since the 50s (it is toxic and unpalatable without modern industrial processing, as are many seed oils).
Mustard oil is traditional and still very common cooking oil in South Asia that is even higher in erucic acid than rapeseed. People have used high erucic acid seed as good for a long time.
How fast is "pretty fast"? I assume that most restaurants change their fryer oil at a max once per week. And after cooking, the (underlying) food is more likely to spoil before the oil on the food going rancid.
You should assume the worst. Even if oils are not smelly, they can be spoiled and nobody will give a damn at the restaurant.
Fast like you use it once or twice, it goes rancid.
I witnessed restaurants in the Meditterian that keep oils on the tables for salads, and they are rancid due to hot temperatures.
Cook on coconut oil or palm oil, they are the most stable ones. If you go with plant oils, use olive oil as it seets in between poly and saturated oils.
Huh, I actually thought this particular piece of woo had mostly died out at this point; haven't heard much about it for a few years.
I'd vaguely assumed that it was bored anti vaxers looking for a new Big Bad, but apparently it was Joe Rogan in 2020. Per Google Trends, it seems to have peaked early 2025, which is _much_ later than I thought. Maybe this is a consequence of dumping twitter; I'm missing out on important Oil Discourse.
Well, if you are going to stay open for long, you had better not use rancid oil! Let's ignore that concern for now, as it generally applies to all food products.
"seed oil" -- What is this nonsense that I keep hearing about on social media? Literally, RFK Jr. (US Secretary of Health) says (amoung other crazy things) that seed oils are "poisoning Americans". Is there any peer-reviewed science behind this "seed oil is bad for you" movement? I have not seen it. Also, Japan uses a wide variety of cooking oil. Probably, olive oil is the least used (only in southern European restaurants). I guess that soybean, canola, peanut, cotton seed, rice bran, and sesame seed oil are the most common oils here -- pretty similar to most of the highly developed world (except rice bran and sesame seed).
Google tells me that soybean, canola, peanut, cotton seed, and sesame seed oil are all considered "seed oils".
"high and long temperatures on polyunsaturaded oils": Japan eats more fried food that people realise, but the portion size is quite small. As I understand, to fry food, you need to have a pool of it that is constantly heated to cooking temperature. That seems to qualify as "high and long temperatures". In fact, wouldn't all fried food suffer from the same? I don't understand the science behind this comment. Can you explain it to me like I'm five? (Other people may be interested to learn more.)
Final small thing: It is best to avoid the term "Japs" in English. It has a historical discriminatory meaning in the United States.
I love how the common consensus in comments here is not "what should we do in our societies to increase the number of old people in good health?" but "they're lying".
Rejecting bad data is part of what we should do to get people healthy. This isn't a controlled scientific study, it's just a news article about a government supplied statistic with a lot of unsubstantiated claims as to why.
Because the places where everyone lives to 200, are also the places devastated by war or full of corruption.
It's like how every asylum seeker in the uk is born 1st of january. It's not because they're born 1st of january, it's because they burned their documents in order to illegally migrate. But if you took that at face value, you'd assume that afghanistan only ever births people on the 1st of january.
We have really good family records dating back hundreds of years. What stands out to me is the number of my ancestors who regularly lived into their 80s or 90s 500 years ago. At the same time it's very easy to see that entire branches of the family were wiped out, probably by basic things like Flu, IE: when you see a bunch of young people in their teens or 20s die within a short timeframe, that's the most likely explanation. I'm just a layperson, but it certainly feels intuitive to say that physical work like they did (avoid cardiovascular disease), probably minimal non-processed food diet, and a whole lot of serious luck when it came to avoiding disease and especially childhood maladies, is probably what worked. Sure it's anecdata, but it seems very consistent across many generations.
I believe Japan has a different concept of retirement than America; I can't speak for other Western cultures. More elderly people work low-paying part-time jobs to remain members of society, in addition to their financial needs. Americans tend to work in retirement out of financial needs, while idealizing not working during retirement.
However, when officials went to congratulate him on his 111th birthday, they found his 30-year-old remains, raising concerns that the welfare system is being exploited by dishonest relatives.
> More than 230,000 elderly people in Japan who are listed as being aged 100 or over are unaccounted for, officials said following a nationwide inquiry.
NHK, the Japanese national broadcaster, has a bunch of programs that highlight small businesses across the country with owner/operators, many of whom who work well beyond the traditional retirement age. It's pretty common to see people in their 70's & 80's running a family business or working at one. These small business owners often have had entire careers elsewhere then come back to the family business for a second career in retirement age. Being the third/fourth/fifth generation owner of a small business is very common in these shows and not one has ever said it's the Omega 3's in their diet keeping them going.
