I can't remember who posted this originally, or where it was posted, but I recommend watching this for a bit of perspective on the general topic of healthy eating:
I agree with almost everything he has to say here. Diet is very important, but it's not a magic bullet. Stress, inactivity, and other life issues can undo all your best efforts.
The only part that got me rolling my eyes was the mention of Okinawa. There's a persistent myth regarding Okinawans, who supposedly eat a classic low-fat high-carb diet based around sweet potatoes. They don't. The Okinawan diet is a blend of Japanese and Taiwanese influences, with a few bits of Americana thrown in (eg., Spam and ice-cream). They eat pig. Lots of pig. And vegetables. And yes, some rice and sweet potatoes. They are absolutely not a bucolic community of sweet-potato farmers. While their diet is neither classic low-carb nor low-fat, I think Dr Chatterjee is absolutely right that the common thread here is just (a) good unprocessed food, and (b) a productive, active, stress-free life.
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Um ... not exactly. That info comes from my friend, who used to go there regularly with his Japanese gf. Back when we were allowed to fly, I could have left my house after lunch and been in Okinawa in time for dinner. I now regret that I never did that!
I'm guessing if you look around on Facebook you'll find people posting pictures of their meals on holiday in Okinawa
EDIT: here you go. This is a very good video. Representative of ordinary food (as opposed to tourist food).
Just worth pointing out that while noodle soup might be a default choice when eating outside anywhere in Asia (equivalent to a sandwich), a meal at home would be some combination of meat, rice and veg., eg:
The traditional Okinawan diet as described above was widely practiced on the islands until about the 1960s. Since then, dietary practices have been shifting towards Western and Japanese patterns, with fat intake rising from about 6% to 27% of total caloric intake and the sweet potato being supplanted with rice and bread.[14] This shifting trend has also coincided with a decrease in longevity, where Okinawans now have a lower life expectancy than the Japanese average.[15]
Yeah, I'm aware of that one. Like I said it's pretty persistent!
I'll try and pick it apart:
- They may well have grown sweet potatoes in preference to (or alongside) rice, simply because the climate was conducive. That doesn't mean they ate nothing but sweet potatoes. The Okinawan black pig is a heritage breed with hundreds of years of history, and its population only dipped to a very low number during WW2; afterwards, it was brought rapidly up to commercial potential again (with American assistance). So no, they absolutely weren't eating a low-fat diet in the 1960s, nor were they eating a meat-free or fat-free diet prior to the war. See here:
which implies roughly one pig for every 9 inhabitants at the time, ie., about the same pig-to-human ratio for modern Japan.
- It seems highly unlikely that pig-meat was ever avoided; why go to all the trouble of breeding a prime meat animal if you're not going to eat it? My hunch is that they grew a lot of sweet potatoes (and they did) to feed to the pigs. This is a very common use for sweet potatoes in the tropics/subtropics because sweet potatoes are enormously productive, and you can simply turn the pigs loose in the field; they'll eat the leaves and the potatoes, while simultaneously ploughing and fertilizing the field for another crop.
- To eat an 80%-carb diet (as stated in the video) you'd have to be eating somewhere in the ballpark of 20-40g of fat per day. That's an astoundingly small amount, comparable to the current UK recommendations. Again, given the availability of pig meat, it seems incredibly unlikely that that actually happened. There are almost no peoples on Earth who avoid meat and/or fat as a matter of preference.
- The article you quote contradicts itself. If "the Okinawan diet has only 30% of the sugar and 15% of the grains of the average Japanese dietary intake", then that's virtually keto. Possibly this part is a typo; there are quite a lot of numbers in that article that aren't consistent with each other.
- The figures quoted for 1950 are meaningless. The island was in bad shape after the war. Many people - like the Japanese generally - would have been living near the poverty line.
- The Okinawa life expectancy at birth is about the same as the Japanese generally. 84 years, apparently. There are still quite a few people in Okinawa over 100 years old (68 per 100,000, apparently, compared to 63 per 100,000 in Japan).
This was such a great watch. Thank you for sharing it with us all TheAwfulToad and I would personally recommend this to anybody and will be sharing it with my loved ones for sure 👍
That’s a really interesting interview - thanks for posting. I think when you are trying to lose weight it’s so easy to get fixated on what you are eating and the number on the scales and lose track of what other things are needed for a healthy lifestyle - it was really balanced - will be giving it more thought 👍🏻
>> For the past six months I been eating just about all the food before I became obese, and am still at a healthy weight.
I think this is where the part about "thresholds" is relevant.
I was discussing this sort of thing with a guy who's a fitness freak. His opinion is that "the best way not to get fat is to not get fat". That might sound completely stupid, but his point was this: once you push your body into a metabolic crisis, a snowball effect ensues: in that state, a diet that might be perfectly OK for someone with normal metabolism makes you get get fatter and fatter, and it becomes increasingly difficult to reverse course. Conversely, if you stay away from that point, you have a pretty wide range of foods that will be healthy for you, and which won't make you fat.
Unfortunately very few of us seem to have a normal metabolism anymore. It's estimated that 100 million Americans are diabetic or pre-diabetic (that's around 1/3 of the population) and as 2/3 of UK are overweight, I expect we are not far behind in diabetes, either.
But it's not everyone, of course. 60 years ago, everyone could eat carbs without fear, because they hadn't been filling their plates with them, they didn't each much processed food, and they tended to only eat 2 or 3 times a day. My aunt who lived lucid and independent until 99 never had to give up carbs, and the oldest person in Europe, a 117 year old nun, celebrated her birthday with an omelette norvégienne (baked Alaska). If I do the same, I am certain I will not make old bones.
But we are where we are. We have broken our metabolisms and need to avoid certain foods to be healthy. I find posts on this groups extolling the virtues of high carb foods very unhelpful. Yes, many people can eat them without risk, but some of us can't. Boasting in this part of HU how you can eat carbs without ill-effect is like joining a type I diabetes forum, and boasting you can live perfectly healthily without insulin.
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