Joseph Everett - WIL
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2018–2023
7:01 · 25M views · Jan 23, 2018
Joseph Everett compares the food environment of the US, with roughly 30% obesity, to Japan's, around 3.5%. He argues that what is available and normal to eat explains much of the gap.
HN commenters recommend it as an accurate account of everyday Japanese eating and of why the US food environment is so much worse.
5 comments from Hacker News
Re diet: putting aside that alcohol-per-capita consumption here in Japan is less than the OECD average [1], and also how the article is actually about how the introduction of meat into the Japanese diet has caused a decrease in strokes (i.e. this is probably off-topic); it is true that if you are eating out cheaply, you'll likely find lots of rice and meat stuff like gyuudon (beef on rice), katsudon (breaded meat on rice) and what not. But a normal Japanese meal generally has a pretty good mix of stuff - some fermented side dishes (tsukemono), some veggies, miso soup, some rice or noodles, some fish, maybe some meat. Perhaps my wife is an outlier, but every meal she's cooked for our household has had at least 3 dishes of different categories as a part of it, and my impression from seeing other households and just looking at a typical bento box, is that that's a pretty normal expectation for any healthy meal. Someone else pointed me to this Youtube video on the topic on a different thread, and I'd say it's pretty accurate [2]. When I go to drinking bars, izakayas, with Japanese people they usually tend to do the same and order a variety of small dishes too - it's not common to just get fried chicken (karaage), but rather people almost always also throw in salty drinking foods (otsumami), which usually include seafood, pickles and vegetables (shiokara, takowasa, various tsukemono and so on). Even then, if someone orders sweets or something, they tend to be a lot less unhealthy
Yup I agree. I call it the food gravity problem of america. Trying to eat healthy here is like trying to beat gravity: This youtube video goes into more detail about the US problem compared to japan: "Why is it so Easy to be Thin in Japan?" this video
Speaking of Japan, I recently saw an interesting video about why Japanese people are so thin, compared to say the US: this video
I'd be surprised if the ratios matched up exactly. That'd mean the only factor dictating the level of obesity is food culture. Not likely. I'm sure Japan has a variety of unhealthy foods, I don't see how that matters. That unhealthy food exists in Japan doesn't tell us anything about how much of it people actually eat. That's why I linked the video, its author talks about the experience of the average person, here's an exact link: this video . I cannot stress this enough, the only thing that matters is what is readily available to the average person. That's the determining factor of most people's diets, not what's theoretically possible to purchase.
> Are you saying these drinks machines only dispense water? Kind of? this video The healthy/unhealtly food availability ratio in the western world is like 10%/90% whereas in Japan it seems closer to 70%/30%. Personally, I have never seen a vending machine in the western world that had a healthy drink in it that wasn't plain water.