Health of okinawas

[instant]

Can anyone explain why OKinawas are so healthy?
They basically do the opposite of everything on as this diet?

Did you know Okinawans have the highest rate of longevity in all of Japan?
The reason cited most often by health experts for the longevity of Okinawans is their diet, which normally consists of generous portions of tofu, kubu (dried kelp) and vegetables. Although tofu and kubu are mainstay ingredients in Okinawan dishes, Okinawans are' also known to consume healthy portions of sweet potato, squash, eggplant, goya (commonly referred to as bittermelon), green papaya, mustard cabbage, daikon (turnip), and somen a thin noodle made of fine wheat flour. Pork is also commonly used in many Okinawan mainstays.


Okinawans are the top pork producers in all of Japan. In fact they are also the top consumers of pork also. So how can Okinawans be the biggest consumers of pork and yet live so long? Research shows that healthy cells also require some fat, and Okinawans prepare their pork in such a way that it enhances health, rather than diminishing it. They boil the fresh pork for about a half-hour to remove much of the fat before using it to prepare a traditional Okinawan pork dish.
Rafute, or glazed pork, is a popular Okinawan pork dish that is made with sugar, shoyu and liquor. The preparation actually allows the rafute could keep for several days without spoiling, which was extremely useful to the Okinawans in the days before the invention of refrigeration. Its ability to keep made it was an ideal dish for Okinawa's subtropical climate.
Okinawan cookery is distinguished by three unique forms: The foods of the farmers or common people of Okinawa, Naha cooking and Shuri court cooking. The common people of Okinawa consumed lots of sweet potatoes and ate simple meals that could be scraped together from their farm crops. In Naha though existed the largest urban center on the island and it was a port town. To Naha people cooking was considered to be an art and their cuisine was just a notch below the Royal court cuisine of Shuri, the ancient capital of Okinawa.


Traditional Shuri court cooking grew out of Okinawa's trade and diplomatic relations with China. In order to entertain the Chinese investment in trade, the Ryukyu government sent professional court chefs to China to master the art of Chinese cooking so that they could prepare a more palatable cuisine for their honored guests. China's influence on Okinawan cooking is evident through the Okinawans use of beef, pork and fowl as well as some rich sauces.
When the Ryukyu Kingdom was subjugated by the Satsuma clan of Kyushu in the early 1600's, it became imperative for the Okinawans to master the art of Japanese cooking. This really served to enrich their native cooking. The attention to detail paid to arranging food which is appealing to the eye is reflective of the influence Japanese cooking had on the traditional Okinawan way of cooking.

http://www.chicagookinawakenjinkai.com/okinawan_food.html

[TylerDurden]

There have been many different theories re the longevity of Okinawans. One is that many areas of the world have poor birth-records(eg:- the Caucasus) so that it becomes easy for people to claim longevity if they share their father's names. Also, Okinawans eat a lot of raw fish which would offset, to some extent, the amounts of cooked foods in their diet. They also eat plenty of vegetables, some of it raw and the rest lightly cooked, which means they would not get the much greater amounts of toxins that are found in cooked animal foods. Oh, and another theory is that they practice caloric restriction, which would lengthen lifespans. Take your pick of which theory appeals most to you.

(It's interesting to note that the longest-lived regions all seem to incorporate large amounts of fish in their diet(eg:- Iceland, Japan and Okinawa - the latter two eating a lot of raw fish).

[instant]

they eat raw goat meat to,, its a common dish from what i read.

[DeadRamones]

Way to much to pin point it to one major reason.

Cold water fishes, fermented food(mostly soy I believe),variety of sea vegetables. They're also not big eaters so low calories might be a factor. I believe they are big drinkers(might be wrong). Personally I think it's just genetics. There are claims that the ones that leave the island die 10years younger compared to the ones that still live in the island.

I don't know how there health is. So I can't help you with that. All I know is that I rather be healthy & die young, then old with tons of medical issues.

[William]

They eat lots or pork, apparently more than anyone else. Other than that their diet is not particularly different.

[instant]

I dont think they eat a lot of pork, pork is only like a garnish, the bulk of there meals are whole grains, yams, veggies.

i have heard that eat .8lb of meat a day

about .5lb of fish and .3lb of usually pork or another animal.

[RawZi]

they eat raw goat meat to,, its a common dish from what i read.

    Where did you read it?  I was just now looking to Google to look at their diet when I ran across your comment.  Would you help me find a good site that mentions it?  I eat raw goat meat and raw goat high meat that I've made.  It's not that I don't believe it, just don't remember reading or hearing about how or if they eat goat.  Maybe theirs is a diet to emulate.

    Oh, I found plenty:
http://www.wellsphere.com/heart-health-article/benefits-of-high-saturated-fat-diets-part-v-the-okinawans/771643

[instant]

this video would disagree with the diet link you have posted..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mspy_QFyTFE

[instant]

i know this forum disagrees on milk... But i do think goat milk , sheep milk are great foods to have.


rawzi thank you that link though.. very interesting

do you have any more links confirming there diet was high fat ish?

[PaleoPhil]

this video would disagree with the diet link you have posted....

I notice that video neglected to mention that those centenarians apparently ate much of their food cooked in lard (rendered pork fat), the most common cooking fat of their youth...

Okinawa and Lard
Monday, March 24, 2008
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/03/okinawa-and-lard.html

Okinawa - The Island of Pork:
http://www.wonder-okinawa.jp/026/e/pork.html

Pork lard did not make the Okinawans fat
http://www.stop-trans-fat.com/okinawans.html

...and they also neglected to mention the various types of sashimi they ate, like hiijaa sashimi (raw goat meat, see http://www.virtualokinawa.com/about_okinawa/food/ and http://stanford.wellsphere.com/heart-health-article/benefits-of-high-saturated-fat-diets-part-v-the-okinawans/771643).

[instant]

I wonder if those are daily meals or just like special event recipes. Because im not sure how much access to meat these people would of had. it seems they would have slaughters only occasionally and usually before a special event.Sometimes you have to be careful about recipes, im not sure of these were all the time recipes or only on rare occasions/holidays.

[PaleoPhil]

Sorry, I should have been more clear. You know the video you linked to, where it shows the American frying/chowing some veggies in a pan? According to the articles I linked to, for much, if not all of the lives of those Okinawan centenarians they often fried those veggies in lard (pork fat).  Like most traditional cultures where meat is not overabundant, they also made use of every edible bit of the pig. One of the articles also mentions occasional use of sesame oil, but one also talked about how when those centenarians were young before WWII they were eating more pork than they do now. Remember, their health is a result of their entire lives, not just what they are eating right now. It's hard to tell without more detailed info, but those American scientists in the video appear to be making the mistake of basing their judgement of the Okinawan diet mostly on what they've been eating recently and putting much less focus on pre-WWII. It's too bad the Okinawans weren't studied their entire lives from womb to grave.

I think that the most important time of all in a person's life when it comes to diet is actually when one is developing in a mother's womb. Seems to me a zygote or fetus whose genetic expression is in the process of developing would be much more sensitive to dietary impacts than a mature adult. So a key question is what exactly were the mothers of those centenarians eating while pregnant with them. My guess based on what I've read is that lard was the most common fat in the diet at that time.

Wheat is another foods that is rarely examined when trying to figure out why some Asian diets provide superior results to Western diets. For example, according to some scientists, the raw data in the famous China study actually correlate wheat more strongly with disease than meat. I'd be curious to know how much wheat the Okinawans were consuming in their youth vs. today's Americans.

[William]

Being at least as gregarious as others, the Okinawan villages would have been surrounded by farms all of which raised swine. It only takes one or a few farmers to slaughter weekly to keep a constant supply of pork to themselves and the villagers.
And these would likely have been vegetable-fed swine, far superior in health and taste to modern commercial fodder-fed swine.

[PaleoPhil]

Yes, good point. The swine of yesteryear would have been fed less soy, wheat and other crap than today. My grandfather raised pigs, chickens and other animals in the early 20th Century in the USA and he fed them much better than most farm animals are fed today.

[PaleoPhil]

Here's some more about the lard-eating Okinawans from Dr. B.G. of the Animal Pharm blog:

Dr. B G said...