There might have been some event in the late 1940s that might effect the statistics of that time. Unsubstantiated claim but might be worth some research.
Just aiming for length rather than quality of life may not be the best idea, but usually people aiming for a long life are also aiming to be healthy as long as possible.
At least if you're alive, you've probably got the option to end it if you make that decision, but once you're dead that's it (not allowing for reincarnation).
I like the idea of healthspan instead of lifespan. I’m happy to keep going as long I’m healthy. When the good times are over and everyday is “please end me” day, I hope I don’t linger for too long.
Rather die straight up in my 70s or 80s with a quick death VS be 100+ and not be able to do shit and watch as my body slowly falls apart and starts failing me.
> Japan is such a high trust society I would be shocked if this is the reason
Trust works both ways. There's also the trust that nobody will report anyone for the fraud, especially if it is widespread and normalized.
However, it would not surprise me if Japan actually did have high life expectancy rates because several other statistics seem to correlate with that, including low obesity, and universal access to healthcare.
I don't remember the source, but worldwide, most really old people have a couple things in common. First is that they live in countries with some kind of pension plan. Second, they generally come from poor neighborhoods where all the people around them statistically have lower lifespans.
Related, perhaps?
The secret to living to 110? Bad record-keeping, says Ig Nobel Prize winner.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2024/12/25/lifestyle/lifes...
This is about those aged over 100, not 110 which is a completely different ballpark... Besides that, all my relatives lived close to 100 and they certainly hadn't a healthy lifestyle nor are they japanese nor had they access to the current medical breakthroughs. I assume the secret is mostly genetics and it is easy for me to see how 100k are aged over 100 in Japan.
My maternal grandparents are currently 98 and 96 and the last time I visited them grandpa said that his father didn't live to age 60.
Meanwhile he has an older sister who, while bedridden, is very much alive at 100.
I suppose the necessary medical breakthroughs happened in the second half of the 20th century, as no one, including the people in question, anticipated they would live this long. Grandma even stated in her will that my second oldest cousin would inherit the apartment - supposedly to have "a better start in life when she grows up". That was 30 years ago and my cousin's oldest child should be in high school now right now.
> I assume the secret is mostly genetics
That, but also various factors during one's life - most importantly, ample and healthy food (especially during fetal growth, childhood and youth), a lack of exposure to known damaging factors for physical and mental health (smog, noise, tobacco, alcohol and other drugs), and a lack of wars and other forms of violence.
The top killers in the Western world are cardiovascular diseases (strongly linked to food) and cancers (strongly linked, again, to food but also to drugs). A safe working culture (both in business and in private) is also a good thing to have - the typical lackluster attitude towards workplace safety is a top cause of workplace accidents both fatal and non-fatal but serious.
I worked with a manager that looked after the mainframe and he always told me to never assume. Assuming genetics is the assumption with nutrition and health, with this not always being helpful. Regardless of our genetics, what we eat and how we move can always move the needle on our health outcomes.
Ancel Keys and his work on diet and longevity is pertinent to this article. He discovered that the people that lived the longest had a low saturated fat plant-based diet. This was to be found in the 'blue zones' around the world. This does not mean exclusively vegan, but getting that way.
Keys had to make some recommendations to the U.S. government and he went for the Mediterranean Diet rather than what they were eating in Okinawa. This was because the Second World War was fresh in people's memories at the time and telling Americans to eat like Japanese people was not going to be well-received advice at the time.
The Japanese diet has changed since the post-war years with the processed foods, animal products and saturated fats rather than what you might call a peasant diet. It is also the same with the Mediterranean Diet, which is not 'pizza, pasta, red wine and meat from imprisoned animals'.
Also important is that most Japanese live in walkable neighbourhoods. Japan is a cycling nation so cycling happens too, not this lycra + polystyrene hat cycling from the parking lot and back to the parking lot that passes for cycling in the West, but everyday cycling on bicycles that are designed for comfort and getting about in regular clothes.
We all like our fat, sugar, salt and motor cars, however, those that were deprived from these joys due to war do well in the longevity stakes.
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1 in 3 Japanese smoke. That's down from 2 in 3 about 30 years ago.
I can tell you very easily why Japanese live longer than Americans, since I have spent abundant time in Japan.
You can tell easily while entire scientific commune is still guessing? Epic.
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A guess from a random commenter is probably going to be more accurate than the food science academic community, when you consider their track record.
I suspect two things, low-calorie diets consisting predominantly of fresh foods and vegetables. And active lifestyle.
It is unreal how much a good diet and walking everyday will change your entire life.
