An author and expert on wellness visited a massive school in a country renowned for having the world’s best life expectancy and was shocked to discover “there was not one fat child” there.
Scottish journalist and author Johann Hari has spent much of his career examining the impacts of technology and modern life on health and wellbeing.
In an appearance on entrepreneur Steven Bartlett’s hugely popular podcast The Diary of CEO, Hari recalled his “totally fascinating” recent visit to a school in Koenji, a district in the west of Tokyo, attended by children from the ages of five to 18.
He and a translator were greeted by the school’s nutritionist – “by law, every Japanese school has to employ a professional nutritionist,” he noted – who explained that all processed food is banned.
“Every meal has to be prepared from scratch at the start of the day,” Hari said. “No kid is allowed to bring in a packed lunch, so everyone has to eat the food prepared at school.”
As well as being healthy and nutritious, the meals and their preparation are used as teaching tools to convey “all sorts of key principles” about wellbeing.
“One of them … is a very deep cultural norm in Japan, which is you should eat until you’re 80 per cent full and then stop,”Hari said.
Another norm is how people eat. A typical dinner might include five dishes, although they are “significantly smaller” portions than in the West.
That variety is important for gut health, he noted, but the Japanese also don’t do what most in the West would do and eat all of one dish before moving onto the next.
“In Japan, that’s regarded as a crazy way to eat. You have a mouthful of the miso soup, then a mouthful of the white fish, then a mouthful of the sashimi, and so on. It slows your eating down.”
After spending a full day at the Koenji school, which has 1,000 students, Hari realised “there was not one fat child” – a sight that he found “jarring.”
“They have extraordinarily low childhood obesity,” he said of Japan.
A snippet of the interview has gone viral on TikTok in recent days, sparking a commentary about the health of kids in the West, which some feel sets them up for a lifetime of subpar standards.
The broader conversation on Bartlett’s podcast focused on some of the reasons for Japan’s world-leading life expectancy, most of which are in stark contrast to Western nations.
For example, when Hari asked some of the children about their favourite foods, he thought they were “trolling” him by offering picks like broccoli, seaweed and rice.
The chicken nugget experiment
Back in 2005, celebrity chef and television star Jamie Oliver embarked on a mission he dubbed the “Feed Me Better” campaign to improve nutritional standards in British schools.
Oliver has had some success. His 10-week healthy eating program is now offered in 320 schools across the United Kingdom, participated in by more than 80,000 kids in the two decades since.
A television series at the time charting his mission was a global sensation and in 2011, Oliver appeared on a US talk show.
As part of it, he spent time with American children to probe their infamous eating habits and try to convince them to ditch over-processed and unhealthy foods.
One experiment, a clip of which has gone viral repeatedly in recent years, saw Oliver explain how chicken nuggets are made – with the stripped back carcass of a chicken.
“I’m going to tell you a little story about how you can use all the leftover bits to make food,” he told the group, hacking at the bones, cartilage and skin of the remains.
“Some of the processed foods that you love are made from the bits you don’t like, bone, all the connective tissues, little bits of bone marrow and stuff like that, they even add chicken skin.”
He put the pile, which the children were visibly disgusted by, into a blender.
“Once they’ve done that, they pour the wound-up meat and bone and skin and the horrible bits, and they put it into a massive great machine that squeezes all the soft stuff away from the gangly hard stuff.
“Then we can get a cutter, and cut out our very own patty, just like that, put some breadcrumbs on it, and there you go ladies and gentlemen, our very own patty.
“And all we do is put it in a pan, now, who would still eat this?”
As he held up a chicken nugget, every single child eagerly raised their hands. A noticeably downcast Oliver simply replied: “Great.”
That clip was referenced in the TikTok comments.
Indeed, during his visit to a Japanese school, Hari said he brought up pictures on his phone of typical British school lunches to show the kids.
“They literally reacted like I had shown them an ISIS beheading video,” he said. “They screamed.”
“They said, ‘where’s the salad?’ I said, ‘there is no salad’ and they were completely baffled.”
How Australian kids measure up
One-in-four Australian children were overweight or obese in 2022-23, according to data from the Obesity Evidence Hub.
The number of children who are overweight or obese has risen from 20 per cent in 1995 to almost 28 per cent in June last year.
On the latest figures, more than eight per cent of kids aged two to 17-years-old are obese – up from 4.9 per cent some 30 years ago.
“The highest rate of overweight and obesity among boys was in the 16 to 17 year old age group,” the group noted. “Among girls, the highest rates were at 8 to 11 years of age.”
Australia isn’t alone – kids across the developed world have become more overweight and obese in recent decades.
By comparison, the World Economic Forum reported that Japan has bucked the global trend of expanding waistlines among young people.
“Japan has fewer overweight children than any other developed nation, in part due to healthy school lunches,” it noted in a 2019 report.
A ‘worrying trend’ here
The overall life expectancy scenario in Australia is different to Japan’s – and getting worse.
While life expectancy here ranks among the best performing countries in the world, researchers have found it’s stagnating among younger generations.
Aussies born between 1930 and 1969 continue to do “exceptionally well”, Tim Adair from the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne and Sergey Timonin from the School of Demography at Australian National University, found.
“But the picture for those under 50 is not so rosy – life expectancy is stagnating for that younger group,” the pair wrote in analysis for The Conversation.
That’s a trend worth examining, given stagnations or reversals in life expectancy “can be warning signs of both longstanding and emerging health problems”.
The pair examined data, from both Australia five other high-income English-speaking countries – in a bid to uncover some of the causes of deteriorating conditions.
“Relatively high death rates for those under 50 dragged the overall life expectancy at birth down for each English-speaking country, including Australia,” Dr Adair and Dr Timonin said.
“Suicides and drug or alcohol-related deaths were the main reason for these trends.
“But over age 50, Australia performs exceptionally well in life expectancy for both men and women. Australians born in the 1930s-60s are likely to live longer than those in the non-English speaking comparison group and all other English-speaking countries.
“But Australians born in the 1970s onwards had lower life expectancy than the comparison group.”
Their research points to “significant” generational differences and should the trend continue, our life expectancy result could continue to shift.
“The results suggest real improvement could come through measures that reduce inequality and structural disadvantages that lead to poor health outcomes, such as improving access to education and security of employment and housing, supporting mental health and drug-related safety, and addressing diseases like obesity and diabetes.”
You are what you eat
Research published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2021 compared recently mortality statistics from G7 countries and found Japan had “remarkable low” death rates from heart disease and cancer.
As a result, the country has the highest life expectancy rate in the cohort – and at a broader global level – which is a stark turnaround from the 1960s when it had one of the lowest in the developed world.
“The low mortality rates from heart disease and cancer are thought to reflect the low prevalence of obesity in Japan, low intake of red meat, specifically saturated fatty acids, and high intakes of fish, specifically n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, plant foods such as soybeans, and nonsugar-sweetened beverages such as green tea,” the research paper noted.
“The decreasing mortality rates from cerebrovascular disease are thought to reflect the increases in animal foods, milk, and dairy products and consequently in saturated fatty acids and calcium, together with a decrease in salt intake which may have led to a decrease in blood pressure.
“This decrease in salt and highly salted foods also seems to account for the decrease in stomach cancer.”
The typical Japanese diet, which is heavy on plant food and fish, might therefore be associated with longevity and health.
Even the consumption of ‘Westernised’ food like meat, milk and other dairy products, remains relatively “modest”, the paper noted.
And as separate research published in The Lancet in 2011 noted, the benefits aren’t just people living longer and healthier lives.
“For the past three decades, Japan has had the highest life expectancy in the world [and] this has been achieved while keeping health expenditures as a fraction of gross domestic product,” the paper noted.
For example, the cost of healthcare is about 8.5 per cent in Japan, compared to 17 per cent in the United States and 11 per cent in Germany, the paper noted.
“Excellent health outcomes in Japan have been attributed to favourable risk factor profiles, health system performance, and universal coverage.”
Realising the underlying reasons for Japan’s health standards and life expectancy would have “important ramifications for other nations looking to achieve good outcomes at affordable cost.”
