Beniko's Love: A Winning Recipe for Pickled Vegetables

August 18, 2022

(1) Annual consumption

There is a unit of measurement called "koku".

1 gou is 150g, 1 sho is 1.5kg, 1 to is 15kg... 1 koku is 150kg. It seems that the size of the masu is the standard, and 1 koku was the amount that a Japanese person in the Edo period ate in a year.

The Edo period is often portrayed as a time when poor peasants were exploited by evil magistrates, but in reality, people ate as much as 150 kilograms of brown rice per year (the standard diet at the time was brown rice) , even though the average height of men and women at the time was 150-160 cm.

Before the Meiji period (until the middle of the Edo period in urban areas), the standard diet was two meals a day. Therefore, the amount of brown rice consumed per meal was equivalent to about two bowls of rice !

On the other hand, the average height of modern people has increased by 10 cm, and their annual rice intake is almost entirely white rice, just under 50 kg.

yeah?

During the Edo period, even though people lived a high-carbohydrate lifestyle, with over 70% of their calories coming from rice, obesity and diabetes were not problems.

Why do modern people suffer from metabolic syndrome (visceral fat) even though they only eat one-third of their carbohydrate intake (rice )?


(2) Class A War Criminals

You're about 38 years old and under the illusion that you're still young. Are you worried about fatty liver? Maybe it's the fat that's stuck between your mesenteries?

Is sugar the Class A war criminal for metabolic syndrome?

The peak sugar intake per person in Japan was 30 kg in the 1960s. Now it has halved to about 16 kg. ( On the other hand, cheap artificial sweeteners have become more common.)

So what about fats from meat and oil?

In 1980, the average person ate about 30 kg of meat, but now it's about 45 kg, 1.5 times higher. However, Americans are the world's most obese nation, consuming 110 kg per year (and 30 kg of sugar). Chinese and Koreans have long been heavy meat eaters, even eating dog.

People today eat only one-third as much rice as people in the Edo period, and sugar intake has halved in the last 60 years. They eat less meat than China and Korea, fellow East Asians, so on a global scale, they don't eat that much.

In other words, the main culprit behind metabolic syndrome is lack of exercise, even before diet.


(3) Move and eat

Young women have weak bones and are too thin

The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare is sounding the alarm.

The calorie intake of women under 30 today is lower than that of women of the same age in 1946 , who were mothers of the baby boomer generation (a generation that gave birth to four or five children each) .

Even in 1946, when people were struggling just to get food for the day and feared they would die if they didn't get enough rations , they still ate 1,900 kcal.

On the other hand, young women today consume an average of only 1,600 kcal.

Being thinner means you can wear more clothes and they look better on Instagram.

However, if your body fat percentage is too low, your fat cells will release less of the hormone leptin.

The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare is implicitly trying to say that this will lead to reproductive disorders and accelerate the decline in the birthrate.

That aside, until just after the war, Japanese people got 70% of their calories from rice ( at least 70% rice), so they were getting 28g of fiber a day (compared to about 14g today).

However, even with excess sugar, few people were concerned about the diseases that could result from it.

From this point on, we can see how to live daily life in a way that is suited to the constitution and health of Japanese people .

Move around a lot and eat healthy foods with fiber.

That is the secret to stress-free health.