Are you overweight? In Japan, your employer will decide : LC Research/Media Forum : Active Low-Carber Forums

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Sat, Oct-21-23, 00:49

Demi

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Are you overweight? In Japan, your employer will decide

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Are you overweight? In Japan, your employer will decide

Employees attend compulsory annual fitness checks and companies have healthy weight targets. Is this why Japan has the lowest levels of obesity in the developed world? And could this approach work in Britain, where 40 per cent of us will be obese by 2040?

It is Monday afternoon at the headquarters of the Dai-ichi Life Insurance Company in Tokyo and staff are lined up on chairs in a corridor. They look as if they are waiting to see the headmaster after misbehaving at school, but in fact they are queuing up for their mandatory annual health check. I watch as the workers file into a large room full of tables laden with medical equipment. Doctors and nurses in white coats are measuring people’s blood pressure and heart rate as well as taking blood samples to test. Behind a screen at the end of the room, employees are being weighed and having their waists measured.

The results will be distributed to staff on colour-coded paper: pink means that someone is overweight or obese, yellow indicates they are at risk and white confirms they are a healthy weight. People can choose to open the letter at home to keep it private from their colleagues but they cannot hide the findings from their boss. Those who have seen their waistline expand over the course of the year may be referred to a company doctor, who will make recommendations about their lifestyle or diet. Nobody is fired for being fat, but if an employee ignores their boss’s advice, then the matter can be escalated up to their “boss’s boss”. If they still refuse to take action the “boss’s boss’s boss” can get involved. I ask whether it could end up with the chief executive of the company and am told that it has never got that far. Most people choose to lose weight rather than risk increasingly public humiliation.

This is not an eccentric innovation by an overzealous human resources manager but the law. In Japan, companies are legally required to measure their employees’ waists every year. The “Metabo” law, introduced in 2008, applies to everyone between the ages of 40 and 74. If people do not meet standard guidelines for waist size, they are expected to attend counselling for weight loss or receive motivational support. Businesses can be fined if they do not achieve sufficiently high participation rates among their workers.

The impact on corporate culture is huge. Dai-ichi, which has close to 50,000 employees, has targets for reducing obesity among its staff as well as measures for financial success. Last year 74.4 per cent of women and 68.7 per cent of men were an appropriate weight. The aim is to push this up to 81 per cent of female and 72 per cent of male staff this year. Department heads are sent a list every 12 months showing how the health of their staff ranks alongside other teams. Along with IT specialists and accountants, the company employs 15 full-time doctors, an in-house pharmacist and a health consultant to advise on diet and exercise. An incentive scheme offers rewards such as Amazon gift cards for employees who take at least 8,000 steps a day, measured by a corporate app. The firm recently received an award from the Japanese government for its excellent health programme.

It is impossible to imagine the British accepting such a draconian anti-obesity measure, but in Japan there seems to be remarkably little resentment about the law. Employers see it as their responsibility to promote healthy behaviour among their staff and most employees feel as if they are being looked after rather than snooped on. At Dai-ichi the board is convinced that the programme is good for the bottom line as well as for workers’ waistlines. Sickness rates are incredibly low — 1.3 days on average per employee every year, compared with 5.7 at the last count in the UK. “We believe that health is the foundation of everything,” says Mieko Ishii, the leader of the company’s health promotion section. “The health of the employees will lead to the improved productivity of the company.” This is a widely held attitude among Japanese businesses. The health equipment company Omron gives blood pressure monitors to all its staff to help identify those at risk of strokes or heart attacks.

It is no coincidence that Japan has the lowest levels of obesity in the developed world. In England, 26 per cent of adults are obese (defined as having a body mass index of 30 or above). In Japan it is just 4 per cent. The contrast among children is just as stark and even more shocking. By the time English children start school, about 10 per cent are obese and a further 12 per cent are overweight. At 11, almost a quarter are obese and 14 per cent are overweight. Children in the most deprived areas are more than twice as likely to be living with obesity. In Japan, fewer than 2 per cent of under-fives are overweight.

For most nations there is a correlation between wealth and weight — the richer a country becomes, the higher its obesity rates. Japan has bucked the trend and has obesity levels comparable to some of the poorest countries in the world, including Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Nepal. This is partly because the traditional Japanese diet — which includes a lot of fresh fish, tofu and vegetables — is healthier than much western food. But such food choices are not an inbuilt national trait. For decades, successive Japanese governments have deliberately set out to promote healthy eating and keep obesity in check.

That starts young. Parents of babies starting nursery are given a list of dozens of vegetables, seaweed and spices their child must try before being enrolled. Picky eaters are rare.

The low obesity rates were far from inevitable. After the Second World War, Japan was flooded with cheap American imports and consumption of junk food and processed products started to grow. The occupying Americans introduced a school lunch programme to feed up the next generation. All children were given milk and bread, made from US wheat, and a hot meal using stockpiles of tinned food. During the Fifties, average annual incomes doubled in Japan and people began to have more choice over what they ate. Instead of returning to the dietary traditions of the past, they developed new, less healthy eating habits and obesity rates started to creep up.

The government took a deliberate decision to intervene. In 1954, the School Lunch Act was introduced guaranteeing a healthy meal for all pupils every day and in 2005 the shokuiku law made food education a part of the school curriculum. Shokuiku means “the acquisition of knowledge about food and nutrition and the ability to make appropriate food choices through various experiences related to food”. The purpose of the law is to instil an appreciation of taste and traditional cultural food values in children. According to Corinna Hawkes, a specialist in food systems at the United Nations, “Cooking, table manners, gratitude, community dining and recycling are considered essential parts of ‘teaching food’ and children participate in cooking, serving and cleaning up the meal.”

