undefined | Better HN

0 pointscommitpizza3y ago0 comments

Even so, being overweight is unhealthy and if you go into a store in Japan it's hard(er) to find unhealthy foods. In Sweden, the amount of candy that is available is almost scary and because I'm used to it, it wasn't until I visited other countries like Japan that this became clear to me how bad it is for me and society in large. It is really, really hard to avoid buying unhealthy foods when so many of the options are unhealthy. You have to read all packages very intimiately in order to know.

Swedes usually eat sandwiches in the morning while many Japanese people eat rice and fish. There were no almost no bread available in the stores when I visited and I think that is also telling. When I went to the cinema in Japan, it was only us foreigners that bought candy (which there were very little of and very expensive). I saw no one else buy anything, they just went in and enjoyed the movie. When eating out, there were a lot of choices of good quality restaurants and even the fast food seems quite healthy or at least have options that isn't dripping with fat and sugars like the alternatives in the west.

Another example is ice tea. It's very popular in Japan it seemed like. It existed everywhere in shops and vending machines. Here it's almost impossible to buy. You can buy hundreds of different kinds of expensive sugar water but ice tea is hard to find in the general store.

If rice is so bad that the article claims, japanese people should be extremely unhealthy but in reality it seems it's the complete reverse at least from my personal experience. I don't know the health status of Japanese people in general and a lot of them smoke but they still at least seem more healthy than Swedes on a society level.

Okinawa, which I visited, has a lot of old people and is one of the "blue zones" of the world were a lot of people live to be 100 years old or older.

I'm just saying that I don't believe what the article claims since my experience that I have seen with my own eyes tells me a different story. The article seems extremely likely to be click-bait and possible just false information. I'm expecting to at least get some notion of what the claims are by reading the ingress and I'm not going to pay for reading what I assume is going to be clickbait.

I just think this is common practice by "journalists" today and I think it's depressing.

0 comments

1 comments · 1 top-level

midoridensha3y ago

>Swedes usually eat sandwiches in the morning while many Japanese people eat rice and fish. There were no almost no bread available in the stores when I visited and I think that is also telling.

What century did you last visit Japan? Bread is very, very common here. A typical "Japanese" breakfast these days at a cafe is toast and coffee, and every grocery store has bread easily available for 100-300 yen (depending on quality). Bread is typically sliced thicker here though, and you can buy the bread with different slice thickness. Bakeries are also common, with many European-style breads and pastries.

A more traditional Japanese breakfast might be natto (fermented beans), rice, and raw egg with a little fish, but toast and coffee are extremely common and popular these days.

>I don't know the health status of Japanese people in general and a lot of them smoke but they still at least seem more healthy than Swedes on a society level.

Smoking is going down lately; with the 2020 Olympics, they passed new laws restricting indoor smoking, so people are quitting. It's gotten really hard to find restaurants that allow smoking inside.

But yes, overall, Japanese still eat a lot of rice, and are much thinner on average than Americans (I don't know about Swedes). The idea that rice eaters are all diabetic is utterly ridiculous and defies reality; any "journalist" who writes this obviously has never been to Asia.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse