Here’s a meal that positively glows with health: fish, natto, lettuce-tomato-and-carrot salad, milk, and for dessert a big round shiny red apple.
So bright with nutritional promise! So empty in fact, says Josei Seven (May 9-16). The nutritional equivalent of dust and ashes.
Yesterday’s health food is health food no longer. Evolving agriculture, altered soil, shifting consumer tastes and a rapidly deteriorating environment have leeched food of its value. The modern meal pleases the eye and fills the gut but starves the blood, brain and other organs – the soul too, maybe. At worst, it fosters diseases that, if not fatal, make life more ordeal than pleasure.
Josei Seven, in short, paints a bleak picture – maybe too bleak. An obvious question goes unanswered: if Japanese eat so badly why do they live so long?
Health is a treasure. Wealth is good and success is fine, but illness turns them sour while health brightens even poverty and failure – imparting strength, moreover, to turn today’s defeats into tomorrow’s victories. Is that too optimistic a view? Supporting it is a throbbing and bloated health market, full to bursting with health foods, health drinks, health salves, supplements, pills, tonics, devices, books, articles, counseling – some of it genuine, some doubtful, some proven fraudulent. Booms come and go.
Japan within recent memory has fallen into and out of banana booms, apple booms, natto booms, fermented tea booms, walking booms, running booms, fish-only booms, meat-only booms, fasting booms, one-meal-a-day booms, milk booms, water booms, even a seaweed soap boom, supposedly conducive to weight loss. We’ll try anything, spend anything, clutch at any straw, heed any peddler of any miracle cure or wonder preventative in our fevered pursuit of the health treasure – where is it buried? Part of the problem, as Josei Seven sees it, is that some of these fads, by the excesses they encourage, do more harm than good – at worst, much more.
A few numbers will indicate where we stand. We’re shown two charts, courtesy of the education and science ministry – one pertinent to vitamin C, the other to iron. Each chart compares two eras, 1950 and 2020, showing how poor various food items once rich in these crucial nutrients have become. The figures that follow are approximate, as precise as the graphs allow. Spinach, for example, which in 1950 had nearly 160 mg of vitamin C per 100 grams, now has less than 40; soybean sprouts, 35 versus 1; hakusai cabbage, 40 versus 20; tomato, 20 versus 10. Iron likewise: spinach, 13 mg in 1950 as against 2 today; carrots, 2 then, nearly 0 now; soybean sprouts, 3 versus nearly 0, tomato, 5 versus – again – barely above 0. We’re starving without hunger pangs, is the inescapable conclusion, barring compensatory factors we’re not told of here.
To begin, as biblical lore says humanity began, with the apple – that big, shiny, red apple. Probably it comes from Aomori or Nagano, Japan’s apple country. The apple of today is not the apple of yesteryear. Then, orchards were surrounded by wilderness, not suburbs. Soils enriched by microbes, worms, bugs and human dung no longer are, and have thinned. Then there’s artificial breeding. Consumers today, Josei Seven points out – it’s a point often made – demand fruits and vegetables that look healthy, taking appearance for reality when all too often the two are mismatched. Blemished, discolored, misshapen produce languishes unsold though perfectly good. Growers breed accordingly. Appearance trumps substance, quantity quality. It’s not just apples. It extends pretty much across the agricultural board. Which is better: second-rate abundance, or first-rate scarcity? You can’t have everything.
As for fads and booms and suchlike bursts of enthusiasm, granted that some may be good, we’d still, in the long run, be better off without them. Two fundamental flaws dog them. The first is unbalance. Bananas may be good but a banana diet to the exclusion of nearly everything else is hardly likely to be. Likewise apples, natto, soybeans, seaweed and so on.
The second, related to the first, is that what’s good for one part of the body may cause harm elsewhere, if relied on to excess. Drinking two liters of water a day purges and cleanses but also thins the blood. Milk strengthens bones but leaves potentially destructive residue traced to artificial chemicals and hormones used to enhance cow fodder. Fish oil is preferable to meat oil but the arsenic detected in some fish is toxic, given over-reliance on fish. Turn to meat instead? Up to a point – past which lies a heavy burden on the stomach and kidneys.
Sugar – the root of all nutritional evil, avoided like plague by conscientious health-conscious consumers – who know not what they do, because sugar after all is the brain’s prime energy source.
All this we gather from Josei Seven’s reporting, and perhaps readers can be forgiven for throwing up their hands and crying, “To hell with it! I’ll eat what I please!” Maybe that’s best. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s good for one individual but bad for another. One thing seems certain: just as the latest research makes nonsense of earlier research that was in its own time also the latest, what’s current now will cause our descendents to blanche at the perils it unwittingly exposes us to. Or again – maybe not. Our survival over a million years or so is proof of remarkable bodily resilience. It permits positive thinking. We’ll pull through somehow.
© Japan Today
16 Comments
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BertieWooster
The danger is in mass produced food. Put tens of thousands of chickens in a small shed and pump them full of antibiotics so that the inevitable diseases don't spread and you end up with something tasteless and barely nutritious. Granddad used to keep chickens in his orchard. They fed on kitchen scraps and the things that chooks like to eat, worms, bugs, etc. But the taste was amazing. The eggs and meat were superb. Ultra processed food is killing people.
The solution is not to eat anything that you can't immediately see what's gone into it. And grow your own vegetables without cancerous pesticides or eat vegetables that have been grown as naturally as possible.
BertieWooster
https://www.theguardian.com/food/article/2024/may/19/academic-and-doctor-chris-van-tulleken-ultra-processed-products-are-food-that-lies-to-us
GBR48
If you want to know how healthy your diet is, you can have your health checked by a doctor or qualified nutritionist. If you lack anything, you can amend your diet or add a supplement.
Your BMI is a good rough guide as to whether you are underweight or overweight.
Most Westerners don't drink enough water to fully hydrate themselves. Rough guide: your pee should be corn coloured. Being dehydrated has a surprising, negative affect on your body. Luckily it is the easiest and cheapest thing to fix.
Puritanism is depressing. If your core diet is good, treats will not shorten your existence. Enjoy them, but don't live on them.
Japan needs to lose the demand for perfect fruit and veg. You can often buy 'wonky' fruit and veg at a small discount. It is just as edible. Do the right thing and cut the food waste.
Redemption
Japan has a good and solid traditional diet and they should stick to that as a cultural treasure.
toolonggone
Many places have good and solid traditional diets, yes, even the US. Japan is not unique in that respect. Good traditional diets revolved around what was in season and available. The advent of mass food production, a lack of food self-reliance and processed food is where diets started to suffer. As for the meal at the beginning of the article, tomatoes are originally from Mesoamerica, carrots came to Japan in the 16th or 17th century and lettuce is believe to have been brought to Japan by Dutch traders in the 17th century. The notion of being so tied up in what is and isn't part of a culture's traditional diet is a bit of not seeing the forest for the trees. Super processed food is not a part of any culture's traditional diet and isn't good for anyone.
bass4funk
I like Japanese food but Remember, not everything food wise in Japan is healthy, Japan has its share of not healthy and questionable foods as well.
Moonraker
Yeah, right. And when they ate that alone they lived much shorter lives, were prone to beri-beri and rickets and were very short.
virusrex
Th author of the article has good intentions, but it is overly generalizing and very poor in evidence, mixing well known things with unsupported claims so it ends up being misleading instead of useful.
For example
is basically nonsense, for someone doing heavy physical work 2 liters of water do very little to "purge and clean" and may not even be enough to stay hydrated. And for anybody with functioning kidneys it would not "thin the blood" for any appreciable amount of time.
Half truths and mistakes surrounding a kernel of truth hinder much more than help people trying to improve their diet.
Raw Beer
Naah, that's nonsense.
There is no need whatsoever for any amount of dietary sugar or carbohydrate. Your body will produce all the glucose your body needs. So it's best to consider sugar as the root of all evil.
virusrex
According to the best experts on human nutrition (and countless institutions dedicated to the field) a healthy diet includes carbohydrates, there is as much "need" for a healthy diet as there is for physical activity or enough sleep.
I mean, pretending the experts in the field (in all countries of the world) are in a conspiracy is not an argument to refute the medical consensus, that is at much a bad excuse for not having that argument.
Zaphod
How did I miss all these booms? Where did they happen?
Zaphod
virusrex
,,, and who decides who these "best experts" are?
...ah, the appeal to authority again. Institutions are of course heavily influenced by big business with things like research grants and incentives. Remind us how well these institutions did with their advice during the Corona pandemic.
Ask the Inuit about that. How are vegetables and grains grown in the Arctic?
Raw Beer
Exactly, those countless institutions are dedicated to being profitable.
Also, early dietary guidelines were heavily influenced by the Seventh-day Adventists and the sugar industry and later buy heavy funding by Coca Cola, Frito-lay....
virusrex
The scientific community of course, there is no use in pretending the people that have made the most advances and brought more benefits for nutritional science don't know about their field, that is beyond irrational.
The appeal to authority is a perfectly valid argument when the authorities are valid and have their conclusions supported by evidence as in this case. Specially when the counter argument is... nothing based on no evidence at all.
Why? the inuit have not made any claim about what is the best diet, that is all on you.
Again, pretending the experts in the field (in all countries of the world) are in a conspiracy is not an argument to refute the medical consensus, that is at much a bad excuse for not having that argument.
Do you have any evidence against the current dietary guidelines? because if not pretending the status of scientific development stopped decades or centuries back makes no sense. That is like saying surgery is not saving lives because surgeons used to work antiseptically.
Raw Beer
Not all experts, just those in institutions that depend on external funding. I previously gave an example of a certified dietician who was fired by the ADA because she refused to promote a product made by one of ADA's major sponsors.
Also, the top shareholders of most (all?) pharma and food industry are also the top shareholders of most (all?) publishers of scientific journals (e.g. Elsevier) and MSM.
There are plenty of independent experts in the field who offer valuable information that is ignored/suppressed by the above....
virusrex
Again, when that includes every institution in the world that is just an unbelievable global conspiracy, when that is combined with the complete lack of any evidence to disprove the consensus that means it is again just an impossible excuse to avoid accepting that consensus.
First that is not an institution, and second, when a professional acts against the evidence, is unable to provide evidence to support a different conclusion and it can be proved to put in risk the health of the people that listen to baseless recommendations then a professional association is perfectly justified in removing that professional accreditation, that is its role, to recognize only those that can act in a professional way instead of their personal profit.
in the era of preprits this is Irrelevant, when all institutions coincide in the same conclusions that means this is what the evidence cleary points out, you being completely unable to find any examples of respected institutions that support a point different from the consensus (with evidence) means you have no basis for criticizing it. Currently there is nothing easier than publishing evidence, the difficult part (and what antiscientific propaganda can't do) is make those publications survive post-publication peer review.