I visit Kohoku primary school to see what typical school lunches are like. There are no dinner ladies doling out turkey twizzlers and baked beans. Instead, the children take turns to serve each other spiced baked fish, vegetables sprinkled with dried bonito and rice. They stir soy sauce into the dishes and ladle out bowls of miso soup. Before the class starts eating, one of the pupils stands at the front and describes the nutritional value of the sweetcorn that’s been folded into the rice.

Lunch here is seen as an integral part of the school curriculum, as essential to a child’s learning as chemistry or maths. Students eat with chopsticks at their desks in the classroom rather than in a communal dining room. Everyone has the same meal, which is heavily subsidised and free for the poorest. Only those with severe allergies are allowed to bring in a packed lunch. The teachers eat with their pupils and explain the importance of table manners as well as the benefits of a balanced diet. “It’s part of the education,” says Yasuhiro Matsuda, the deputy head. “We want children to have an understanding of the importance of good nutrition and how to eat well. And we have found that healthy school meals lead to better concentration and greater mental stability too.”

The pupils sound like restaurant critics as they assess the quality of the food. “The vegetables have a different flavour to usual. The dried bonito has made them taste much clearer,” says 12-year-old Haruka Hawashi. Her friend Yuina Matsumoto, 11, thinks the seasoned fish is “very good” — “Sometimes when fish is grilled it can be too dry but today it’s delicious.”

The school is built around a giant kitchen, which has huge windows on every side so that the children can see the chefs preparing fresh meals every day. There is a full-time nutritionist who devises the daily changing menu and a rice field on the roof so that students can learn about the source of their food. Processed food is banned — even the miso soup base is home-made.

Once a year, the younger children help to prepare lunch. Older children all have regular cookery lessons. Students are encouraged to write comments about the food on a feedback board and send thank-you letters to the chefs. The aim is to develop a cultured palate in the young by exposing children to a wide variety of food at an early age — sesame toast, corn stew, fish with seaweed, udon noodles and crispy tuna are all on the menu.

In Britain, it is increasingly difficult to be healthy. The supermarket shelves are heaving with sugar-laden cereals and ultra-processed foods that are cheaper than fresh fruit and vegetables. We are trapped in what the restaurateur and former government food adviser Henry Dimbleby calls a “junk food cycle”. Highly processed foods — high in salt, refined carbohydrates, sugar and fats — are on average three times cheaper per calorie than healthier foods. In this “obesegenic environment”, pre-packaged convenience and ultra-processed food make up 57 per cent of the average UK diet. The fruit and veg market is worth just £2.2 billion a year, compared with £3.9 billion for confectionery. Ministers, nervous of being accused of creating a “nanny state”, have delayed plans to ban junk food advertising before the 9pm television watershed and end “buy one, get one free” deals. In Japan, there is no concept of the “nanny state” as a negative force. In fact, as one academic explained to me, Japanese people respect their parents so why would they see the nanny as a bad thing in any case? The state is unashamedly bossy.

There is an understanding of the importance of the wider environment in shaping public health. Protectionist laws have prevented large supermarkets and food manufacturers from becoming too dominant, meaning there is more space for small producers. These policies are slowly being eroded under pressure from the World Trade Organisation and the United States, but cultural expectations now favour healthy choices. Eating in the street and snacking between meals are frowned upon. The food kiosks at railway stations sell exquisite wooden bento boxes filled with fresh salmon, rice and seaweed rather than burgers and fries. Hospital food is as wholesome and delicious as school lunches.

It is difficult to see mandatory waist measurement catching on in Britain, but Japan shows that it is possible for a country to shape its eating habits and tackle obesity. As Henry Dimbleby says, “Good food cultures don’t just happen — they are made by us.” Willpower is not enough when the environment is conspiring against individuals. “We are fat and ill because we live in a world full of food that makes us fat and ill,” Dimbleby argues. “The mantra of ‘choice’ beloved of free marketeers is simply deluded.”

It is not only Japan that has taken back control of the nation’s diet. Amsterdam managed to achieve a 12 per cent drop in childhood obesity over 3 years after launching the Healthy Weight Approach initiative in 2012. Fruit juice was banned from schools, fast-food outlets limited, advertising restricted and subsidised activities offered to low-income families. Chile declared that sugary cereals must be sold in plain packages. Instead of Tony the Tiger cartoons on Kellogg’s Frosties, sold as Zucaritas, there are health warnings on a black background highlighting the high sugar and calorie content.

Finland has transformed its health outcomes over the past 50 years. In the Seventies, men in the remote province of North Karelia had the highest mortality rate from heart failure in the world. The levels were 30 per cent higher than in Mediterranean countries. In fact, so many men were dropping dead in their forties and fifties that the area became known as the unhealthiest region on earth. Researchers would come to study the population, prodding and poking middle-aged males to find out what was going wrong.

Then in 1972, the governor of North Karelia, Esa Timonen, decided that enough was enough and hired a 27-year-old doctor with an MA in social sciences to lead a public health project. Pekka Puska, who went on to become director general of the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Finland, says, modestly, that he was only chosen because he was so young and everyone knew that the job would “take a long time”. He was right, but nobody expected him to have so much success. Over the next three decades he created a programme that reduced heart disease by 80 per cent among the men of North Karelia.

Puska realised that the root of the problem was the region’s diet. After the war, veterans had been given their own plots of land to tend and, without the skills for arable farming, most had decided to rear pigs and cows. This had led to a dramatic increase in the consumption of red meat, butter and animal fat. A typical North Karelian stew had three ingredients: water, fatty pork and salt. Vegetables were avoided because they were seen as valuable animal feed. Around 60 per cent of the men also smoked.