The actual traditional Japanese food consists of obscene amount of carbohydrates taken with pickles flavored salt with little to no protein or fat intakes. The role of carbs and proteins is switched from a stereotypical European dinner, a meal is about how to deal with the grains. This naturally shortens body heights and take diabetics out of family lines. This had changed massively owing to Westernization of diet and had reduced stroke(brain and heart) deaths even as recent as last ~30 years.
This is apparently weird even to Chinese people; an image of ramen with rice and roast dumplings on sides amounts to a ragebait to them(as well as to experts in cardiovascular systems), while it's nothing more than a common lunch menu to students and young workers in Japan.
But I digress - my point is, the real traditional Japanese meal is more like half a football worth of rice with vegetable flavored salt, quite unlike idealized modern interpretations thereof.
Otherwise correct, but the real real traditional Japanese diet was barley (mugi), millet (kibi/hie) and sorghum (awa), not just white rice, which was an unaffordable luxury for many peasants.
The article also mentions that 60 years ago, Japan had the lowest proportion of 100+ year olds.
Gemini disagrees with this.
Try an actual source: https://2024.sci-hub.se/1147/ff0abbc773b295a97bc927b98dcaed9...
It is true that rice was always the prestige food consumed by the upper classes, and the peasantry ate rice too, but it was only one of the five staples (gokoku) and was often extended with other grains (mugigohan etc).
Mugi/awa/hie were untracked substitutes for rice. Medieval Japanese warlords mainly collected taxes in form of bags of rice, and ignored other crops. So peasants mixed those grains into rice at varying ratios of up to 100% depending on local and yearly yields. That doesn't mean those grains were culturally considered defaults.
Your pdf is mostly about the 1870s and later. (Although it does mention the Tokugawa period, which began in 1603, it seems to do so for quite tangential reason.)
In contrast, people in East Asia started cultivating rice 9,000 years ago, and modern Japanese are probably mostly descended from these early rice farmers (who started out in China, then spread to Korea and then Japan) with a substantial contribution from another population called Jomon, which were already in Japan when the heavily-rice-dependent people started to arrive in Japan about 2,300 years ago and who lived mostly by hunting and gathering.
This is relevant because some people here are advocating for everyone to adopt a Japanese-like diet, which might not turn out so well for you unless most your ancestors have 8,000 or 9,000 years of experience getting most of their calories from grains.
We're not really disagreeing here? But wet paddy rice farming requires flat land, which in mountainous Japan is in notably short supply, so they planted other crops too.
This parallels China, where the warm, wet south is rice country but the colder, drier north grows other grains. The five grains (gokoku) idea is itself originally Chinese:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Grains
Gemini thinks there are two "g"s in "guava" as of two weeks ago when I tested it.
That's pretty close. If I had to sum it up in one word, it would be: trains.
Car culture makes Americans fat and lazy. 40% of US adults are obese. 80% are overweight.
Walking and good food, yeah, that helps. But trains introduce short sprints into everyday life. It starts with "He's too late, he's never gonna catch it... well I'll be damned, he did it." and pretty soon, you're saying "We can catch it, just run!" Everyone on the train has a shopping bag, because trains don't have huge trunks like a car. You want groceries? Carry it. Good exercise. Trains also remove the road rage from your life, the daily stress of defensive driving in a fast moving freeway full of other angry drivers. Trains eliminate the premature death caused by road accidents which not only lower life expectancy directly, but indirectly as bread winners are taken from families. The car exhaust is gone too. Trains reshape how towns are built, with higher density and less parking. More walking! Everything mushrooms out from the decision to travel with trains. It's little wonder why Japan has the lowest obesity rate in the world.
I don't disagree, but to add I think the retirement culture probably helps a lot for longevity too.
The Japanese retirement attitude is "I've worked my ass off all my life. Contributing to the society all my life. Finally I have some time to spend on my hobbies! I should be active!" and they pick up quite active hobbies: if you go hiking mountains you'll see many old retired people with serious gears. Also still trains.
Contrast it to ime, western retirement which is more "finally I can relax" and people become sedentary. Hanging around in parks, cafe, or focus more on socializing and diet. And starts to rely more on cars and other senior services.
Yes. My Japanese wife’s father and mine are the same age. FIL had a heart attack last year and almost died. Yet he’s still the president of the rotary club, travels every two weeks across the country to attend events or give lectures. Recently hosted an international student exchange at his workshop and is still making new pieces of art to be exhibited.
My father spends all day watching football or horses and has visibly started going senile.
