Why Do the Japanese Outlive Us in America – Without a 24 Hour Fitness?

Photo by Ash Edmonds on Unsplash

Remember when GM, Ford, Chrysler scoffed at the quality of Japanese “rice burners” that started showing up on the U.S. market back in the 1970s and dismissed their presence as a potential threat.

Not long thereafter, the American auto industry started rolling out gems like this rolling bathtub –

– while Toyota and Honda began eating their lunch with Accords and Lexus’s?

We’ve been slow to learn in lots of areas, refusing to budge from our “greatest country on earth” arrogance.

This may be another one. Did you know that –

– fewer than 3% of Japanese go to a fitness club.

– life expectancy in Japan is 84.9 years (#2 globally behind Hong Kong), 6 years longer than the 78.9 for the U.S. (which places us 39th globally, between Curacao and Poland).

–Japanese experience fewer deaths from ischemic heart disease and cancer (especially breast and prostate cancer).

-the obesity rate in Japan is about 5% for men and less than 4% for women, compared to an obesity prevalence of over 42% in the United States.

It’s not that the Japanese don’t exercise. They just do it much differently and, it seems, without the need for mirror muscles and “personal bests” in anything.

When researchers asked Japanese young people in their 20s about regular exercise, they got these responses:

  • walking (42 percent)
  • stretching (24 percent)
  • jogging (22 percent)

No mention of dumbbells, kettlebells, Peloton, or BowFlex.

Approximately half of those queried offered that they barely exercised, about once a month or not at all. Exercises with names like rajio taiso, dai-ichi, dai-ni, dai-san are common and usually start with children.

So far, I haven’t heard any of those exercises offered up at my 24 Hour Fitness.

You don’t suppose that diet plays a role in this longevity?

Duh!

There are a handful of diets associated with good health and the prevention of cardiovascular disease. Those include the Mediterranean diet, the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension), the vegetarian diet, and – VOILA! – the Japanese diet.

 

This chart contrasts the Japanese diet versus other developed countries and provides some of the “why” to this greater longevity (I’ve circled those components that stand out versus the Standard American Diet).

It’s no secret we like our meat, starch, and sugars. And we’re not inclined to give them up or moderate them even when nearly half of us in the U.S. have fatty liver disease and are overweight or obese.

It’s complicated –

-this whole diet thing.

I chirped a couple of weeks ago about the content of the book “Metabolical” by Dr. Robert Lustig. It’s a complex read and has drawn out considerable ire from several communities, including his own medical profession and from nutrition professionals.

I’ve watched a handful of podcast interviews of Dr. Lustig and find him very focused and consistent on his message. A one-sentence summary of his position is:

Protect the liver, feed the gut. Stop eating processed foods, increase the fiber, and eliminate the sugar.

With Dr. Lustig, calories don’t count. It’s what’s been done to the food that we eat that counts. Calories are independent of the content that is producing the insulin resistance that is leading to fatty liver disease and obesity. You can imagine how well that goes down in a medical and nutrition/diet community that has been preaching “calories in, calories out” for almost a half-century.

If you’ve plodded through the book, you’ll have discovered that he doesn’t advocate for any type of diet – vegan or ketogenic. He’s good with either one – or a combination. It’s all about the adulteration of the food, the lack of fiber, and the sugar. I’m sure he would endorse the Japanese diet with its reduced sugar and starch.

We all have a vote.

He’s predicting that “food will be the next tobacco” but that it will take 20-30 years to turn this ship away from unhealthy food. I found it interesting that he says on one podcast that our starting points that will get this change started are (1) eliminating food subsidies and (2) reaching the children.

In the book, he makes his point:

“Right now, the only things standing between us and success are: sugar addicts in the population, hubris addicts in the medical and ancillary professions, money addicts in the food and pharma industries, and power addicts in Washington and beyond. But things can change when the culture changes.

How do you change an entire culture? In the last forty years, we’ve witnessed four separate cultural tectonic shifts in America: 1) smoking in public places; 2) drunk driving; 3) bicycle helmets and seat belts, and 4) condoms in bathrooms. In 1980, if any elected official stood up in a State House or in Congress or in Parliament and proposed legislation to combat any of these, he or she would have been laughed right out of office. Today, they’re all facts of life. 

We also taught the children who grew up and started voting. And the naysayers, well, they’re all dead. That’s why culture shifts are generational shifts. You’re seeing it now with climate change. We need a global reckoning around food. It’s already started, but it has to pick up more steam. 

What can you do today? You have the vote – instead of the a ballot box, you have your fork. Your vote is tallied immediately. And you get to vote twenty-one times a week – every meal, three times, every day. 

Vote early. Vote often.”

I’m feeling less guilty.

I followed “Metabolical” with another book recommendation and found myself entangled in equally complex and oft-confusing explanations of what goes on in all of us metabolically. This book doesn’t come from a clinician but from a highly regarded scientific journalist by the name of Gary Taubes in a book entitled “Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It.”

Backed by amazing historical research revealing the bad nutritional science of the last century and an amazing grasp of our metabolical functions, Taubes builds a case somewhat similar to Dr. Lustig’s with regard to the elimination of processed food and sugar but comes down more in support of the importance of fat in our diet.

It’s complicated and technical too, but I found it compelling enough to stop beating myself up for those occasional times when we sneak some beef into a stew or include a chicken breast as a part of a meal.

What’s a person to do?

First it’s this, and then it’s that. Then it’s don’t do this or be sure to do that. It’s like dancing on peanut butter, this whole diet and metabolism thing.

I certainly am not qualified to offer up any dietary advice. I will just say that, after these readings, I’m buying into both authors positions and aiming to:

Protect my liver, feed my gut by reducing processed foods, increasing the fiber, radically reducing the sugar, and being sure to consume appropriate amounts of healthy fat. 

No vegan. No keto. Somewhere in between.

Maybe – more Japanese like!

Except, I’m not giving up my trips to 24 Hour Fitness.

 

 

Please Tell Me You Didn’t Do New Year’s Resolutions Again!

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

OK, I’m betting they may not be on paper, but you plan to:

  1. Lose weight
  2. Eat better
  3. Exercise more
  4. Watch less TV
  5. Spend more time with family
  6. Read more
  7. Go to church regularly
  8. Get more sleep
  9. Take up a hobby
  10. Quit smoking
  11. Volunteer more
  12. Drop Facebook

In other words, become a New You for the New Year.

I know you are exceptional – you’ll make all of that happen. All in the same year and a New You comes out the other end toasting another new year on 12/31/22 and the start of a new list the next day.

We can only hope!

For most people, 13 of those 12 won’t happen.

Just imagine if we were all able to keep that sort of annual momentum year-upon-year-upon-year.

We could own the universe with all that compounding.

But then, who would want to own today’s universe?

I’ll pass.

I don’t remember when, or if, I’ve ever set New Year’s Resolutions. Certainly don’t remember ever putting them to paper. Maybe if I had I would be more of something. I don’t suppose it’s too late but as I prepare to start my 9th decade on this mudball, somehow it seems a little superfluous.

It fits better for me to do the three most important things I can think of today. String enough of those all together and the year should turn out OK.

Why don’t they work?

Setting goals is generally a good idea and is the rationale behind New Year’s Resolutions – except they also generally don’t pan out. It’s kind of a running joke that these resolutions are an exercise in futility. They usually run out of steam about April.

The classic seems to be the exercise resolution. (C’mon – you’ve been there!)

 

Need proof? For a few decades, I frequented an upscale athletic club daily for basketball and weight-lifting.  But I always worked out at home for the first few weeks of each year because it got so overrun with well-intentioned, deer-in-the-headlights new patrons set on a “new me” in the coming year.

 

By the first or second week of February, the decks were pretty well cleared and things were close to normal again – certainly full-on normal by March 1.