Using a medley of initiatives, Puska set out to remove the barriers to healthy behaviour. He wrote a recipe book that added vegetables to traditional dishes. One adaptation, which added carrots, potatoes and swedes to a meat dish, was known as “Puska’s stew”. He held more than 300 local “parties of long life”, where healthy food was cooked and served to villagers by the equivalent of the Women’s Institute. He persuaded the council to ban tobacco advertising and encourage smoke-free offices. There was no one “silver bullet”. Instead Puska took a scatter-gun approach. He hired a team to devise initiatives that would tackle the problem from every angle. They cleared the snow from footpaths and built bicycle lanes. To improve fruit consumption, they set up cooperatives to pick and freeze berries in summer so that they could be distributed in winter.

On their own the measures seemed trivial, but together they brought about a huge cultural shift. “You have to have your boots deep in the mud,” he told the Times Health Commission recently. “Strategies on paper do not do the work. You need to reach people in their everyday surroundings. We tried to involve all possible organisations in the community and asked them to work with us.”

Within five years deaths from heart disease had begun to fall. Puska was asked to roll out his project across Finland. He created an X-Factor style television show on which contestants competed to see who was the healthiest. It was a ratings hit, watched by around a third of the population. By 2009 the annual mortality rate from heart disease had fallen by 85 per cent in North Karelia and by 80 per cent across the whole of Finland. Average life expectancy in Finland rose by seven years for men and six for women. “The target was the whole community, not just people at high risk,” he explains. “The healthy lifestyle needs to be made easy.”

In Britain, there is now cross-party support for phasing out smoking but there is too often a sense of fatalism about the obesity epidemic. Since 1992, there have been 14 obesity strategies and 689 separate schemes. Successive prime ministers from Tony Blair to Boris Johnson have promised to make it a priority but all have given up. Now ministers hail the new anti-obesity drugs as if they are the only way to solve the problem, but the NHS will never be able to afford to keep the growing number of obese patients on these expensive weight-loss medicines for the rest of their lives. There has to be a wider change in the culture to tackle the root cause of the problem rather than just treating the symptoms.

Already, the obesity epidemic is costing the NHS more than £6 billion a year, set to rise to more than £10 billion by 2050. If the UK continues on its present trajectory, about 40 per cent of the population will be obese by 2040, which comes with growing risks of cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal conditions and poor mental health. The wider economic costs are huge. A study by the consultancy Frontier Economics estimated that the annual cost of adult obesity to UK society is around £58 billion, equivalent to 3 per cent of GDP. In England, research shows that areas with the highest rates of overweight and obesity also have the lowest rates of productivity. Andrew Lansley, the former health secretary, told the Health Commission, “Obesity will kill more people even than the pandemic did, and look what behaviour change was required for that.”

Politicians act as if they are helpless in the face of global forces when it comes to obesity. They are not. Japan and Finland — two very different countries with diverse cultures and populations — show that, with political will and courage, it is possible to transform the food environment and create a healthier, wealthier nation. Back in Tokyo, the workers at Dai-ichi Life wait with trepidation for the results of their annual health check and the pupils at Kohoku primary school finish off their fish.

“The school meals are so delicious that I always have another bowl,” says Miku Umeharu, 11. “I think it’s a very good idea to have healthy food. Sometimes I tell my mother what we had for lunch and I get her to cook it again for me at home.”

Rachel Sylvester is chairwoman of the Times Health Commission, which investigates the crisis facing the health and social care system in England

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...tests-75kfz2kzp

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#2 ^

Sat, Oct-21-23, 03:53

JEY100 JEY100 is offline

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Fascinating…never read before about the work and school programs in Japan. Rather than the assumption that Japanese self-regulate consumption (Hara-Hachi-bu) there are additional social and financial incentives in play.
I think in Dr Kendrick’s book on the cholesterol con, he described the program in North Karelia, that the decrease in Smoking from 80% to 16% may have had more impact on the health improvements than low fat food, and there was high stress from social displacement and unemployment among the Russian and Finnish groups that lessened over time.
Thanks for sharing…good luck with UK or US companies checking employee health!

#3 ^

Sat, Oct-21-23, 06:18

WereBear

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Quote:

Originally Posted by JEY100

I think in Dr Kendrick’s book on the cholesterol con, he described the program in North Karelia, that the decrease in Smoking from 80% to 16% may have had more impact on the health improvements than low fat food, and there was high stress from social displacement and unemployment among the Russian and Finnish groups that lessened over time.

I was just thinking Dr. Eades would say it was the smoking and the stress, not the food. They might have done better leaving that alone!

Quote:

Originally Posted by JEY100

Thanks for sharing…good luck with UK or US companies checking employee health!

The US has a phenomenon known as "break room" because the free junk in there -- boss brings in donuts! cake Fridays! The business gifts that are all edible and pointedly NOT healthy. The holiday season approaches.

Even worse in shift work. I see them heading out for the morning & afternoon shifts, picking up breakfast and lunch for their day. It's all sandwiches that are 90% bread and SnoBalls. Then there are the ones trying to do it right and pick up a salad, but there's rarely protein in a convenience store salad.

How many times have I thought to myself, Just ditch the sandwich bread and the snack cakes, but your favorite sandwich on the salad, and it will work. But I can't.

We have weight problems because we are told all the wrong things! And when we try to do the wrong things we blame ourselves.

Time it ended.

#4 ^

Tue, Oct-24-23, 00:01

deirdra

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It is interesting that they don't start until age 40, so Japanese people must be self-regulating before that. In much of the western world they would need to start in grade school to keep people from growing obese.

#5 ^

Tue, Oct-24-23, 02:33

WereBear

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It could be as simple as rice being a relatively non-toxic grain. Or it could be that fast food is competing with traditional street food, which is less harmful than artificial Western concoctions.

When I worked and spent time in NYC, everyone was walking everywhere and the street food was what it had been for decades. More and more, I think it's not just what food we eat.