Feels like a much more likely explanation. Heard my parents talk a lot about people who retire, make their primary activity be vegging out, and then health issues start popping up. Japanese also seem to have a big culture of everyone needing to have hobbies.
Germany is rather like that. Never try to keep up with a German granny going up a hillside.
By this logic wouldn't people in nyc, London, Washington dc, and Paris be living extra long?
The answer to that should be fairly obvious after Iryna Zarutska and Emily Carlson happened so recently. American and Japanese trains are not qualitatively the same. Vagrants and solicitors wander the local trains here like it is their asylum. Amtrak is a lot safer since they have conductors checking tickets, but that is still very loud and unruly.
If you'd like a more direct comparison to Japan, try Hong Kong, another place where I have spent a fair amount of time riding the trains. They also have world leading life expectancy.
Life expectancy in NYC is 82.6 vs 78.4 overall for USA. Lots of variables and such, but NYC must be doing something better than the rest of the country and I wouldn't doubt trains (and walkability) are a contributing factor.
I recently had an experience where I needed to do physical labor about 16 hours a day for two weeks, at the same time there was hardly any time to eat so I had to eat very small and simple meals. At the end of the two weeks I felt amazing.
Be careful with that feeling and don't underfuel, or at least keep it at "sane" levels. I feel pretty amazing and full after 62km/2700mD+ XCMs as well, as an extreme example... which is at least partially due to the immune system (and resp. inflammation/etc) being suppressed. Long, light/moderate efforts without adequate food intake and rest can lead to the same thing.
What are XCMs? 2700mD? Why would the immune system being suppressed make you feel good? I’m so confused
Stress hormones. Read up on cortisol's effects. XCM - cross country marathon (MTB race). 2700mD+ - 2.7km of vertical gain. A reduction of inflammation is a general effect of anti-inflammatory drugs, which tend to make you feel better. There's a LOT more than that (i.e. say, all the things that fall under the umbrella of "runner's high"), but the TL:DR is that significant physical activity / energy expenditure, combined with a lack of proper rest & nutrition leads to long-term undesirable effects that can definitely be masked and/or disregarded.
I fugure XCM must be cross country marathon, where 62km is the distance. But what is mD? Difference in elevation in meters?
I have no idea what you wrote and you shouldn't assume people know some niece jargon.
Did a major house cleaning a few years ago, got me out of the chair and the couch for a couple of weeks. Probably not as intense as your experience but I definitely felt better and was more flexible for about a month afterwards.
I think this works well for relatively short bursts, but if you made it a regular habit your body would start to break down after a year or two.
Japanese food is not actually so great, especially nowadays - lots of carbs for one. Good Japanese food is not so different from Mediatorial.
I'm no food historian/scientist, but I'm pretty sure the Japanese have been eating rice, which is a carb, even longer than has been a Japan.
> I assume the secret is mostly genetics
In Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal he mentions that research shows that long life is not particularly heritable.
Lifespan genetics research is all over the place, partly because it is hard to get adequate statistics. There's currently a new preprint paper by Shenhar et al. that suggests life expectancy is actually heavily influenced by genetics if you account for the confounding factors correctly.
Many diseases that shorten lives have increased chances due to genetics from Alzheimer’s to diabetes or some heart diseases(the leading cause of death) .
While longer lives may not be directly inheritable, shorter lives absolutely can be, good genetics does play a role to living long .
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11258071
Seems like something similar could still be a problem here, although it seems less likely since the number here is significantly less than article I've linked.
> I assume the secret is mostly genetics
Obligatory mention of how genetics and early nurture and environment cannot be separated in research: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/looking-in-the-cultu...
> Besides that, all my relatives lived close to 100
Were you there when they were born, so that you can verify their true age?
Can't speak for the one you're replying to, but when it's just about the age of 100 it's not particularly difficult to verify. Take my great-grandfather, for example, who died at nearly 100. I have photos with him and my father, when the latter was a child, and I've seen photos of my father from his whole lifespan of course. I have photos of my great-grandfather from way way back in time, with references (including newspaper articles with photos). And so on and so forth. There's no way his birth certificate and church records could have been faked. And that actually goes for my great-great-grandfather too.
On my mother's side, I was a little boy when I met my great-great grandmother who was already 90, and witnessed her living to, guess what, nearing that other age mentioned. And, again, there are records and photos going way back to when she was born.
At an old people's home nearby I got to know a gentleman for some years, he died this year at 99. Again there are records in numerous places documenting his age and where and when he was born (and he grew up nearby my grandfather's place). And at that same old people's home there's a vital lady who's 105, and, again, unless you believe all public documents and church records are fake, she's as real as it gets. She has a daughter who visits, she's in her seventies. That daughter has children of her own, and her children also have children.
