https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11258071

Seems like something similar could still be a problem here, although it seems less likely since the number here is significantly less than article I've linked.

> I assume the secret is mostly genetics

In Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal he mentions that research shows that long life is not particularly heritable.

> I assume the secret is mostly genetics

That, but also various factors during one's life - most importantly, ample and healthy food (especially during fetal growth, childhood and youth), a lack of exposure to known damaging factors for physical and mental health (smog, noise, tobacco, alcohol and other drugs), and a lack of wars and other forms of violence.

The top killers in the Western world are cardiovascular diseases (strongly linked to food) and cancers (strongly linked, again, to food but also to drugs). A safe working culture (both in business and in private) is also a good thing to have - the typical lackluster attitude towards workplace safety is a top cause of workplace accidents both fatal and non-fatal but serious.

> Besides that, all my relatives lived close to 100

Were you there when they were born, so that you can verify their true age?

the problem is presenting a headline as fact, rather than as a reported number or adding any qualifying words like "possibly"

Probably but stats aside there certainly are a lot of very old people in Japan living near-normal lives compared to other developed countries.

After an hour in any town and I'd seen more 95+yos walking about than 10 years in Britain. And the number of times I saw 4 generations of men from one family in the bathhouse!

When there's money to be made from dead relatives, and an incentive for governments to make it look like people live beyond 100 so that they can claim superiority, yeah, that's a good recipe for massive fraud.

You are just a rounding error.

I went from teenager, to twenty something, to something something.

Hoping I live to something something something.

My grandfather made it to 98, but holy cow he was frail. The last few years of his life he couldn’t move much. Shuffle walked only a few inches. Drooled on every meal in front of him. I loved my grandfather but watching him in that state, we were all relieved for him when he passed.

He smoked only during WW2, was an army corp of engineers colonel when he retired from the military, came from a dirt farm in Michigan, engineered all kinds of civil and military projects. In the end, he still managed to engineer a smile. He absolutely loved maps/atlases/GIS.

> I'm extremely skeptical on claims of people having past 100 years of age.

People do live past 100.

Look at a chart of how old people are when they die and you’ll see a consistent distribution with a downward curve. There really are people in the tail of that curve.

There is no hard cutoff in the body that can precisely track time passed over 36,500 days and then shut it all down.

Not only are random people on the internet and a few select media outlets aware of the problem, but governments are also aware. Since the problem is costing governments money, usually in the form of retirement benefits, they have been working to eliminate the problem. In fact some governments have been working reducing and eliminating the problem for decades.

Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother lived to 102, and her date of birth was fully attested.

Many others lived past 100.

Last Civil War veteran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Woolson another example.

Also we have a much longer tradition of western European cooking on a pedestal. Asian recipes really only start showing up in American media in the 90s, and blew up in a serious way in the 2010s.

Japan in particular is not food self sufficient and has a declining agricultural production so is not spending as much money on convincing people to export food. Plus technically a lot of Japanese food is not grown or caught in Japan and so can be made elsewhere using the same recipes.

What do you mean by "lifestyle" here?

I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at, but if you’re referring to weight, diet is significantly more important than lifestyle.

In other words, it’s way easier to out diet a bad lifestyle than out lifestyle a bad diet, if your goal is to not be overweight. Obviously that doesn’t apply to all health metrics.

dieting is a part of your lifestyle, and has one of the largest impacts. Assuming you aren't a chronic smoker of course.

Where's the sophistication? It's mostly vegetables.

As a Japanese, I will also mention that what you see out to eat in Japan is not exactly what we eat at home traditionally. I doubt many would know about all the multitude of traditional dishes that my mom regularly made at home that one would typically not go out to eat, such as hijiki salad (ひじきの煮物) or kinpira gobo (きんぴらごぼう). These and others are the types of dishes that remind me of home (and not tamago-sandos and ramen). My mom emphasized eating things of different colors, which came in the form of assortments of various types of vegetables.

Also, portion sizes in America are huge.

> it’s the choices that Japanese people make within this environment that are healthy

This is a difficult truth for a lot of people to accept because it’s so much easier to blame invisible factors that are poorly understood: Microplastics, xenoesteogens, microbiome, trace lithium in the water supply, or the other trendy excuses.

In some cultures moderating your eating and controlling your weight comes with very high societal pressure. Everyone sees this from a young age and internalizes it. It’s hard to communicate how strong this pressure is and it gets lost when you only look at studies about the food supply.