How much of it is that manufactured foods are some unknown percentage of UPF? That's eating food that has NEVER been food.

#6 ^

Fri, Dec-08-23, 05:10

Demi

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How Japan solved its obesity crisis – and what the UK can learn from it

Britain’s expanding waistline costs nearly £100 billion a year and puts a huge strain on the NHS, but it's not too late for a cultural shift

At this time of year in Japan, familiar figures begin to appear outside the country’s branches of KFC. Life-sized Colonel Sanders statues dressed in red satin Santa Claus outfits have long been a fixture of the festive season, and a symbol of an unlikely Christmas ritual.

What started as a 1970s marketing ploy to persuade Japanese people that KFC was a Christmas staple in the western world is now entrenched as a unique cultural tradition. Every year around four million Japanese feast upon what is known as the “KFC Special Christmas Dinner”. During this frenzied period, Christmas accounts for reportedly around one-third of KFC’s annual sales in Japan.

Back in the UK, despite KFC currently advertising delights such as the Stuffing Stacker Burger (975 calories) and Stuffing Tower Burger (730 calories) most of us will instead prefer a traditional home-cooked Christmas dinner. The problem is the other 364 days of the year, when the Japanese resume one of the healthiest diets on Earth and the British return to the lifestyle and junk food habits that have plunged our nation into a spiralling obesity epidemic.

According to a new report published this week, Britain’s expanding waistline is now costing nearly £100 billion a year, damaging national productivity by up to nine times more than previously thought. The report, commissioned by the Tony Blair Institute, found that two-thirds of the population are now considered overweight or obese (a rise of around 11 per cent since 1993). Within 15 years, meanwhile, the cost of obesity is set to grow by a further £10 billion.

Our diet, warns Henry Dimbleby, the Government’s former food advisor and founder of restaurant chain Leon, is rapidly driving the country to ruin. As he points out, by 2035 treating Type 2 diabetes alone (just one of a number of health conditions related to obesity) will cost an estimated £16.9 billion – more than is currently spent on all cancer treatment within the NHS.

“As our diet-related conditions get worse, the NHS sucks up more money from the rest of the government,” he grimly forecasts. “We become both a sickly and impoverished nation.”

Comparing ourselves to Japan, which, at just 4 per cent, has one of the lowest obesity rates of any country in the developed world, may seem a tall order. But Dimbleby and others argue that the country offers a salutary lesson in how we can come to grips with our own battle against the bulge.

Japan (alongside its East Asian neighbour South Korea) has successfully decoupled economic development from rising rates of obesity, proving that wealthy countries can keep their weight in check. But above all – and crucially with regard to the UK – that hasn’t always been the case in Japan. In fact, back in the 1960s, the country was deemed one of the least healthy in the G7, with the lowest life expectancy; its population growing fat on cheap US imports of food, which ramped up following the country’s defeat in the Second World War.

And yet, within a few decades, Japan achieved such a cultural shift in relation to food that it secured the coveted title of longest life expectancy in the world. Its successful transformation, the 53-year-old Dimbleby argues, demonstrates that obesity is an issue that can be fixed. Not by mass medication (the UK Government announced in June that it was rolling out a £40 million two-year pilot making anti-obesity drugs more widely available outside of hospital settings), but through addressing Britain’s increasingly toxic relationship with food. “People say the genie is out of the bottle and it’s all over,” he says. “But I think it is possible to change a culture.”

Starting with children is key, and here again the UK measures up unfavourably. When English children reach school age, according to the most recent NHS figures (2021/2022), around 10 per cent are already obese and 12 per cent overweight, rising to 23.4 per cent obese and 14.3 per cent overweight by the time they reach Year 6 (age 10 to 11). In Japan, 2019 statistics show that only 4 per cent of six- to 14-year-olds register as obese. In fact, according to the World Economic Forum, among the 41 countries in the EU and the OECD, Japan is the only country where fewer than one in five children is overweight.

By the time they reach secondary school, Japanese children are enrolled on an extracurricular club programme known as the “bukatsudō”. This scheme has been in place for decades and encourages children into physical activity seven days a week.

The US food writer Nancy Singleton Hachisu, who has been based in Japan since 1988 and published a series of Japanese cookbooks, placed all three of her now grown-up sons in the club programme. “They had to practise year-long before and after school and would get home at around 8pm,” she recalls.

For three decades, Singleton Hachisu has also run an English school, which currently has eight children aged six to 12. School meals are far healthier than in the West, she says. In 1954, Japan introduced the School Lunch Law which ensured a healthy meal for all pupils every day. This was bolstered in 2005 by separate legislation, which similarly made food education an integral part of the school curriculum. “You see some podgy or frankly overweight kids, but not often,” Singleton Hachisu says.

The traditional Japanese diet of fresh fish, small amounts of meat, tofu and vegetables is undeniably naturally healthier than most Western food. But the celebrity chef Andrew Kojima, the author of No Sushi, who cooked Japanese food for the late Queen on a number of occasions, says there are also beneficial customs in Japanese dining which could be easily adopted on British tables.

He cites three vital philosophical concepts in Japanese cooking which are ingrained from a young age. The first, “Hara hachi bu”, means eating only until you are 80 per cent full. The second, “Ichiju sansai”, translates to a soup and three side dishes. And the third, “Go-syoku”, is the concept of always eating five colours (red, yellow, green, white and black). Ultimately, he says, this boils down to simply ensuring variety, delaying gratification and appreciating whatever you eat rather than piling it all on one plate and wolfing it down. “In Western cooking, we tend to joke that beige food is nice food, but if you eat all beige food, that is not a healthy diet,” the 45-year-old says.