It's when you get to all the 115-120 year olds in remote regions you start to see the fakes. And it's not difficult to spot when you look, the statistics are all skewed - unlike in places like most of Japan, just to get back to the original story.
But nobody is doubting that these people exist, or saying that their documents were faked maliciously. Back in my grandparents' time, they had a child, then a few years later they went to register the child, the clerk asked "how old is she?" and they said "7 or 8" when she was 11, for example.
My grandmother never knew her birthday, or her birth year. We just estimated, even though she was very much real.
Depends on where you live, I suppose. I know a lot about how it was done back as far as my great-greats and sometimes older, because the church records are meticulous and written with a lot of comments, and notes if there's been any kind of delays. And never would a child be registered years after birth.
It definitely depends where you live. My great grandparents wouldn't make the day's trek down the mountain to the city and sleep in the open just to register a child.
I don't doubt that the people you mentioning are the age they say they are, but even when there are multiple documents verifying somebody's age, they all take get data from a single original document. Apart from this I see things the same way as you've detailed.
The thing is - what I'm talking about is _not_ coming from a single original document. Yes, the birth certificate is a single document, but there's other documentation where children are mentioned. I looked up everything I could find about the 99 year old gentleman I mentioned, and because of certain "interesting" things about two of his grandparents the family had been traced by multiple sources before and through his birth. Newspapers were around, and photos too. The situation is different now than when people claimed to be extremely old back when the rage about super old people in certain east-European / west Asian regions began. Now we're talking about people born way into the 20th century, which means that for many regions in the world there aren't many options to fake it.
> This is about those aged over 100, not 110 which is a completely different ballpark
Is this some kind of new math? 100 and 110 are within 10% of each other, which seems very much in the same ballpark to me.
They are not within 10% of each other when you consider human mortality rates.
Ie if you live to 100, you do not have 10% chance of living to 110.
Eg this study says:
"Three percent of females and 1% of males in the 2019 birth cohort, given age-specific mortality rates in that year, are projected to survive to 100 years old. Only 0.4% of females and 0.09% of males will survive to 105 years which is 10 times rarer than survival to 100. Survival to 110 years is 150 times rarer for females and 333 times rarer for males (0.02% for females, 0.003% for males) than living to 100. "
https://www.bumc.bu.edu/centenarian/statistics/
Your chance of dying is roughly 50% per year in that range.
2^10 = three orders of magnitude difference in survival
The chance of dying is not linear with age.
The linked BBC article devotes the last quarter of text to this. Don't assume they're taking all statistics at face value.
the problem is presenting a headline as fact, rather than as a reported number or adding any qualifying words like "possibly"
A link to the paper on biorxiv[0], Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud. A bit of the abstract:
I also found an interview with the author [1], which had some choice quotes, one that popped out to me, [0] http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/704080[1] https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/09/25/the-secret-to-a-l...
After reading a couple of articles on fraud or just sloppy record keeping almost always behind centenarians, now I'm extremely skeptical on claims of people having past 100 years of age.
While there are a few people who seemed to be nearly immortal, as in "being around since forever", like the Queen Of England or recently deceased https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Iliescu ... they didn't actually push past 100.
With all the care and life standard, seems to be a hard limit in our genes, so until something is done about that, better get realistic expectations.
My grandfather made it to 98, but holy cow he was frail. The last few years of his life he couldn’t move much. Shuffle walked only a few inches. Drooled on every meal in front of him. I loved my grandfather but watching him in that state, we were all relieved for him when he passed.
He smoked only during WW2, was an army corp of engineers colonel when he retired from the military, came from a dirt farm in Michigan, engineered all kinds of civil and military projects. In the end, he still managed to engineer a smile. He absolutely loved maps/atlases/GIS.
My wife grandmother made it to 102 and when she died (from an infection)it was a surprise as she was still very active and was walking everyday. Genetics and luck play also a big role.
You don't know that. It's just hypothesis.
I knew a woman that had 101 years when she died. She was vital until 99 or so, not even wearing glasses. She had a very hard life, including the fact that both her husband, only son died. So, I guess, luck is out of question for this case.
Its anybodies guess why she was living that long. Genetics for sure do not exist in vacuum and environment may activate or do nothing to your genes. You can also brute force specific genetic dissorders by taking copious amounts of vitamins.
You can be lucky in some areas and not others, when people say this in the context of health they are strictly speaking about health
> I'm extremely skeptical on claims of people having past 100 years of age.
People do live past 100.
Look at a chart of how old people are when they die and you’ll see a consistent distribution with a downward curve. There really are people in the tail of that curve.