The “January Bloom” is the only way an athletic club can make it. They convince people their membership will be “fun” and get their $39.95 on monthly recurring concealing the fact that exercise – especially as a newbie – is anything but fun and knowing that the combination of pain, inconvenience,  and lack of immediate results will soon keep people at home. But still paying their monthly.

Who’s gonna admit they flunked exercise?

I don’t mean to throw water on the entire goal-setting process just because New Year’s Resolutions don’t work.

But maybe, just maybe, there’s something that works better than goal-setting – and eliminates the frustration of unachieved New Year’s Resolutions.

I’m trading goals in for “themes” that are on the path to mastery.

Niklas Göke is a writer on Quora and Medium.com who offers a different twist on goal setting perhaps worthy of consideration:

“-goals were never the reason you didn’t “make it” this year. Goals don’t help you create long-term happiness, let alone sustain it. They never have, and they never will.

From a rational perspective, goals seem like a good way of getting what you want. They’re tangible, trackable, and time-bound. They give you a point to move toward and a nudge to help you get there.

Until we reach them, all goals do is exert pressure from afar. Even worse, when we finally do achieve them, they disappear.

But on a day-to-day basis, goals often lead to anxiety, worry, and regret rather than fulfillment, pride, and contentment. Until we reach them, goals exert pressure from afar. Even worse, when we finally do achieve them, they disappear right away — like a baseball in a home run, zipping out of sight. The burst of relief is fleeting, and we think it must be happiness. So we set a new, bigger goal. Once again, it seems out of reach.”

Goke and James Altucher, bestselling author, entrepreneur, angel investor, and former hedge fund manager, advocate for themes instead of goals. 

Altucher suggests creating a theme of how you want to live your life and then do the next thing that is important to you.

A theme might be a single word — a verb, a noun, or an adjective. “Commit,” “growth,” and “healthy” are all valid themes. So are “invest,” “help,” “kindness,” and “gratitude.”

A goal asks “what do I want?” but a theme asks “who am I?”

Altucher’s position is that our overall life satisfaction isn’t determined by singular events but rather by the average of how we feel at the end of each day. According to him, when you have themes, “you build unbelievable intuition on what is the next thing you should be doing in your life. You’re no longer trapped by a long list of tiny inconsequential things you feel you have to do.”

So, I’m continuing to simplify it for 2022 by envisioning myself on a path to mastery of what I’ve chosen and love to do using today to advance that in some way, fully aware that true mastery is always out of reach.

It’s the goalless journey that matters.

I’ve stolen and adopted this theme from Dr. Ken Dychtwald, psychologist and founder of AgeWave:

Breathe – Learn – Teach – Repeat

It fits who I am. If I stay true to that, on December 31, 2022, I will be smarter, healthier, and maybe will have touched somebody. And I will not be bound up or worried about having missed a goal or having to set another one.

A theme or goalless journey is immune to anxiety and fear of failure.

Here’s a meaningful quote from Niklas Goke:

“A goal splits your actions into good and bad. A theme makes every action part of a masterpiece.”

Here’s to you and I making 2022 a masterpiece – of our choosing – one day at a time.

How do you feel about this argument? Are you a committed goal setter – or do you have themes working for you? We’d love to have your feedback on the topic. Leave a comment or drop an email to gary@makeagingwork.com

Asking Your Forgiveness – I’ve Been Helping You Die Early.

Alexas_Fotos on Pixabay

I was mad last week.

I was only 1/3 through Dr. Robert Lustig’s book, “Metabolical”, at the time.

Now I’m 7/8 through.

I’m madder – with a permanent state of mad.

I’ve also discovered I owe you, dear reader, an apology.

I’ve misled you with some of my writing.

If you’ve tracked with me for a while, you’ve been subjected to a number of articles like this: What is the biggest failure in modern health? Maybe not what you think?  

I’ve been pretty liberal in my use of some pretty ugly photos to draw emphasis to obesity. Like:

Well, the message with those pictures and my articles has been mostly wrong. The message has always inferred lack of personal responsibility and that obesity leads to sickness.