In Japan, there is little of the snacking and takeaway culture seen in Britain (this week the Waitrose Food and Drink report found almost one-third of the UK now sits down to eat only two meals a day, replacing the third with snacks). The quality of food available in institutional settings throughout Japan is also far healthier. In his book Ravenous, which explores ways to tackle the obesity crisis, Dimbleby recalls a 2019 stay in a Tokyo hospital after he suffered a nasty fall on the street. Breakfast was pickles, rice porridge and grilled fish. Lunch and dinner included a miso soup and steamed vegetables alongside grilled meat, fish, or an omelette.

He says such changes are possible in the UK without a dramatic increase in budgets. The charity Chefs in Schools, which Dimbleby co-founded in 2018, is aiming to improve menus in 5,000 schools in England over the next five years. He would also like to see an Ofsted-style inspection regime introduced for school dinners. “In schools and hospitals, there is no reason you couldn’t do it now if people who ran each of those institutions wanted to,” he says.

Adapting the Japanese “metabo” law is something he would also encourage in workplaces across the UK. The law, which was introduced in 2008, requires every Japanese citizen between 40 and 74 to meet required waistline sizes each year. Those who fail are offered counselling and incentivised to lose weight. Businesses can be fined if too many workers fall short.

In Britain, Dimbleby suggests this policy could be achieved under the guise of obliging companies to offer employees voluntary annual health checks. If nothing else, he argues, it would certainly provide a boost to Britain’s chronic lack of productivity. In Japan, annual sickness rates are, on average, 1.3 days per employee compared with 5.7 in the UK.

However, such changes require government intervention, and the current administration remains unwilling. The recommendations in the National Food Strategy, which Dimbleby led at the behest of Boris Johnson’s government, have been effectively ignored. Meanwhile anti-obesity measures, such as a ban on two-for-one junk food deals and introducing a 9pm watershed for advertising unhealthy food, have been delayed until 2025.

Campaigners are also calling for the sugar tax introduced for soft drinks in 2018 to be extended to other products. But Rishi Sunak, an evangelist of full-fat high-sugar Coca Cola, appears unmoved. Instead, Victoria Atkins, the new Health Secretary, has in recent days stressed the desire to appear “not nanny-stateish” and offer people “help and advice on how to be healthier”.

The problem is, due to the lack of government intervention and the power of corporations peddling us calorific food, we remain embroiled in a system where the chips are quite literally stacked against us. As our £100 billion junk-food bill demonstrates, Britain needs all the help it can get.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...s-uk-learn-nhs/

#7 ^

Fri, Dec-08-23, 05:56

WereBear

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It's not a fair fight.

Google is de-emphasizing meat in its search engines, to comply with the WHO recommendations, but they aren't trumpting that as PR. If that was a good thing, they would.

But I am getting skewed health information. On the regular, with that search engine. And it was hard enough wading through the acres of muck already.

While carnivore and keto have their own marketing scams, that shouldn't turn someone away from my own success. It's part of learning how to distinguish real from fake.

One clue is that the fake is usually slick, conventionally attractive, and has better production values

but some people have been so "marketized" they see that as a sign of quality.

Not that most are likely to look up studies, but I advise them to do what I do, which is look for people who are qualified to explain the studies. It's a little more effort, though. Making all these decisions.

I fear there will always be perfectly nice people who find this whole thing fraught and never get on the right track.

Also, a good point to emphasize to friends and family is that someone must have an ad clearly marked on their account, post, hashtags, etc. It's supposed to be transparent. We should start reporting them to the FCC, who has a renewed interest in tracking down the worst of the con artist influencers in the US.

Not that I'm bragging. It never should have slackened off in the first place. It's part of the heckscape we live in now.

#8 ^

Fri, Dec-08-23, 09:19

JEY100 JEY100 is offline

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Google is de-emphasizing meat in its search engines, to comply with the WHO recommendations, but they aren't trumpting that as PR. If that was a good thing, they would.

really? I am so naive. Never use Google anyway, but Duck, Duck, Go. It supposed to have fewer ads, and they are marked as such.

Waistlines or waist to height ratio are a fairer metric than BMI.

Last edited by JEY100 : Fri, Dec-08-23 at 12:16.

#9 ^

Fri, Dec-08-23, 18:15

Calianna

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I got distracted by life back when this thread first started, but this paragraph in the first article really irritated me - not so much the entire paragraph, but the one line:

Quote:

The results will be distributed to staff on colour-coded paper: pink means that someone is overweight or obese, yellow indicates they are at risk and white confirms they are a healthy weight. People can choose to open the letter at home to keep it private from their colleagues but they cannot hide the findings from their boss. Those who have seen their waistline expand over the course of the year may be referred to a company doctor, who will make recommendations about their lifestyle or diet. Nobody is fired for being fat, but if an employee ignores their boss’s advice, then the matter can be escalated up to their “boss’s boss”. If they still refuse to take action the “boss’s boss’s boss” can get involved. I ask whether it could end up with the chief executive of the company and am told that it has never got that far. Most people choose to lose weight rather than risk increasingly public humiliation.

The idea that the ones who have gained too much weight CHOOSE to lose weight is what bothers me about it. I doubt seriously that any of the Japanese who are obese ever CHOSE to gain weight to begin with.

I know I sure didn't.

Quote:

"Most choose to lose weight".

I CHOSE over and over to lose weight, and failed every single time. Every time I regained, I gained more and more weight.

Something was clearly broken in the way I processed low fat foods, because give me a tiny serving of starch or sugar and it just led to larger servings of starch and sugar. It was like giving a drug addict just a little hit. Once I got started, I couldn't stop.

I should have seen the signs much earlier than I did that I seriously needed to give up the starches and sugars and return to a low carb way of eating, since the few years I did LC (off and on) in the 70's were the only times in my entire life that I'd had energy and was a relatively normal weight.