North America is a car captured hellscape where so many people have zero options but to sit in a car to get everywhere they want to go.

Meanwhile in Japan and so many other regions in Europe that are pointed to as healthier people have the option to simply walk to do so many of their daily tasks.

No real surprise that the regions where people have to actively work harder to be active are in poorer health than others where being active is the default easiest choice.

The built environment is a critical thing here we can fix to make a healthier society.

I think this is mostly a social/societal thing - at an early age in schools they tell kids that they should only eat until they're 80% full. And there's substantial social pressure and bullying of anyone considered even mildly overweight.

Also, most people have a lot of walking/biking built into their daily schedule, especially in larger cities where having a car is impractical.

This all means that while there is a huge amount of sweets and fatty food, it's usually eaten in moderation, and people get exercise in their daily lives to work it off.

>If you been to Japan, access to unhealthy food is extraordinarily easy.

But so is healthy food. Imagine saying "I ate nothing but 7/11 food for two days and I feel the best I have in years" in America.

Where I'd be having a hot dog or pizza I was having onigiri. Small things like that add up.

And yes, they do walk a lot -- I spent a whole evening just walking around Shinjuku in awe of the place.

The Mediterranean diet is pretty much nothing like people in the Mediterranean eat today either. Very old people had a radically different diet during most of their life.

>it’s the choices that Japanese people make within this environment that are healthy.

Precisely that they don't need to make choices due to their environment is what makes the difference. In the US and EU people love their individualism, spend a gazillion on fitness interventions and most people are overweight, it's probably the most visible sign of the importance of culture. As Russ Ackoff said, the correct way to address problems is not to solve them, but to dissolve them. Not to fix individual issues but to create conditions under which they do not occur.

The best way to lose weight is actually to move to a place that's full of thin people, not "do" anything. It's funny that the reverse is common wisdom, everyone who moves to an unhealthy place will always proclaim how they gained 20 pounds immediately

They have vending machines with hot pizza! I’d be in big trouble there.

What a horrible post, missing the entire point by a mile and worse yet, misguiding everyone about the most basic facts :(

I assume you're from a western society, so I can't possibly imagine how you could have possibly reached such a conclusion. The contrast should be obvious at first glance.

The default Japanese diet is greatly more healthy than the default western diet, especially the American diet.

As a person living in the west and willing to put in some of my limited effort into eating healthy, I'm screwed. There's barely any healthy options available, I'm flooded by an ocean of awful food and it takes significant effort and cost not to drown in it.

I can't emphasize this enough, it absolutely does not matter what you can technically do or not. Defaults are what matters. By default in Japan you eat a reasonably healthy diet and walk/bike regularly. By default in America you eat fast food and drive everywhere.

Isn't it just affordable access to high quality healthcare services?

What would that diet consist of?

A bunch of stuff can go wrong with oil:

* You can use cheaper types that are nothing but omega 6

* You can heat them too high for their smoke point

* They can oxidize and go rancid

* You can use an enormous amount of it

Likely one of the main reasons a lot of restaurant food may not settle as well as home cooking. But in principle a restaurant could do the reverse of these four points.

Yes there is.

You can use rancid oil, seed oil, high and long temperatures on polyunsaturaded oils etc. All very unhealthy. Not sure what Japs use though.

I moved to Japan 7 years ago and managed to gain 10 kilos. It is nowhere as healthy as people say.

> Japan is such a high trust society I would be shocked if this is the reason

Trust works both ways. There's also the trust that nobody will report anyone for the fraud, especially if it is widespread and normalized.

However, it would not surprise me if Japan actually did have high life expectancy rates because several other statistics seem to correlate with that, including low obesity, and universal access to healthcare.

I don't remember the source, but worldwide, most really old people have a couple things in common. First is that they live in countries with some kind of pension plan. Second, they generally come from poor neighborhoods where all the people around them statistically have lower lifespans.

The logical conclusion is fraud.

I don't think defrauding the government is all that related to what is typically meant by high/low trust societies.

It was already seen over a decade ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11258071

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogen_Kato#Aftermath

I mean, clearly not all centarians in Japan are actually dead. But I think it's fairly straightforward that the numbers of super-elderly are inflated.

Dude. All humans poop.

If Japan is such a high trust society, why do they have separate train compartments for women?