How Japan escaped Obesity while America got Fat

15 years ago, I moved from Texas to Japan. I quickly had this weird feeling that something was off about the people here. I couldn't quite put my finger on it at first, but the more I looked around, eventually I realized what it was. Nobody's fat. Since 1960, the obesity rate in America has skyrocketed from 12% to over 40% today. That means America's obesity rate is almost 10 times Japan's obesity rate of just 4.5%. The average American would be considered fat in Japan. If you're like an even American, medium level fat, you are completely fat here. I didn't realize it because I was fitting in like Australian people, but then when I came back to Japan, I noticed that I was fat. It's way easier to lose weight in Japan than in the States. But why? What's Japan's big secret? There's a million things it could be. Maybe it's green tea. Or maybe it's lower smoking rates in Japan. Actually, no. Smoking rates are higher in Japan. 25% of Japanese men smoke, but only 13% of Americans do. Maybe more people go to the gym here. Actually, no. Only 3.3% of people have a gym membership here, while 21% of Americans do. Maybe it's because everyone eats fermented soybeans for breakfast. Actually, it's way simpler than that. The whole food environment is just different in certain key ways. In Japan, you actually cannot make excuses to gain weight. But maybe in the States, maybe it's not the case because you're surrounded by lots of trouble. When I came to Japan all those years ago, I basically just ate whatever looked good and I was losing weight. So let's say you wake up, you get ready for the day, and you're off to get a good breakfast. What are your options? Well, per person, there are 15 times as many fast food establishments in America compared to Japan. So the average American's breakfast options might look like... Single-handedly, the worst croissant I've ever put in my mouth. McGriddle. Ew, it's sweet. What the f***? All of our favorite foods. So there's plenty of McDonald's you can go to here in Japan, but Japan also has over 4,000 rice bowl establishments. At places like Yoshinoya, for just $4, you can get what is actually a quite traditional Japanese breakfast. A small bowl of rice, fermented soybeans, roasted fish, and miso soup. But let's say you don't have much time, and so you just want to grab something quick and go. The answer, convenience stores. 7-Eleven. Wow, this is so glossy. Do I come to Japan just for the 7-Eleven? More and more people are posting online about how in love they are with Japanese konbinis, convenience stores, and for good reason. They actually have a huge selection of pretty decent food. So here's what you can get for about $9 USD. Fish simmered in miso, ramen-style eggs, a rice ball, roasted chicken, a salad, and a green tea. And they have many other things, like a decent selection of roasted fish, fruits, salads, and even low-calorie stuff, like these noodles made of tofu. The pre-prepared foods are also quite decent, like fish with mushrooms and radish, chicken gizzards with green onion, shrimp and squid with broccoli, boiled eggs, and steamed chicken with pickled veggies. The bendos are a little bit more junky, but they're much better than American options. So the first key difference is convenience. Convenience doesn't always mean junk. However, the average American convenience store doesn't have many options of reasonably healthy things to eat. You might be able to get some nuts or a protein bar. But other than that, it's just chips, candy, processed food, and some fried stuff sitting under a heat lamp. So yeah, of course, super health conscious Japanese people don't get all their meals from a convenience store. Only if I'm too busy and I have no time to cook. The thing is that the overall standard for food in Japan is much higher in general. So even the convenience stores have reasonably healthy choices. Japan has about 55,000 convenience stores, meaning Japan has almost 10 times as many convenience stores per square kilometer than America. Which is great because from what I've seen, Japanese people, or at least Tokyo people, are extremely busy. Japanese people in general sleep way less than Americans, which is actually very unhealthy. Yet they're still much thinner. So yeah, there are healthy restaurants and supermarkets in the US. But when it comes to cheap, quick, and convenient food, it's often very unhealthy. In Japan, for lunch, I have the option to buy some fried junk or go to McDonald's for lunch. But it's often just as easy to, say, walk into Matsuya and get something like a bowl of rice with some stewed beef, a half-boiled egg, some kimchi, and a bowl of miso soup with plenty of pickled ginger, of course. When I first got to Japan, I thought most things weren't sweet enough. Now, after living in Japan for more than a decade, when I visit America, most things taste way too sweet. According to 2021 statistics, the average Japanese person eats half the sugar of Americans. Americans eat 33.7 kilograms of sugar per year, but Japanese people only eat 17.7 kilograms. The thing with sugar is that the reason people eat too much sugar is that they want a lot of sugar because they eat too much sugar. This 2016 study found that after just two months of people doing a low-sugar diet, cutting their simple sugar intake by 40%, they started to rate sweet foods as significantly sweeter, as much as 40% sweeter than before. That's exactly what happened to me. At first, Japanese sweets didn't taste sweet enough. Then I got used to it, and now they taste plain sweet. So I think the Japanese just eat less sweet, less caloric things, and they eat less of it. The soda cups are just smaller here in Japan. This is a large cup at McDonald's in Japan. This is an American small. The American small is actually slightly larger than the Japanese large. And of course, the American large is about twice as big as the Japanese large. Even the milk is way smaller. This is the standard size of milk here. Next, take a look at this. The selling point of this sweet drink is actually that it's small. It says nomikiri saizu, meaning a size you can finish. And these half-sized drinks are in most of the vending machines. Hey, why'd you get this small one? I think this size is too much for me, so I can finish this. But this one's only 10 yen more. You could have gotten like... This one's like twice as big. It's too much, and I don't want to waste it. You don't want like a giant drink? You don't want to get like as much drink for your money? No. No one in Japan drinks a big gulp. You can't even get it anywhere. Now that's what I call a large. I couldn't find any big gulps in Tokyo, but I could find these tiny