Weight loss just happened to come along with LC (at least for a while), and even though I've regained a rather disturbingly large chunk of weight, I'm not nearly as heavy as I was at my peak.

/end rant

#10 ^

Fri, Dec-08-23, 19:09

Calianna

Senior Member

Posts: 1,901

Plan: Atkins-ish (hypoglycemia)
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BF:
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This is what bothers me the most in the 2nd article:

Quote:

By the time they reach secondary school, Japanese children are enrolled on an extracurricular club programme known as the “bukatsudō”. This scheme has been in place for decades and encourages children into physical activity seven days a week.

The US food writer Nancy Singleton Hachisu, who has been based in Japan since 1988 and published a series of Japanese cookbooks, placed all three of her now grown-up sons in the club programme. “They had to practise year-long before and after school and would get home at around 8pm,” she recalls.

How many hours of practice were these kids doing each day?!

Even if they were only practicing for a hour before school, the fact that they never got home from practice until 8pm means they must have put in at least 4-5 hours of organized sports practice daily, on top of whatever phys ed classes they had during the school day.

Granted, the lack of physical activity many school kids in the US engage in is not good for them, and is likely a factor in the rate of overweight children in this country.

But if it takes that many hours of intense exercise 7 days a week in just to avoid becoming overweight, then by the calories in/calories out mantra, they're still eating too much, because what happens when one of them is sick or breaks a leg and can't attend practice?

How about when they become adults - how exactly are they to continue with that kind of exercise schedule when they reach adulthood in order to maintain the work required healthy weight, while holding down full time jobs, with children of their own to care for, households to maintain, and meals to prepare.

Something about the way the Japanese diet and life are being descried doesn't strike me as being entirely accurate.

Oh wait, I think I might see it:

I just now looked up the cookbook writer mentioned above - Nancy Singleton Hachisu. Turns out that she has some videos, and I'm afraid she's not thin at all.

I'm not criticizing her for being overweight (It'd be highly hypocritical of me to do that) and she's certainly not morbidly obese, but the implication in this article is that she has adopted the Japanese diet (and surely their exercise principles as well), so while reading this article, I thought surely she must be maintaining a very healthy weight by following the Japanese food ideals expressed in her cookbooks.

And I'm really sorry, but unless the Japanese women she's pictured with are excessively thin, she's not a normal weight.

(If I was the author of this article, I would not have used her in this particular article as my example of a US food writer living a Japanese lifestyle, because surely I'm not the only person who looked her up and realized that living the Japanese lifestyle and eating a Japanese diet has not resulted in her looking like she's a normal weight.)

#11 ^

Sun, Dec-10-23, 06:14

WereBear

Senior Member

Posts: 14,684

Plan: EpiPaleo/Primal/LowOx
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BF:
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Location: USA

I suspect the addictive effect of carbs combined with fake food infiltration, and I suspect very few are eating the traditional diet. One thing entirely overlooked in this "tech solutions for biological problems" approach is how so many cultures no longer have a job opening for homemaker.

Something has to give, and it's that 1950's "real women have shiny floors" aesthetic. But no one is cooking because no one has the time. Even though fast food is more expensive, it saves hours in the week and when we are exhausted it's three times as hard to stick with.

But it's still so economical. Even with the grocery prices artificially inflated. The baking goods companies are suing the egg companies for deliberately rigging the prices.

We need a better system than corporations suing each other to reveal the truth about their "business" practices.

#12 ^

Fri, Jan-19-24, 13:26

Demi

Strong Girls Rock!

Posts: 26,772

Plan: Muscle Centric
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BF:
Progress: 109%

Location: UK

Quote:

It's a nation where just 4pc are very overweight thanks to compulsory weigh-ins at work - and apps that shout insults at fat people... How a trip to Japan shocked this group of obese Brits into losing weight

A bustling market in Tokyo and locals are minding their own business, browsing stalls or rushing to work — until a group of obese Brits stroll past and stop them in their tracks. Suddenly, heads start to turn, and the visitors are struck by the sense they’re being gossiped about.

‘All the school kids — they pointed and laughed at us,’ says an aghast Tiffany, 24. ‘They are so open about being rude.’

Marisa, 32, is equally shocked. ‘I don’t feel like I should be here,’ she says. ‘It blows my mind that you’re not allowed to be who you are, and you just have to fit in.’

In Britain, where more than 25 per cent of adults are obese — or have a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or above — the group would barely raise an eyebrow. Here in Japan, however, where the obesity rate is just four per cent, they are an anomaly; figures of shame in a society where fat is scorned. And that is precisely why they have come to the country, as part of Channel 4 documentary series Around The World In 80 Weighs.

The group of six, whose combined weight is 855 kg, or 134 st, travel the globe to learn what other countries are doing to tackle obesity. They include Russell, 36, a healthcare insurer from Kent — who developed diabetes after his weight topped 30 st — and his wife Marisa, 31, an administrator, who started comfort eating at school after being bullied. ‘If anything bad happened, I would turn to food,’ she says.

Tiffany, an NHS waste co-ordinator, believed she was ‘this disgusting human being’ after being called fat daily as a child, and Therri-Jay, 32, a community officer from London, turned to food to cope after her best friend was murdered when she was just 14.

Then there’s 34-year-old Phil, a behaviour welfare coach from Leeds, who wants to lose weight to be a better father to his four-year-old son; while housewife Susan, 57, from Northamptonshire, blames her weight on grappling with boredom and loss.

‘I’m a bit in limbo,’ she says. ‘The children don’t need me. Cooking is a hobby but that turns into eating.’

While all members of the group — who have an average waist circumference of 54 in — have psychological triggers that fuel their overeating, our British culture of buy-one-get-one free junk-food deals, takeaways and whipped cream lattes also encourages them at every turn.

‘Society is a lot to blame for me being overweight,’ claims Therri-Jay, who laments the chicken and Chinese fast-food joints she sees ‘everywhere’, adding: ‘It makes you really think — does my country even care about me?’

So what is different in Japan, where they live and eat like locals for five days? And could this nation’s attitude towards food help foster healthier eating habits in the UK?

Of course, the national diet — known as washoku — is a world apart from our cuisine of sugary cereals, endless snacks and stodgy ready meals. Largely fresh and unprocessed, it centres on rice, fermented vegetables, soya and fish. Because Japan is a group of islands, its residents eat more fish than other Asian countries: 80g to 100g every day.

That’s quite something compared with the two-thirds of Brits who don’t even eat the recommended two portions of fish a week.

‘Vegetables that have been fermented, either by pickling with vinegar or with salt, have been broken down by bacteria and are increasingly shown to support gut health,’ says Laura Southern, nutritionist at London Food Therapy.

‘As fish is a primary source of protein for the Japanese, and they don’t eat the same quantities of red meat as the West, their diet is lower in saturated fat, which can lead to high blood pressure and heart disease.’

Soy — usually in the form of tofu, edamame or natto, which is traditionally eaten for breakfast — also provides protein, while the Japanese eschew sugary lattes for green tea, which Southern says is packed with ‘stress-reducing plant compounds and high levels of antioxidants linked to improved brain health’.

Seaweed is another staple — it contains alginate, which stops the body absorbing fat — while meals end with fruit, and puddings are a rare treat. Little wonder, then, that Japanese people consume on average 300 fewer calories a day than Brits, and 48.8g sugar per day compared with our 100.4g, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation.

The presentation of food is just as important as the content.

Japanese YouTubers Mr and Mrs Eats (they never reveal their real names), who chaperone the Brits around Tokyo in the show, explain that rather than using one large plate, the Japanese eat from a small bowl, rotating different dishes.

The slender Mrs Eats says: ‘We eat little by little so you don’t over eat.’

Russell, who wants to lose weight with Marisa so they’re healthy enough to have children, is partial to bread, egg fried rice and prawn crackers. He decides the strategy ‘makes sense, because sometimes I leave the best bit till right at the end and that makes you finish everything on the plate even if you’re stuffed’.

Bingeing is also more difficult if you’re using chopsticks. The Brits describe them as ‘torture’ to eat with, but research from Ohio State University has found they make eating more enjoyable.

British model Lisa Snowdon has attributed her phenomenal figure to them, saying: ‘If I’m hungry and use a fork, I shovel food in. With chopsticks, it takes longer and tricks me into eating less.’

Then there’s the Japanese saying, hara hachi bu, which means ‘to eat till you are 80 per cent full’, that children are taught from a young age.

But diet alone doesn’t explain why Japan had the longest average life expectancy among G7 countries in 2020. The island of Okinawa is home to the highest number of centenarians in the world. Unlike our MPs who dither over banning fatty BOGOF products, Japan’s politicians consider it their duty to control the nation’s health.

In 2008, after Western fast food had begun to overtake traditional Japanese fare in popularity, and the country’s men were found to be 10 per cent and women 6 per cent heavier than a decade earlier, the authorities took the extraordinary step of making it mandatory for companies to carry out annual health checks on staff, with weight monitored.

Men with a waist circumference of over 33in and women whose waists measured over 35in were given exercise and diet plans — and firms that failed to bring their staff’s weight under control faced fines.

‘If it can prevent even a small number of people from developing cardiovascular diseases, it will be good news for them and their families,’ said director of the Japan Society for the Study of Obesity, Yuji Matsuzawa, at the time.

All of which ‘might sound weird to you guys,’ says Mrs Eats, as she takes the group to fragrance company Kao to watch a health check in action, and marvel at the healthy canteen lunch menu, created by company dieticians, that costs staff just £2.

But Therri-Jay is too unsettled to eat, describing how feeling like a ‘second-class citizen’ at home makes her reach for burgers, chocolate and popcorn. ‘We’ve not been told how to cope,’ she cries.

Yet whether staff here are happy about the draconian measures enforced on them is another matter — in 2023 Japan ranked last among 18 countries surveyed for workplace wellbeing, with only 49 per cent describing themselves as happy in their jobs.

Tiffany, for her part, doesn’t see her obesity as a problem, having worked hard to overcome the trauma of being sent to a personal trainer aged 11 by her own mother; and of being bullied at school for her weight. She now weightlifts, cheerleads and firmly believes ‘you can be healthy when you’re obese. I’m not sure if I grew up in this environment I would be the same person’.

Certainly, she would be uncomfortable with the fat-shaming that is de rigueur in Japan. ‘It’s super normal for [people] to just grab you and say: “What’s going on here, buddy, you’ve picked up a few pounds,” ’ explains Mr Eats, who introduces the visitors to an employee who failed his health test and was ordered to walk 10,000 steps a day until he was slim again.

Walking is a national pastime in Japan, with the average Japanese person taking 6,500 steps a day, partly because driving is expensive — 69 per cent of households have access to a car there, compared with 77 per cent in the UK.

Japan has another weapon in its fitness armoury in the form of dai-ichi —an exercise routine that takes just three minutes, requires no equipment, and is broadcast to a backdrop of piano music several times a day on a Japanese public radio station.

Followed by everyone from children to the elderly, it comprises 13 simple moves, including arm raises and star jumps.

Therri-Jay performs the routine in Kao’s offices, mortified at showing everyone her ‘underneath’ while touching her toes.

