The real secret is that they have amazing mass transit infrastructure which makes for extremely walkable cities. Only about 10% of Japanese people own a car and so they probably get way more exercise just from living day to day than the average American gets in a week.
Plus Japanese 7-11 is considered decent food. Compare to 7-11 here where any food is a combination of salt, more salt, and sugar, with maybe some protein or carbs. I imagine this quality difference expands to other establishments as well.
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I think it’s the other way around. Mass transit greatly benefits from walkable cities because that means distances are shorter which in turn makes the whole system cheaper to build and operate.
Walkable cities are created by not emphasizing car infrastructure which necessitates good mass transit because people still need to get around which creates a more walkable city, etc. It’s kind of a chicken and egg situation, they’re both the cause and effect of each other in an endless cycle.
No disagreements there, I was just thinking more in the sense that their cities are very dense and have zoning laws which allow residences, industries and commercial spaces to coexist side-by-side, often in the same lot. That can make for pretty walkable places even without good mass transport.
Exactly and the process of switching sucks for everyone. It’s something we still need to do, but people need to be prepared for a system where the trains are running at a loss, there’s not enough parking, and there’s traffic jams. Incidentally that’s basically what it’s like as a city outgrows car infrastructure.
I’ve alternated living in the US and in Germany, for a couple of years in each place. My no exercise, not eating especially well weight is about 40 lbs heavier in the US. I was fine in the US with significant exercise commitments, but when I was schlubbing around, I was about 180 lbs at 5’10”, whereas I’m now about 140, even though I’m a decade older.
I had a health checkup after several years in the US, at a time when I was a vegetarian with no sweet tooth, who didn’t drink or smoke and did 14 hours of hard cardio (step dancing) a week. My ldl cholesterol was 180.
After a couple years in Germany, I’m now a five year older vegan who eats a worrying amount of gummy bears, drinks occasionally, smokes 4-5 spliffs without a real filter daily (I know, I’m trying to stop), and doesn’t add any exercise to my life. My ldl is 125.
I know that cheese isn’t great for you, but that’s not enough to make that big a difference. The lifestyle I had in the US was endangering me, even though I was trying really, really hard to live “right.” I’m making frankly terrible health decisions here and I’ve been rewarded by getting to eat whatever I want without gaining weight or negatively affecting my cholesterol.
Radioactive fish is a dumb argument, the radioactive water is already diluted enough to be harmless after more than a decade in sea.
Dilution is the solution to pollution is a cheasy sentiment, but not completely wrong.
Also, water blocks radiation rather well, and heavy water sinks. It’s no problem there.
you are confusing radioactive contamination and irradiation.
It doesn’t matter at all for the human consuming the fish if the fish is irradiated or not. The fish might die early and get cancer, but that doesn’t affect the human eating it, does it?
The real problem is the fish being contaminated with radioactive substances. This is where the radioactive isotopes in the water are ingested by the fish, and therefore also the human that eats it. Now the human will have an increased risk of cancer, likelihood of radiation sickness, etc if consumed in large enough quantity.
The radiative material in the water is still diluted enough to not be an issue though
Works in this case, not so much with the Pacific Garbage Patch.
Yeah, but give it two million years, and it should be fine.
Healthcare. They have great healthcare
Do they? I heard it was a bit shit, but haven’t looked into it at all
I’ve lived in Tokyo for a short stint - I’ll trade a shorter life to get away from their atrocious work culture any day.
Different root cause, but not for nothing - I didn’t meet a foreigner that’d been there more than 6 months and managed to keep a grip on their sanity.
I lived there for 4 years. I was fine, loved it. Totally agree about the worl culture tho.
Sugar, especially in the form of fructose, is relatively low in the Japanese diet. Meanwhile you will struggle to find food that doesn’t have high-fructose corn syrup and other cancer/obesity agents in North American food. People in NA didn’t use to get so fat, and it wasn’t just because they moved more.
There was a user on Lemmy the other day talking about the fact that in the US, corn subsidies have resulted in corn products being so prevalent in food production and animal feed that most of the molecules that compose most Americans were at one point, corn.
Disclaimer: I have no idea if this is true. Interesting to think about though.
“Everything is deep fried” sounds untrue.
A big factor is that Japanese diet has a lot less sugar in it.
What’s CICO??
Calories In Calories Out. It’s a diet strategy where you eat less calories than you use and therefore lose weight.
I mean it isn’t a “strategy” it’s simply the mechanism by which weight is lost.
If you use more fuel than you have then the amount of fuel in your tank is less.
The strategy is writing down the number of calories you think you’ve absorbed and trying to balance that with the amount you’re burning. Weight loss happens when the calories absorbed are fewer than those burned, but people can’t really be certain about either number.
My sister has celiacs that went undiagnosed until her twenties. Before that, she might have eaten a dinner roll that was measured at 120 calories. Of that, she would have absorbed probably something, but not 120 calories, because her body recognized it as poison and pushed it through as fast as possible. She was at one point eating 4500 calories a day, but she absorbed nowhere close to that. Because she wasn’t aware of her celiac’s, her math on both sides of the equation was wrong.
Celiac’s is obviously an abnormality, but there’s no way to know if your system is more or less efficient at harvesting energy from specific foods without a very thorough long term exclusion diet.
When people use the weight loss strategy of CICO, they’re assuming that their digestion and energy expansion are standard, so that the numbers they write down are correctly calibrated to their actual intake and use of calories.
I’m simply trying to explain that CICO isn’t one of a number of strategies, it is the only possible method for what people call “weight loss”
If you take out more energy from a system than you put in then there is a net loss in energy. That’s CICO.
People say it doesn’t work because they rarely count what they put in their body correctly and then rather than claim what they did is fallible they claim that the system is wildly different from person to person or a disease or medication is causing the problem.
The primary reason CICO doesn’t work for people is they are underestimating what goes in and overestimating what goes out.
The primary reason CICO doesn’t work for people is they are underestimating what goes in and overestimating what goes out.
I think that’s plausible, though I don’t know if it has been studied. It also coexists with the idea that what an individual actually digests can differ a lot from what is listed as a calorie count for a given food.
Remember to up your protein and ideally do some resistance training too.
Otherwise the body will burn muscle mass first, since that’s the most efficient way of compensating a calorie deficit.
is the other diet strategy eating a lot and hoping you lose weight too?
A cult.
Calories in calories out
Ah! Thanks!
Calories in calories out. It’s a strategy, you know.
Jokes on you, I’m doing CICI