You can scratch that understanding if you bought into it.

Here’s the real truth, ala Dr. Lustig:

Obesity itself doesn’t make us sick. It’s what we eat that makes us sick, then we get obese, and from there we experience a cascading of diseases i.e. cancer, Type 2 diabetes, dementia, heart disease.

In Lustig’s words:

“The key to the kingdom is that it is not about obesity, it is about metabolic dysfunction and anyone can get it, and that’s what makes it a public health crisis, because obesity is a result of the problem, not the cause.

I never want to hear any of you talk about the obesity epidemic ever again, because that is the food industry’s mantra, that is what they use to obfuscate the truth, and you play right into it when you talk about it.”

I consider myself duly reprimanded. For having done that, I apologize.

I was thinking downstream when the problem is upstream.

Tobacco debacle Part Deux

Remember how big tobacco denied for years that smoking caused cancer and that nicotine wasn’t addictive although they knew otherwise. And how it took massive effort on the part of the government to unpack those lies and hold them accountable.

Even when cornered, big tobacco shifted the blame with a party line that said “nobody forces anybody to smoke. It’s a personal choice.”

Big food has borrowed the playbook.

The Centers for Health Statistics revealed that 42% of U.S. adults were obese in 2018.

Obesity was rare 40 years ago, as was Type 2 diabetes.

Our metabolic processes didn’t change in 40 years. But what we do to them has – dramatically!

It’s undeniable that it’s all about the twin evils of sugar and processed foods – and especially the sugar in processed food.

Big Food knows this and that they are killing us slowly. The facts are undeniable, the evidence overwhelming. Big Food’s scourge is equivalent to  – perhaps worse than – Big Tobacco’s scourge. The party line is the same:

“It’s your fault – nobody forces you to visit Carl’s Junior. We just make what people want.”

It’s complicated.

The metabolical processes, that is.

Not the solutions.

Dr. Lusting goes into mind-boggling detail in “Metabolical” to explain the chemical processes that go on in our bodies and how they are affected by what we eat. More detail than we need and lots of hard-to-connect dots. But he brings it all together into a six-word solution for avoiding the metabolic dysfunctions that lead to obesity and other chronic conditions.

Protect the liver, feed the gut.

Tell me – how much were you taught or have you learned about the connection between the liver and what goes on in your gut (stomach and intestines)?

OK – I’ll settle for nothing. That’s where I was pre-Lustig.

Tell me – how many conversations have you had with your PCP about the connection between the liver and what goes on in your gut?

OK- zero, I get it. They never had a Lustig in medical school and aren’t motivated to take the time to learn what he knows.

“That’s upstream stuff. I’m a downstream specialist” says your PCP.

Can you imagine your PCP saying to you that your high blood pressure, or high LDL, or A1C is “foodable” rather than “druggable?”

Ain’t gonna happen.

You then begin to realize that-

-so much of this is not our fault.

We are living lab rats.

Julia Hubbell writes daily on Medium.com. She’s on this soapbox too and recently put this twist on the issue:

“You and I are living lab rats. Like it or not the world is full of people who are being fed poisonous toxins packaged as fun foods for the kids and adults alike. Every single one of us, when we choose chips over apples, sweetened cereals over plain oatmeal, Coca Cola over plain water is choosing death over life. We are poisoning our cells day by day, ingesting disease-inducing substances put into seductive packaging.”

“And all the while, we blame fat people for getting fat because they are lazy, not because specialized food scientists are paid massive sums to get us addicted, keep us addicted and utterly unable to say no to their products. We are being manipulated by Big Food to hate people for getting sick as a result of eating foods that ads convince us are harmless, even as we do terrible harm to ourselves by eating them.”

Until we get “upstream” from the problem by understanding how we inflict ourselves with metabolic dysfunction and then vote with our food purchase dollars, this destruction will continue unabated.