Yet she concludes: ‘If we had to do that every morning at work I think we’d be more productive, more happy and I feel like we’d enjoy movement more.’ There are other, darker, aspects to Japan’s attitude towards the overweight. They include exercise apps such as Nenshou, launched in 2013, in which an on-screen animated character dishes out digital humiliation in the form of statements such as: ‘Fat girl, do some more exercise, OK?’ Russell and Phil, greeted by a ‘good morning, tubby!’ by the avatar on the app they are shown, appear appalled.

‘That wouldn’t go down well in the UK,’ says Phil. ‘It’s blown my mind that that’s allowed.’

More dubious still is an emerging market for renting obese people, for around £11 an hour, by companies such as Debucari, which launched in 2021.

Stressing that it is not an escort service, Debucari states its goal is to promote ‘progression away from an era where being fat had a negative image’ — yet it also suggests the obese can be hired to help clients look slimmer.

In the Channel 4 documentary, one such ‘body’ for hire, recalls how she had been told to lose weight in her previous job in a café because ‘in these places you must be thin’.

Tiffany is, not unreasonably, unconvinced by the practice: ‘I don’t quite believe there is zero fetishness about it.’

On their final day the group visit a community bath house, where locals believe submersing themselves in 42c water raises their metabolism and promotes weight loss (although there is little evidence to back up their claims, and the baths apparently cause cardiac problems and are reported to be responsible for 10 per cent of all sudden deaths in Japan).

So nonchalant are most Japanese about their bodies that there are no private changing rooms at the baths, a deal-breaker no doubt for many prudish Brits.

Horrified at the prospect of changing publicly, Phil opts out — but Russell, despite ruing the belly he describes as an ‘apron’, takes the plunge: ‘I’m here to shock myself and create a new mindset.’

He describes his immersion into Japanese lifestyle as ‘pretty emotive’, while wife Marisa calls it ‘an eye-opener’. She admits: ‘In 15 years we might not be here if we don’t change.’

Before they leave the group get on the scales — and discover they’ve lost 17kg in total in just five days. They’re delighted.

‘We’re so lucky to come to Japan,’ says Susan. ‘They’re so disciplined as a country. We all agreed we’ll take the discipline with us.’

Of course, no amount of chopsticks, workouts on national radio or domineering bosses can alleviate emotional angst, and sniggering at obese people in public is not the answer.

But perhaps incorporating a few of Japan’s strategies for weight control into our national psyche might finally stop the habit too many of us have, of reaching for the biscuit jar every time we need a pick-me-up.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowb...ing-weight.html

Quote:

Around the World in 80 Weighs

In this warm but eye-opening series, six people from across Britain, who are each living with obesity, travel the globe to learn the diverse reasons why people around the world are affected by obesity

https://www.channel4.com/programmes...ld-in-80-weighs

#13 ^

Fri, Jan-19-24, 18:24

Calianna

Senior Member

Posts: 1,901

Plan: Atkins-ish (hypoglycemia)
Stats: 000/000/000 Female 63

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Progress: 50%

Wow.

I think there's plenty of fat shaming already without national policies that encourage such obvious fat shaming through non-official channels - especially such blatant fat shaming of those who are mere visitors to that country.

The 4% of the native population that is obese there - We know they're subjected to official fat shaming. But we also know it's not ALWAYS the fault of the obese individual, since there are medical conditions unrelated to diet that can cause massive weight gain.

Other times obesity ends up being the ultimate result of having gone on so many extreme diets in a desperate attempt to lose down to an acceptable weight - the constant yo-yo-ing up and down has been shown to result in weight regain, plus interest.

The Biggest Loser had a big prize at the end, but the almost inevitable regain (unless they kept up with the extreme diet AND the extreme exercise schedule) was still a sad example of what happens with those who are so desperate to lose weight that they starve and exercise themselves thin.

The stress alone of being harassed about weight can result in "stuffing" your feelings, and gaining even more weight.

(I just had a gloomy thought - what happens to those in Japan who really can't lose weight? They've being harassed at work, and apparently also harassed in public - do they end up quitting their jobs and isolating themselves to avoid the constant harassment and embarrassment? Do they become suicidal because they've tried everything and nothing works? The other articles said that while they won't be fired for being obese, the employee will be dealt with (might as well call it official harassment) by their boss or boss's boss etc. They said it has never gotten to the point that the chief executive of the company has gotten involved in handling of an obese employee who "refuses to take advice". But I also wonder just how they prove that an employee has refused to take diet and exercise advice? Do they have someone following the employee around day and night to prove that they're sneaking Big Mac's and fries on the side, and not actually exercising at the gym?)

While it's good that they've managed to avoid the massive obesity problems that are plaguing so many developed countries, I really question their methods.

#14 ^

Sat, Jan-20-24, 03:38

WereBear

Senior Member

Posts: 14,684

Plan: EpiPaleo/Primal/LowOx
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BF:
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Location: USA

The part that interests me is whether or not shamed people in Japan actually do eat more healthfully as a result. Do they know what that is? Is it generally available?

Nagging doesn't work if you don't know what to do. And I've been stared at for leaving pizza crusts on my plate. Didn't change my behavior

If we are psychologically manipulated towards change it's not going to work long term. Nagging is what drives people to Biggest Loser behavior, which only makes things worse.

The culture told me I HAD to eat lots of vegetables and whole grains, and then I discover how oxalate sensitive I am. I tried to lose weight with low fat and was grateful I could stay in one size that way, but it wasn't natural or fulfilling to my body. Then, as I got older, low fat/exercise stopped working at all.

In the end, I was desperate, and took the choice that was sure to kill me, Atkins. And it made me healthier.

THAT, I think, is the real problem. Over the last few years, I can hardly believe how much the general public has been scared away from animal foods by the incessant marketing that masquerades as "health advice."

And I can't be the only one with an overactive pancreas. It's doesn't take much carbs for it to conclude I've fallen into a beehive and need a tanker car of insulin. And now I'm really hungry.