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Seems like you have some divergent ideas here. On the one hand, you ask about practical, actionable stuff; on the other hand, you ask "How many consecutive generations of people living to 100 does it take before it happens at a regular basis.". The answer to the latter question is not something you can really use for anything.

I sometimes wonder if the right thing for westerners wouldn't just be a big sequence of photos of mid-tier Japanese restaurant food -- like what's served at train stations -- with all the components broken down, along with a description of how a person fits those things together every day to have complete story for food. After going there a few times, I was surprised by how much healthier I ate, and figured out how to reproduce some of the effect back in the United States.

One category of difference with Japanese diet is things that are somewhat healthier at baseline. That is the way Japanese junk food is. A mochi is pounded rice, sugar and beans; and many sweets are actually filled with bean paste. A common kind of savory Japanese snack is grilled seaweed.

Another category of difference is eating the same thing but just in slightly different proportions. It's quite common in the USA that you go somewhere and get a meal and it's literally a piece of meat and a potato. Even at a good restaurant; but especially at less expensive restaurants. This isn't about Japanese food versus other kinds of foods. If you got a German restaurant in Japan (they are somewhat more popular in Japan than in the USA) and you get a plate it will be like three different kinds of sausages (in small sizes) and one or two salads and one or two vegetable items.

This is not due to some kind of technical balancing or something like that; Japanese consumers just demand somewhat more varied food with more vegetables.

There isn't a recipe or some weights or formulas. I just went there for 1-2 weeks at a time 5-6 times and tried a bunch of food and got used to it, came back and then wondered about what I could do differently. Everything that has changed in my diet as a result is entirely a matter of small adjustments -- adding vegetables at certain times of day or something like that -- but I did lose weight and have enjoyed other benefits like no acid reflux, no food coma, &c.



Do all Japanese actually eat that healthy? I can believe it of some of them, but there’s little fruit and many salarymen seem to live on a diet of fried chicken, hard liquor and cigarettes.


>many salarymen seem to live on a diet of fried chicken, hard liquor and cigarettes.

That's what surprised me the most visiting Japan. All the skinny people in Japan eating fried chicken, fried mashed potatoes, fried everything.

The only thing I could make out for why they were skinny was insane levels of portion control. Since they definitely didn't have time to do sports.


Also a tremendous amount of walking. Japanese urban planning is much more pedestrian friendly than say, almost anywhere in the US.


US has a problem with activity. No sidewalks, go everywhere by car except in a few big cities.


Europe has that, too but we're not that skinny.


But Western European diet "americanized" itself a lot recently. For example in France, some of the staple meals are burgers, tacos[0] and kebab.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_tacos


They are eating a lot of other food, actually; and that's why it works.


This does not really comport with the restaurant menus that I saw.

When you say they seem to live off this diet, what are you basing that on?




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