It’s not about the calories. It’s not about the obesity.

It’s all about the processed food – and the money that spins off of its consumption.

Dr. Lustig let’s us know just how big that is:

“The entire food industry (grocery and restaurant) grosses $1.46 trillion per year with a profit of $657 billion. Yet U.S. medical costs total $3.5 trillion per year, of which 75 percent are food-related chronic disease. Conversely, the pharma industry generates $771 billion in gross revenue annually, of which 21 percent is gross profit. One company made $19 billion in annual profit from diabetes drugs alone.

You do the math: between food and pharma, you’ve got $2.1 trillion per year going down a rathole – into shareholder pockets – while the public gets sicker and healthcare is collapsing. We lose triple what the food industry makes cleaning up their mess. 

This is unsustainable. “

Let’s all get mad.

A REAL FOOD diet is more available and less expensive than we realize. We need to get “upstream” and stop being lab rats.

We’ll take a look at REAL FOOD in subsequent posts.

Chime in here. Are you able to sustain a real food diet? What is it? How do you do it? Share your thoughts. We’re all in this together.

News Flash! David Isn’t Coming to Save Us! Don’t Get Caught Waiting.

David Sinclair is an interesting and pretty high-profile guy recently in the burgeoning conversation on aging. As an Australian-born Ph.D. in molecular genetics and a tenured professor at Harvard Medical School, Sinclair comes down squarely on aging as a disease that we will eventually be able to overcome.

He’s apparently moved the needle a bit with his discovery of the effects of a number of chemicals that appear to slow the aging process. Some view his work – and the work of others – as eventually leading to “magic pills” to solve aging.

Others, like me, are skeptical that this “magic pill” is anywhere close to fruition.

We’ve been talking about this stuff for a very long time.

Don’t get me wrong. I support what Sinclair and his fellow pioneers are doing. Why not? We all stand to benefit from the discoveries that come out of this type of deep research. While it may not lead to us living forever (scarrryyyyy!), the spinoffs from the research may help us live longer and healthier.

We don’t have to wait for Sinclair’s magic to materialize to “delay” the aging process.

We know all we need to know right now to slow the acceleration of our own aging.

But, I sense that we are inclined to want to wait and wish for the magic potion or formula to be revealed rather than take the initiative now to understand and change the “comfortable and convenient” lifestyle habits that are already accelerating our aging.

Take a look at the scoreboard:

  • The five biggest killers in our culture – heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and dementia – haven’t changed in decades. They are all lifestyle diseases and are largely preventable.
  • The average life expectancy in the U.S. peaked in 2010 and has turned down each year after a century of meteoric growth from 47 in 1910 to 80 in 2010. Our biologies didn’t suddenly change but our lifestyle patterns gradually did thus contributing to the downturn. The downturn has been helped along with opioid abuse and our susceptibility to a horrible pandemic. But the downturn started before either of those events. 

Graphic source: Scott Fulton

  • We “live shorter and die longer” in the U.S. than in any other developed country on the planet. We’re 46th out of 193 countries in terms of average longevity and have the longest average period of late-life morbidity.
  • The American male population is 60% overweight, 30% obese.
  • Type 2 diabetes has now become endemic – and it hardly existed 40 years ago.
  • The U.S. population is “verifiably sick” with 88% of Americans walking around with some level of metabolic dysfunction that’s likely gone unrecognized. We haven’t been told because the ones that should be telling us don’t know what to look for.

I’m not waiting for David!

At 79, I can’t afford to wait for the Sinclair cohort to equip me with a magic health wand. So I’ve decided that I can educate myself on how my biology (body and mind) work and what they need to operate optimally and then work to design my lifestyle habits around that knowledge.

My theory is pretty simple: do what I can now to preserve and maximize my health so that I can be around to take advantage of any new bio-science and technology developments that will allow me to extend my healthy life even further – should they develop.

I can hope that David comes through. In the meantime, I’m feeling pretty good and am starting each day vertical. What more can I ask?