cans of soda. Who the f**k drinks this s**t? If you go to a restaurant in Japan, what percentage of the people would you say are drinking soda? Oh, I think less than 10%. Only water and tea? Yeah, I think so. It's better. So Japanese people just don't drink that much soda. The average person here drinks 30 liters of soda a year, but the average American drinks five times that much, 154 liters per year. So for example, with this vending machine, if you don't want anything sweet, five different types of unsweetened tea, you can get water, and then there's black coffee. By the way, these vending machines are everywhere. Japan has the most vending machines per person on the planet, around 4 million, or one for every 30 people. Next is key number three, school lunch. The Japanese approach to feeding their school kids is completely different from America. Do the teachers even eat this stuff? We don't eat school lunch. They don't, they don't touch it. So I'm half American. I went to elementary school in both Japan and the United States. In the United States, the food was just junk food. We had tater tots, we had sloppy joes. It's like everything bad for you. You know, chocolate milk. In middle school, we would get chocolate milk. Chocolate milk for what? Just like, if you want chocolate milk, go ahead. Serve for lunch at a high school. Students in Woodbridge, New Jersey say the food is inedible. Some high school students who are so sick of their school food, they've started a protest movement against it. In 1970, the law changed. Schools could now turn to private, for-profit companies to feed their students. In American schools, it's common to have plenty of processed foods on the menu. You cut back on everything. Salary, supplies, the food. But if we go over and take a look at Japan, school lunches are planned out by the school's designated nutritionist. And they are made from scratch every single day. If you're in Japan, every meal is meant to be healthy. Vegetables, there'd be rice, some fish, some meats, and a little bit of pickled vegetables. So that by the time, you know, that you're 16, 17, 18, you're not going to be fat. It'd be very rare that you're going to see a child that's fat in Japan. I think that carries you your whole life. It sets your diet. You got like a nutrition education that actually worked. Yeah. The fourth key is portion sizes. The portion sizes are generally just a little smaller wherever you go. Normal size, like meal size in Australia is usually big. I couldn't finish eating them, but then I got used to it. And I actually gained 12 kg there. So that's like 25 pounds. Double tacos designed to keep your stomach and your wallet full. I'm full! America's biggest breakfast for only $9.99. I think there's two big reasons why Japan doesn't take the American approach of giving you huge portions to make you feel like you got your money's worth. First off, don't do this in Japan. A big concept here is mottainai or wasteful. Elementary school, middle school. If you cannot finish the meal, you don't have like lunch break. So you just have to sit there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like I remember some of my friends couldn't finish eating and then like crying and eating. The idea came from mottainai. You cannot waste food because that's the life of plants and animals. Yeah, leaving food is considered bad. It's kind of bad manners to leave unfinished food and especially rice scattered about on your plate. Next, it's not really a thing here to get a container to take leftovers home. You're expected to finish your meal at the restaurant. So the average restaurant serves people reasonably sized, not too big portions that most people should be able to finish in one sitting. Most packages of snacks here are sized so that you can comfortably finish them without feeling stuffed. Like look how small all these little packages of chocolates are. If you eat the normal American diet, you'll get fat. In Japan, if you just eat whatever everyone else eats, then you get thin. Yeah. Do you think that's pretty accurate? Yeah, I think it's accurate. There are some people who are maybe starting to get a little bit overweight and I suspect they're eating too much junk food. So the fifth point is variety. It's easy to eat and drink healthy when you have plenty of options and when you're not getting bored eating the same handful of healthy meals over and over again. People can eat big portions of junk if they want, but it's usually just as easy to get a variety of reasonably priced, relatively healthy food. What I like about drinking culture in Japan is that even if you keep drinking at the izakaya or bar, you see so many menu, the healthy food on the menu. If you go to America, fried chicken, you know, fried potato, you know, like french fries. Most of the places to go to drink have decent food options. You can expect to get some really solid food that's actually quite healthy at a classic Japanese pub, an izakaya. There are about 7,500 izakayas in Japan, more than the total number of fast food burger chains like McDonald's or Burger King. Now, I'm not necessarily saying you should replace fast food with alcohol, but even if you're walking in somewhere planning to get drunk, there's all kinds of simple, healthy, and delicious dishes. There's one other quick point I want to touch on, but first let me make it clear that there are better quality food options than convenience stores, rice bowl chains, or izakayas, of course. Most Japanese people wouldn't even think of these places as healthy, but this isn't about optimal health. It's about how you can be reasonably healthy with not that much effort. Lately, the word has been getting out about how bad vegetable oils or seed oils are for health. It's kind of impressive how clever marketing got us to think that we need to crush and heavily refine thousands of seeds with a long industrial process to get the oil that we need to cook with to be healthy. Sure, you can buy vegetable oil in Japan and people do cook with it, but it's very interesting to note that Japanese people consume about one half of the seed oils of Americans. The ironic thing about seed oils is that they become more unhealthy when you cook with them, especially if you fry with them. That's because the fats are very fragile and easily break down when heated, which is not the case for saturated fats like, say, beef tallow, which are very resilient to heat. This brings us to the sponsor of this video, the seed oil-free masa chips. More than four years ago, I started investigating how in the world we got tricked into thinking that we should be eating vegetable oils to be healthy. 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