That’s sort of like saying every hole in the ground I see is somehow smaller than the Grand Canyon.
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I’ve shared this article with others … I’m very impressed with the school lunches. Nothing canned, nothing frozen. Wow! And kids aren’t allowed to bring food from home.
I’m confused. Given the prevalence of diabetes in Japan, wouldn’t they “need” ozempic? Or is it simply that this medication must be saved to protect people against the fats? (Because HEALTH. apparently.)
But but… their HEALTH. Also, why will no one protect innocent eyes against the FATS? It’s because woke isn’t it?
Fat people are needed to make small people feel superior.
It’s a group of people you can freely and openly discriminate against, deride, blame, ridicule, and dehumanize — seemingly without much of any backlash or consequences 
On an “open & welcoming to all” food site at that.
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I walked through a smaller local seafood shopping are in Japan (I think it was in the Nara area), and these vendors had tons of fresh seafood. Unlike what you see in bigger grocery stores with a lot of giant tanks (some places had these), you also had smaller setups with a smaller box filled with water that was being fed by a small water tube, and each box had the live fish, shrimp, claims, etc. in them. I got spit on by a clam there. 
But you can easily find live shrimp at the local markets, and same in other Asian countries too. Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc are all smaller countries with long coast lines so access and delivery is far simpler than the vastness of the US. You definitely don’t want raw shrimp shipped to you! 
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Heard!
I am reminded that we do have live spot prawn swimming in tanks here.
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Sorry but that is complete BS. And discussing that obese people may have a significant higher likelihood towards certain diseases isn’t discriminating. Or is discussing that smokers are more likely to get lung cancer also discrimination against smokers ?
Why is anyone’s decision about how they choose to live (or shorten) their lives anyone else’s business?
Unless you want to judge other people I frankly don’t see the point.
Growing up in Europe I still don’t see automatically individuals wants/needs higher than societies wants/needs. At the same time as a scientist I deeply believe in science - science points towards certain areas where excessive use highly likely leads to increased diseases and ultimately burden on society. And so I see it as part of society’s responsibility to support people that they live a healthy life. At the same time ultimately it is the individual’s decision what he/she wants to do with their life but if they want to live for example and continue smoking 1-2 boxes of cigarettes a day they should also “pay” a price by higher health insurance premiums etc.
So, I don’t see automatically somebody’s way to live only as their own business but also as part of a society and as such it should be absolutely normal to discuss health, science around health etc.
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.)
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Did you read the article?
It’s about Wegovy and obesity, not Ozempic and diabetes, as the title might suggest.
Same drug, off-label use turned into rebranding.
But also, there’s diagnosed diabetes, undiagnosed diabetes, insulin resistance / impaired glucose tolerance, and so on.
Diabetes stats abound. For eg, here.
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Japanese schoolchildren are provided with school lunches while in elementary school. There are no school lunches in junior high school and senior high school. SOME nursery schools and kindergartens provide school lunches and I think those cutesy bento boxes with cut pieces of nori, vegetables and meat/fish are usually prepared for schoolchildren who haven’t yet entered elementary school.
However, there are days where parents are requested to send elementary school children to school with bento boxes because the school kitchens may be closed for one reason or another or the school day may be shortened for some reason.
If a junior or senior high school student is unable to bring a bento to school for some reason, they can generally buy stuffed buns of some sort on campus. In Kagawa Prefecture, where udon is king, nearly all junior and senior high schools have self-service udon counters where students dip parboiled udon into hot water to complete the cooking of the noodles and then put on toppings.
Coincidentally, Kagawa Prefecture and neighboring Tokushima Prefecture (where I lived for 13 years) often vie for highest percentage of people with diabetes. Udon noodles are not very healthy and are widely popular in both prefectures and in addition, people in Tokushima LOVE sweets and are EXTREMELY dependent on private cars and rarely use public transportation nor ride bicycles (students being the exception to the rule for the latter.)
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There are no “absolute truth” on such generalizations but at the same time there isn’t only black and white but many shades of grey. And so, some generalizations point towards trends which describe differences between cultures (including nutrition), e.g. portion size in Japan vs US or processed food in schools lunches etc. which ultimately point towards reason why obesity in the US is so much higher than in Japan
It’s not just Japan, though. It’s the US vs pretty much anywhere else in the world where portion sizes and processed foods are concerned.
That’s true but Times Magazine is an US publication and so they focused on the cultural differences between US and Japan (and the portion sizes in the US are in addition on a different level compared to many other countries - every time we are back in Europe we don’t need to take home half of the restaurant meal because they have reasonable portion sizes)
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Yes it’s a US publication.
What does that have to do with Japan or their govt’s regulation of health?
And it’s not an article about portion size or anything else either.
That’s why I prefaced my comment with badly written and researched.
I didn’t find it badly written - it simply describes why Ozembic for weight loss in Japan will have little impact on the bottom line of NN. And on a food board like this, a lot of people are interested in many aspects of food across cultures etc but the large majority of people (which covers also the readers of Times magazine) in the US are much less interested (and knowledgeable) in such topics and for them a lot of the facts in this article which compares basic food culture will be new
Why such high rate of diabetes in Japan and India? Is it genetic? The rice? Rice, pasta, potatoes, bread … are they equally bad for diabetics?
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Yes I did read the piece. I’m not sure why you’ve decided to lecture me though. The point is disingenuousness in the title and fundamentally in the comments-- the use of fat as discussion of health whilst ignoring genuine health concerns (and their pharmaceutical needs). But go ahead, tell me more about diabetes.
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