There is no hard cutoff in the body that can precisely track time passed over 36,500 days and then shut it all down.
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Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother lived to 102, and her date of birth was fully attested.
Many others lived past 100.
Last Civil War veteran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Woolson another example.
Not only are random people on the internet and a few select media outlets aware of the problem, but governments are also aware. Since the problem is costing governments money, usually in the form of retirement benefits, they have been working to eliminate the problem. In fact some governments have been working reducing and eliminating the problem for decades.
Yeah, I assume this means there’s a lot of fraud
Probably but stats aside there certainly are a lot of very old people in Japan living near-normal lives compared to other developed countries.
After an hour in any town and I'd seen more 95+yos walking about than 10 years in Britain. And the number of times I saw 4 generations of men from one family in the bathhouse!
When there's money to be made from dead relatives, and an incentive for governments to make it look like people live beyond 100 so that they can claim superiority, yeah, that's a good recipe for massive fraud.
This should come from this paper I guess: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3
Then I may be immortal.
I went from teenager, to twenty something, to something something.
Hoping I live to something something something.
You are just a rounding error.
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Anecdotal, but living in Japan now and I do eat much healthier and walk way more than I ever did. Sometimes it's just for fun since the city I live in is walkable, but also my commute to work involves at least an hour of walking to and from stations which I have gotten used to.
As others have mentioned, social pressure plays a role in fitness, but there definitely is an abundance of unhealthy food. A previous generation may have had less unhealthy food options, so I'd be interested to see if this trend continues. All the greasy fast food chains exist here too and they are always packed.
Funny that you say it, but I think Japan doesn't eat any healthier than the average European country. Coming from the USA, I can see how the conclusion might change.
I come from a country that isn't well-known for its cuisine but live quite long lives, but I still gained (and lost when I left) about 7kg when I lived there.
Nothing about their high-sugar, high-sodium, no-fruits diet seemed particularly healthy.
Okinawans eat very differently than people who live in Tokyo, I guess.
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?
Okinawa, Japan is famously one of the world's five "blue zones" and much ink has been expended on figuring out why. Bitter gourd or certain types of seaweed, perhaps?
What's less often discussed is that it's also Japan's poorest prefecture to this day, with spotty record keeping since it was effectively a Japanese colony (it was previously the Ryukyu Kingdom, which was annexed by Japan in 1879). Vast slabs of the main island were razed to the ground during the WW2 Battle of Okinawa and much of the civilian population simply starved to death.
I remember a paper from last year in which they are suggesting that basically Blue Zones are made just by a combination of clerical error and pension fraud: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3
"Blue zones" are debunked bullshit.
I actually lived in Japan for 2+ mths , ate like how I ate more than what I ate in Singapore , literally lost 5kg. I was remote working there but do travel out and walk during weekends.
I actually miss the dirty oil fried food from Singapore , it’s much nicer when it’s greasy. Japan cooking oil is very clean , food quality is much higher too, less processed.
> but do travel out and walk during weekends.
Traveling somewhere where you walk more and then losing weight is such a common story that it has become a meme.
People also don’t accurately judge how much they eat. The portion sizes were likely smaller and the food composition was different than what you ate in Singapore, even if you thought you were eating the same. A lot has been written arguing about hidden factors in food, but in actual studies it always comes down to eating fewer calories. Eating less calorie dense foods and smaller portion sizes will do it. Even the GLP-1 studies revealed that the magic of their weight loss is directly proportional to reduction of calories eaten, even if patients eat exactly the same foods (but in smaller quantities or less frequently)
A bunch of stuff can go wrong with oil:
* You can use cheaper types that are nothing but omega 6
* You can heat them too high for their smoke point
* They can oxidize and go rancid
* You can use an enormous amount of it
Likely one of the main reasons a lot of restaurant food may not settle as well as home cooking. But in principle a restaurant could do the reverse of these four points.
Yes there is.
You can use rancid oil, seed oil, high and long temperatures on polyunsaturaded oils etc. All very unhealthy. Not sure what Japs use though.
The two most common oils in Japan are canola and soybean, and that's also historically been the case, not a modern change. They definitely do not believe there's anything wrong with seed oils.
> The two most common oils in Japan are canola and soybean, and that's also historically been the case
Umm, canola oil has only been available since the 70s. Even rapeseed oil has only been used since the 50s (it is toxic and unpalatable without modern industrial processing, as are many seed oils).
Rapeseed oil has been used for cooking in Japan for hundreds of year. The 1950s saw a shift to non domestic production.
https://www.tokyofoundation.org/research/detail.php?id=241
I shouldn't have used canola to refer to both.
