There’s so much to unpack here that it’s almost too much. Starting with shoddy writing / research, but set that aside.
It’s fairly obvious that any old culture has nutrition coded into it that western science is only very slowly unpacking.
But this isn’t just about culture — this is about government mandated nutrition / weight management / health parameters. Very few countries (democracies?) would be okay with the government policing their bodies (or at least male bodies, in the case of the US).
Mike Bloomberg instituted a jumbo soda ban in nyc because no human body needs that quantity of sugar in a single drink, and it was a proxy for other health interventions. How did that go over? Not so well. And it’s not just the corporations affected who objected — it was also people whose rights to be as unhealthy as they wanted were being curtailed.
In the case of the US, some healthcare is paid for by the govt (low income, senior) so there could be an argument for the govt then having some say in trying to manage things that are known to result in higher healthcare costs. But again, even for entitlements like food stamps, there are problems with restricting what they can be spent on (again with the soda).
In the case of Japan, corporate culture has been pretty well studied. Used to be lauded for loyalty and rule-following. Later criticized for what was behind that. Similarly with societal culture, gender constraints, fetishization, and so on. So I’m not sure what the article is trying to say, exactly, because none of anything that enables Japan to mandate and enforce the kinds of things it seems to be praising are even tangentially addressed.
But aside from that, trying to generalize cultural nutritional knowledge is inherently flawed. Like “french women don’t get fat” and “red wine is the miracle elixir” and “the mediterranean diet is the best of all”.
Ayurveda (and yoga) are from India and yet Indians have one of the highest rates and risks of diabetes and related diseases. It’s gotten much worse after the economy opened up and western junk food became integrated into the fabric of young people’s diets more than thousands of years old nutritional traditions.
So yeah, I don’t know what point the article is trying to make.
(As an aside, I’m a bit confused by the school lunch discussion as I thought the bento box obsession was borne out of the lunches that were packed for Japanese schoolchildren.)
