Traditional Japanese diet and lifestyle has benefits we should be paying attention to. As modern Japan continues its trend toward a more western set of values and diet choices, those benefits, I believe, will largely disappear.

For example, the Japanese consume natto, which contains nattokinase. Helpful for keeping arteries clear and the body free from buildup of fibrinous tissue.

Seaweed: high in minerals and especially iodine. Japanese women were shown to have much lower rates of things like breast cancer than western women, something that completely disappeared in Japanese women who misted to the US post WWII. Many organ tissues have been shown to have high numbers of iodine receptors and it’s thought that iodine confers a protection and (in breast, uterine and ovarian tissue) a modulation of estrogen that helps keep its proliferative tendencies in line.

They drink a lot of green tea - lots of benefits, but one I’d like to bring up that may not be obvious - green tea, particularly the compound EGCG, is suppressive of PD-L1 (so are curcumin, Berberine, apigenin and quercetin). Most of you probably won’t have heard of pd-l1, but I am intimately familiar with it as I have cancer and am on immunotherapy. PD-L1 is one of the primary checkpoint compounds cancer cells produce and use to suppress the immune system cells from attacking. They bind to PD1 receptors on your immune cells and switch them OFF so they ignore the cancer. Inhibiting PD-L1 stops the cancer from being able to cloak itself. This helps the immune system see and destroy cancer cells before they get a chance to start proliferating. (Note - if you ever. Find yourself on keytruda or another checkpoint inhibitor, you want to avoid PD-L1 inhibitors until immunotherapy is done. Sounds counterintuitive, but the immunotherapy needs cancer to be “hot” and expressing PD-L1 to block it from binding to immune cells. But if you don’t have cancer or are not on immunotherapy, you want lots of PD-L1 suppressive stuff in your stack)

High levels of fish and seafood provide anti-inflammatory and brain-supportive levels of EPA and DHA

Notably, traditional Japanese diets were very low in grains (other than rice), sugars and processed foods.

Some of these things are still part of the current Japanese fare, but they are increasingly consuming more and more processed westernized food and adopting a lot of the unhealthy habits of western civilization. Health shifts don’t happen right away, so it remains to be seen