Mustard oil is traditional and still very common cooking oil in South Asia that is even higher in erucic acid than rapeseed. People have used high erucic acid seed as good for a long time.
Seed oils being unhealthy is a recent meme I keep seeing, besides health influencers talking constantly about it, the science just isn’t there.
It's not recent at all, it's there for decades.
Polyfats are unstable by definition, so when you cook with them, they go rancid pretty fast. That is all very well known.
Besides, seed oils usually produce imbalance of w-3 vs w-6 fatty acids which is also deemed to lead to pro-inflamation effects.
This is all very well known and not a hype. Here is a review from 20 years ago:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09523...
You should assume the worst. Even if oils are not smelly, they can be spoiled and nobody will give a damn at the restaurant.
Fast like you use it once or twice, it goes rancid.
I witnessed restaurants in the Meditterian that keep oils on the tables for salads, and they are rancid due to hot temperatures.
Cook on coconut oil or palm oil, they are the most stable ones. If you go with plant oils, use olive oil as it seets in between poly and saturated oils.
it's definitely increased recently. despite it being at best inconslusive and at worse, false.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20250530-are-seed-oils-...
Huh, I actually thought this particular piece of woo had mostly died out at this point; haven't heard much about it for a few years.
I'd vaguely assumed that it was bored anti vaxers looking for a new Big Bad, but apparently it was Joe Rogan in 2020. Per Google Trends, it seems to have peaked early 2025, which is _much_ later than I thought. Maybe this is a consequence of dumping twitter; I'm missing out on important Oil Discourse.
So what? Some celebrity popularizes decades old good science, and that somehow makes it less valid or untrue ?
Well, if you are going to stay open for long, you had better not use rancid oil! Let's ignore that concern for now, as it generally applies to all food products.
"seed oil" -- What is this nonsense that I keep hearing about on social media? Literally, RFK Jr. (US Secretary of Health) says (amoung other crazy things) that seed oils are "poisoning Americans". Is there any peer-reviewed science behind this "seed oil is bad for you" movement? I have not seen it. Also, Japan uses a wide variety of cooking oil. Probably, olive oil is the least used (only in southern European restaurants). I guess that soybean, canola, peanut, cotton seed, rice bran, and sesame seed oil are the most common oils here -- pretty similar to most of the highly developed world (except rice bran and sesame seed).
Google tells me that soybean, canola, peanut, cotton seed, and sesame seed oil are all considered "seed oils".
"high and long temperatures on polyunsaturaded oils": Japan eats more fried food that people realise, but the portion size is quite small. As I understand, to fry food, you need to have a pool of it that is constantly heated to cooking temperature. That seems to qualify as "high and long temperatures". In fact, wouldn't all fried food suffer from the same? I don't understand the science behind this comment. Can you explain it to me like I'm five? (Other people may be interested to learn more.)
Final small thing: It is best to avoid the term "Japs" in English. It has a historical discriminatory meaning in the United States.
Who cares about RFK. Even if person X talks nonsence most of the time you can't use that as anrgument for every single thing he says.
The toxicity depends on temperature and length of time. So yes.
Not all fried food suffer, as saturated fats are stable. Coconut oil or palm oil.
For ELI5 you ask AI.
I gain around 5kgs each time I’m in Singapore, even just for a week. Singaporean food is incredibly unhealthy. Slurp down that laksa yo.
I gained weight during my last 2 weeks in Japan. Was eating 4 meals (although relatively light) a day.
On my last Japan vacation I actually managed to gain weight
I moved to Japan 7 years ago and managed to gain 10 kilos. It is nowhere as healthy as people say.
I love how the common consensus in comments here is not "what should we do in our societies to increase the number of old people in good health?" but "they're lying".
Rejecting bad data is part of what we should do to get people healthy. This isn't a controlled scientific study, it's just a news article about a government supplied statistic with a lot of unsubstantiated claims as to why.
Indeed – It's true that average life expectancy is a more robust metric. But Japan is top 3 by that metric as well.
Because the places where everyone lives to 200, are also the places devastated by war or full of corruption.
It's like how every asylum seeker in the uk is born 1st of january. It's not because they're born 1st of january, it's because they burned their documents in order to illegally migrate. But if you took that at face value, you'd assume that afghanistan only ever births people on the 1st of january.
We have really good family records dating back hundreds of years. What stands out to me is the number of my ancestors who regularly lived into their 80s or 90s 500 years ago. At the same time it's very easy to see that entire branches of the family were wiped out, probably by basic things like Flu, IE: when you see a bunch of young people in their teens or 20s die within a short timeframe, that's the most likely explanation. I'm just a layperson, but it certainly feels intuitive to say that physical work like they did (avoid cardiovascular disease), probably minimal non-processed food diet, and a whole lot of serious luck when it came to avoiding disease and especially childhood maladies, is probably what worked. Sure it's anecdata, but it seems very consistent across many generations.