A quantum leap.

On the learning front, I responded to a tip from one of my favorite writers, Julia Hubbell, who encourages her readers to read a book entitled “Metabolical” by Dr. Robert Lustig, Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of  Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Julia operates out on the edge of her comfort zone in every corner of her life so I considered the tip worth pursuing.

I’ve plowed through a third of the book and, even as a consistent reader of pretty heady stuff, am challenged and absolutely blown out by the book.

The immediate appeal of the book for me is that Dr. Lustig takes our medical establishment, Big Pharma, and our disastrous food industry to the woodshed and reveals how most everything we think we know (and have learned from these three behemoths) is totally wrong.

And we’re all sick, killing ourselves slowly, and dying early as a result.

I’ve written repeatedly about how we – especially as we move into the “third third” of our lives – must become more self-care literate with the core of that literacy being a fundamental understanding of how we function at the cellular level.

Dr. Lustig takes that understanding to a new level by unpacking detailed cellular functionality and revealing much of the truth that is hidden from us about that functionality.

We can all do this.

Truth is, there isn’t a lot of magic to what our biology asks of us. Our cells, of which we have 35 trillion or so in our bodies, have been doing their thing for billions of years and don’t ask for much beyond oxygen and good glucose to function and not go rogue. 

 

Sure there are exceptions, like start-of-life “blueprint errors”, but nearly all of us start with a birthright of good health. Dr. Lustig goes into incredible biological, endocrinological detail showing how we screw up that birthright – and will continue to do so until we get knowledgeable in the right way.

If you are up for a tough read that will take your awareness to a whole new level on how to stretch your health longevity, buy the book but be prepared to get pissed off and be jolted by how much you’ve been misled.

We’ve proven ourselves, especially in western cultures, to be darn good at screwing up a magnificent 24×7 immune system kludged together from those 35 trillion cells to protect us from nefarious invaders (READ: COVID-19) while equipping us with the energy and smarts to stay vertical and move.

We’re amazingly illiterate about the very vehicle that propels us through life. If we were self-care literate would we –

  1. – take 35% of our meals through the side window of our cars?
  2. – continue to consume sugar in prodigious quantities?
  3. – allow Hormel hot dogs or Johnsonville brats into our refrigerators?
  4. – weigh, on average, 20 lbs more than 20 years ago without growing any taller?
  5. – allow over half of the U.S. population to be pre-diabetic (Psst? 70% don’t know it)?
  6. – spend 40 hours per week being one with our voice-activated remotes and La-Z-Boys?
  7. – waste $35B year-after-year on diets that don’t and can’t work?
  8. – know more about how our lawnmowers work than our bodies?

Fate versus choice

A mere century ago, lots of people died early – before 50, on average. They, within the existing body of knowledge, wrote it off as “God’s will” or “fate.”

We’ve moved past “fate.” We now have “choice.”

We can’t stand behind fate today. We have choices supported by discovery. Discoveries being made by the David Sinclair’s and Robert Lustig’s.

Our healthcare system, Big Pharma, and the food industry don’t want us to pay attention to those discoveries.

So we choose to stay in the dark and maintain our comfortable, convenient, and conformative lifestyles stressing our way through life hoping David and Robert will come through to save our bacon from our wayward ways with a magic pill or formula.

I’m cheering them on fully aware that they, and we, are up against incredibly powerful, wealthy, politically savvy, and profit-driven adversaries that put money before our health.

Let’s take a stand!

I’m digging in and not going to take it anymore!  Lustig is doing that to me.

The aforementioned triumvirate – healthcare, pharma, food – needs to be forced to change. We can’t count on the government because it acquiesced (and partnered) a long time ago.

It’s on us.

Next week – and perhaps a few weeks following, I’m going to unpack how I’m going to wage my one-man battle against these three thieves of healthy longevity.

Tune in, join me, add to my plan. We may add a few healthy days to our – and somebody else’s – life.

Photo by Sammy Williams on Unsplash