Japan Lights: Japanese diet - a few things worth knowing

Japanese diet - a few things worth knowing

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New Year has come and with it - New Year’s resolutions! One of the most popular one is “I’ll lose some weight/ go on a diet”. Which is a great opportunity to talk about Japanese diet, which is said to be one of the most healthy diet in the world.

Now, I’m not a specialist when it comes to diets or nutriment values and so on, so I just wanted to point out a few things I, personally, think are worth knowing about Japanese diet. I won’t give any meal plans or anything, since during my stay in Japan I was not on a real Japanese diet - I was cooking what I knew how to cook, and so typical Japanese meals were not always on my table.

Story time: How I wanted to start a Japanese diet.

What inspired me to write this post (apart from New Year) was what I found out when I was trying to actually get myself a meal plan for Japanese diet. I went to obvious place for it and searched through Internet. Not a wise choice since I was aiming for simply eating healthy, not losing weight, which apparently was the main goal of all the diets I’ve seen there. What I found was very surprising because it didn’t look like a Japanese diet at all. Just look at this: a toast a carrot and coffee for breakfast?

"Japanese" breakfast according to some of Japanese diets found in Internet
(I tried it and believe me, it doesn't taste like Japan)

Apart from the obvious “I can’t eat so little for breakfast, it’s the most important meal of the day” and the fact that I live in a part of the world where it’s simply cold in winter so we need a good, warm meal at the beginning of the day to warm up, this was simply not Japanese at all! This was nothing like any Japanese breakfast I've seen! For starters, breakfast in Japan (as well as almost every meal) usually have gohan - a bowl of white rice. Another thing is coffee, which is not a popular drink in Japan. The one sold in vending machines is weaker than the one I’m used to, and most of my Japanese friends don’t drink it unless they are really, really exhausted. So what is it doing in the meal plan? The rest was no better. Since I figured this so called “Japanese diet” has nothing in common with an actual Japanese diet, I stopped digging further.

Japanese Diet: the basics

Once again, there will be no meal plan in here. There will be only some things I learned about food and eating in Japan, that I myself find really good and worth remembering, which for me are the best things in Japanese diet.

#1 Variety

A meal I’m used to usually consist of three things on one plate: carbohydrates, proteins and vitamins in for of fruits and vegetables. It might be a sandwich (bread, ham and lettuce/cucumber/tomato) or a dinner (potatoes, cutlet, salad) or any other meal. In Japan it’s different. There’s lots and lots of different dishes served together, often each on its own plate/bowl. So it’s not just one type of protein, it’s a few types at the same time: shrimp tempura, raw fish, fried pork or chicken - they can all be served together. Same goes for vitamins and carbs. This way one meal with a huge variety of ingredients has much more nutritional value and so it’s better in keeping hunger away.

Simple Japanese meal: three bowls, two types of carbs (rice and udon), two types of proteins (egg and pork), lots of different vegetables

#2 A lot of small portions

Portions in Japan are tiny, there’s no denying it. Yet, they keep people full. What’s the secret? As I said previously, it’s partially the variety but other part of it is that while the portions are small, there’s a lot of them. It’s not about stuffing the stomach, it’s about enjoying lots of small, tasty treats. So, eating a lot of various things is more effective than eating one big thing in fending off hunger and the craving for snacks is smaller.

Japanese dinner: wanna play the "how many small dishes is here" game?

#3 Chopsticks

Everyone knows that in East Asia people eat with chopsticks. What it has to do with healthy diet? Well, chopsticks require precision and can’t hold as much food as fork or spoon. Which means that people eat slower while using chopsticks. Since it takes some time (usually around half an hour) for the brain to register that the hunger is gone, eating slowly means that a person ha eaten less before the appropriate amount of time passed.

#4 Fishes
Fishes are very very healthy, this is something obvious. Another obvious thing is that they are very popular in Japanese diet. Another obvious thing is that since Japan is an island surrounded by ocean, there’s looooots of fishes there. Lots of delicious, healthy fishes. To sum up: eat fish!

Conclusion

There’s a lot of things that are making Japanese diet one of the healthiest in the world (none of them is a coffee/carrot/toast combo). But lots of them, while working splendidly in Japan, are very hard to accommodate elsewhere. Some of the ingredients are impossible to get, eating with chopsticks is not the only way to eat slowly and so on. The good thing is, it’s not necessary to start a 100% Japanese diet - one can just mix other cuisines while remembering about the basics things that are making Japanese diet so special: variety, lots of small portions, slow eating and eating a lot of fish and fresh ingredients.