    Steve,

    Centenarians on the traditional Okinawan diet had HDLs of 60 mg/dl (that is a helluva lot better than 90% of Americans) with lard, fatty pork belly and rich goat milk. This is not the case now since Okinawans lost the longevity edge in the 1990s and currently (after canola oil was introduced imho).

http://drbganimalpharm.blogspot.com/2009/09/death-band-sdldl-on-lipoprotein.html

Thanks to Lex and others here I've found that there are a lot more Paleo blogs out there than I realized.

[instant]

Is beef lard equally good?

[William]

Is beef lard equally good?

Rendered beef fat is called tallow, and it is different from lard in that tallow lasts and stays good for many years, while lard is said to go bad.

I don't know if it is equally good to eat for health, as the only lard where I live is highly processed and poisoned with the carcinogens BHA and BHT, and commercial swine are fed stuff too foul to think about.

[instant]

beef is a main staple in my town...

[instant]

Does anyone have an idea for how many fat calories Traditional okinawas got? (exmple 40% calories from fat)
in most modern books of the OKinawas they say they got less than 10% of calories from fat and most of that was vegetable fat and they ate at little as 1oz of meat a day)
is this true?

[instant]

Zenei Yogi, president of the Maruichi Meat Co., based in Naha, told The Daily Yomiuri through an e-mail from a spokesman that goat meat is traditionally served in Okinawa "at a time of celebration for such events as housewarming or birth of a new baby. Goat meat is also eaten as remedy for recovery from fatigue after planting rice or harvesting sugar cane."

http://www.soshiok.com/articles/9923
See meat used in celebrations..


I read different stories, I have read modern okinawas eat more meat then there ancestors,, then i read there ancestors eat more milk and meat than current okinaways.. (mainly they more goat and goat milk)

[TylerDurden]

Does anyone have an idea for how many fat calories Traditional okinawas got? (exmple 40% calories from fat)
in most modern books of the OKinawas they say they got less than 10% of calories from fat and most of that was vegetable fat and they ate at little as 1oz of meat a day)
is this true?

Well, so far, the only reports I've heard all mention that okinawans ate a low-meat diet(most of the meat being raw or cooked fish) with plenty of vegetables.

[instant]

If i had to guess.. the okinawas ate about .8lbs of meat a day.... 1/4 being pork, goat etc and the other 1/2lb being fish...
Im not sure how much goat milk they used.. I know they did consume raw meat but also fried and boiled, im assuming most of there meat was cooked but they did consume it raw at times.

overall it seems the bulk of there calories came from vegetables and whole grains.

basically seems like a balanced diet of whole grains, veggies, fruits, meat and milk, raw and cooked..

[PaleoPhil]

I think this quote from the article you cited provides a clue:

But even in Okinawa, goat meat has a certain image problem. Ozawa said: "I have heard from a meat supplier in Okinawa...that their tradition is getting weaker because the young people in Okinawa don't really prefer to eat yagi, or goat meat, anymore. They have strong prejudices: 'Goat meat is for the elderly people' [or] 'Goat meat stinks.'"

I can't imagine pre-WWII Okinawans throwing away good pork fat. Middle and upper class and farmer Okinawans reportedly used to eat a lot of pork and goat pre-WWII and for some time after it (there reportedly were meat shortages during the war). Goat is fairly lean, but even goat does have some fat. Just buy some Jamaican curry goat at any Caribbean festival and you'll see what I mean. 

The poor and the youth eat more plants/carbs.  One of the articles I linked to said that as a result of the youth turning away from lard and using more modern vegetable oils and eating more grains and other processed foods, their lifespan has been reversing, but I don't have the data.

Like Ancel Keys, those young American scientists may have had a preconception in their mind about what's healthy and what's not (fat bad, plants and lean protein good), so like Keys they may have looked for the time period (recent) that the Okinawan diet most resembles their preconception and the certain foods (soy crap, lectin-rich nightshades, green veggies, "vegetable" oils) that they decided a-priori are healthy. It's hard to tell without all the raw data of the study. Mass media articles and study abstracts rarely provide that.

[instant]

what about OKinawas actually trimming the fat off meat and straining soups to get fat out?

[PaleoPhil]

When, today or pre-WWII? I can't imagine them trimming and discarding meat fat pre-WWII. Trimming and using in other ways in their diet, perhaps. I can imagine them doing that today, if they've been brainwashed to fear fats like we have been here in the USA, which a couple of the articles I linked to indicated that they have been.