Wonder when these folks retired.
Kind of blows my mind that there are people out there that have lived longer in retirement, than they have worked.
I believe Japan has a different concept of retirement than America; I can't speak for other Western cultures. More elderly people work low-paying part-time jobs to remain members of society, in addition to their financial needs. Americans tend to work in retirement out of financial needs, while idealizing not working during retirement.
It's very common in Japan to work even during nominal retirement.
I read such news with a grain of salt:
However, when officials went to congratulate him on his 111th birthday, they found his 30-year-old remains, raising concerns that the welfare system is being exploited by dishonest relatives.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11258071 (2010)
> More than 230,000 elderly people in Japan who are listed as being aged 100 or over are unaccounted for, officials said following a nationwide inquiry.
That's a pretty stark difference.
NHK, the Japanese national broadcaster, has a bunch of programs that highlight small businesses across the country with owner/operators, many of whom who work well beyond the traditional retirement age. It's pretty common to see people in their 70's & 80's running a family business or working at one. These small business owners often have had entire careers elsewhere then come back to the family business for a second career in retirement age. Being the third/fourth/fifth generation owner of a small business is very common in these shows and not one has ever said it's the Omega 3's in their diet keeping them going.
The cohort of Japanese men would be of military age during WW2, so the gender proportions of centenarians are lower due to men being KIA.
100K out of 123 million is about 1 in 1200, not so absurd.
Certainly life span is long in Japan even if some of the centenarians aren't really that old.
> When its government began the centenarian survey in 1963, there were 153 people aged 100 or over.
This is the comparison that makes the number standout.
There might have been some event in the late 1940s that might effect the statistics of that time. Unsubstantiated claim but might be worth some research.
I know someone who wants to live as long as he possibly can. Not appealing to me at all.
Just aiming for length rather than quality of life may not be the best idea, but usually people aiming for a long life are also aiming to be healthy as long as possible.
At least if you're alive, you've probably got the option to end it if you make that decision, but once you're dead that's it (not allowing for reincarnation).
I like the idea of healthspan instead of lifespan. I’m happy to keep going as long I’m healthy. When the good times are over and everyday is “please end me” day, I hope I don’t linger for too long.
That’s wonderful. I hope I can live so long.
Only if I can stay in good health. I don't want to be like my grandmother who got a stroke and spent the last 10 years of her life laying in bed.
You want healthspan, not a lifespan.
Honestly, I dont if I'm in poor health.
Rather die straight up in my 70s or 80s with a quick death VS be 100+ and not be able to do shit and watch as my body slowly falls apart and starts failing me.
Buy a smart watch and start running and enhance your VO2 max.
Fun fact: in japan diapers are much more targeted at old people that babies.
To be fair, I've never seen a baby buying diapers/nappies.
together they have 10 million years of total experience, put that in your LLM and watch it smoke
Japans whole "hikikiomori" population is estimated to be in between 500k to over 1M people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
these old people are gunna be kinda fucked
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Possible, but also Japan is such a high trust society I would be shocked if this is the reason
> Japan is such a high trust society I would be shocked if this is the reason
Trust works both ways. There's also the trust that nobody will report anyone for the fraud, especially if it is widespread and normalized.
However, it would not surprise me if Japan actually did have high life expectancy rates because several other statistics seem to correlate with that, including low obesity, and universal access to healthcare.
I don't remember the source, but worldwide, most really old people have a couple things in common. First is that they live in countries with some kind of pension plan. Second, they generally come from poor neighborhoods where all the people around them statistically have lower lifespans.
The logical conclusion is fraud.
I don't think defrauding the government is all that related to what is typically meant by high/low trust societies.
It was already seen over a decade ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11258071
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogen_Kato#Aftermath
I mean, clearly not all centarians in Japan are actually dead. But I think it's fairly straightforward that the numbers of super-elderly are inflated.
Dude. All humans poop.
But not in the streets.
If Japan is such a high trust society, why do they have separate train compartments for women?
And plenty of posters in the train stations telling you not to take pictures under women's skirts.
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nah, we can use the US as a benchmark for the expected rate of >100yr old people . It's not all fraud.
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Just like in the US, they check these things in Japan.
Errors in population statistics are a global phenomenon, not just in Japan.
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馬鹿
Boy that sure set me on a memory tangent…
https://megatokyo.com/strip/74