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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   42541 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest. (South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.)

On personal anecdote this feels kind of more of an indictment of the modern Western nutrition and food knowhow, whatever that consists of. I spent an year there, and basic Japanese university cafeteria chow + restaurant food had me lose 15kg, going from overweight to borderline normal, in a few months, without any special effort on my part. Like, a bowl of rice + some toppings would have me totally lose any sense of hunger for the rest of the day while keeping me energetic and alert (and doing more exercise than ever since), and I'd have to consciously try and eat more than that. Seems to work fine on the native population too.

I've posted about this before but I firmly believe that the answer to this is the lithium/chemical hunger hypothesis. I experienced the same thing when I was in Japan, but I was eating incredibly rich gourmet beef ramen for breakfast and washing it down with a sweet pastry. Still lost vast amounts of weight.

I don't have a strong position on this so random thoughts:

  • Japan makes you walk. I regularly travel between countries and when I look at my health app on my phone I can see exactly when I arrive and leave Japan because the steps taken in Japan are significantly higher than any other country I spend time in. The cities are set up such that you must walk far and wide. Train stations are large and mazelike. (This may not apply if you have a car in Japan- I have never driven in Asia.)
  • Japan is the most difficult country I've visited to eat healthy in. Fresh fruits and vegetables are very expensive. (Yes there's cheap fruit/veggie stores but you have to seek them out.) It is the hardest country to find roasted meats without added fats in. Cuts of meat that are popular are very fatty. If you like seafood you will have a much easier time eating healthy (though you'll still be dodging breading and mayo.) I have struggled with my weight my whole life, the endless bowls of pasta and sandos and uber processed snacks everywhere are hard for me to resist.
  • Asian food in general tends to be less calorically dense than western foods, and spiciness has a mild laxative effect that reduces calories slightly as well. I think these two are slightly less applicable to Japanese food vs. Chinese or Thai cuisines, but the effect is still there if you're comparing rice to baguette or more calorically dense western foods.
  • I believe there's a social effect on people's sizes as well. I had a black friend in America who is overweight, lose quite a bit of weight, and then she said she felt like people could beat her up. She's since gained weight back. I don't really blame her. Being around bigger people does make me want to be a bigger person, while being around smaller people in Asia makes me feel like I don't need to eat as much. People in america in the 50s and 60s were much smaller as well, the fattening of america was a sort of arms race, and why I don't think ozempic is going to be as influential as people believe- some people want extra weight to throw around in their lives. In some places you don't need it.

The implied proposition that raw/fresh plant-based food = healthy seems suspect to me. Several human populations historically either had no such foods available to them at all, or only seasonally (note that the overwhelming majority of our edible plants are, in evolutionary terms, very recent creations); it would be strange, and does not seem apparent from real-world evidence, if their health suffered for it.

If you are not dead set on raw vegetables, I found it quite easy everywhere I went in Japan to find teishoku places that would give you half a dozen small plates of stewed or pickled mystery sansai with your rice and tiny portion of grilled fish.

For your other examples - Thailand/SEA are among the few regions that have a long-standing native traditions of eating copious amounts of raw or minimally-cooked vegetables, Korea is just extremely far up America's memetic colon (while their native food culture is all carbs, fermented foods and meat), and if you ask for raw vegetables in China people (locals and me both) will still look at you like you have a death wish.

while their native food culture is all carbs, fermented foods and meat

And pollock!

TBF it probably helped I was in a provincial university in the boondocks, a ways from the city center, so it was a hassle to go there on bicycle, narrowing down the food options. Like, the nearby options for anything with fries or bread or pasta were mostly famiresu chains that are sort of a weird uncanny valley imitation of some American diner. There was IIRC way more pasta and sandos in Tokyo. Going to the city center there was the best pasta I'd tasted to date but I wouldn't burn an hour+ of a day on the bicycle too often to get there :P. And I was on budget, which would bias me toward the school cafeteria or cheapo rice bowl places like Sukiya that didn't really give an urge to have the meal with extra everything. Going to visit as a grown up tourist with techie salary I engorge myself way more on the good stuff, so I guess moving there wouldn't have the same salutary effect anymore, unless I simultaneously went broke.

I mean, I eat Cajun(basically meat- usually cheap, fatty cuts- and rice slathered in fatty sauce) food with French and Mexican influences. But my portion sizes are normal, so I stay at a normal weight.

I’ve heard about Japanese portion sizes, I suspect this is what happens there as well.

I love Cajun food. I used to have a Cajun stepdad, he sucked but his cooking was the best. Thai people remind me so much of Cajuns.

Standard Japanese portion sizes are smaller than Western portions, typically, but it's very easy to add extra rice, extra noodles, extra fried chicken, extra broth, extra eggs, extra whatever you want, at every restaurant.........

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