Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • "The Okinawa Diet: Living to 100"

  • The dietary guidelines recommend that we try to choose meals or snacks

  • that are high in nutrients but lower in calories

  • to reduce the risk of chronic disease.

  • By this measure, the healthiest foods on the planet, the most nutrient dense,

  • are vegetables, containing the most nutrient bang for our caloric buck.

  • So what would happen if a population centered

  • their entire diet around vegetables?

  • They might end up living among the longest lives in the world.

  • Of course any time you hear about long-living populations

  • you have to make sure it's validated, as it may be hard to find

  • birth certificates from the 1890s.

  • But validation studies suggest that indeed they really do live that long.

  • The traditional diet in Okinawa is based

  • on vegetables, beans, and other plants.

  • I'm used to seeing the Okinawan diet represented like this,

  • the base being vegetables, beans, and grains,

  • but a substantial contribution from fish and other meat.

  • But a more accurate representation would be this,

  • if you look at their actual dietary intake.

  • We know what they were eating from the U.S. National Archives,

  • because the U.S. military ran Okinawa

  • until it was given back to Japan in 1972.

  • And if you look at the traditional diets of more than 2,000 Okinawans,

  • this is how it breaks down.

  • Only 1% of their diet was fish; less than 1% of their diet was meat,

  • and same with eggs and dairy.

  • So it was more than 96% plant-based,

  • and more than 90% whole food plant basedvery few processed foods either.

  • And not just whole food plant-based, but most of their diet was vegetables,

  • and one vegetable in particular: sweet potatoes.

  • The Okinawan diet was centered around purple and orange sweet potatoes.

  • How delicious is that?

  • It could have been bitter gourd, or soursop?

  • But no, sweet potatoes.

  • So 90 plus percent whole food plant-based

  • makes it a highly anti-inflammatory diet,

  • makes it a highly antioxidant diet.

  • If you measure the level of oxidized fat within their system,

  • there is compelling evidence of less free radical damage.

  • Maybe they just genetically have better antioxidant enzymes or something?

  • No, their antioxidant enzyme activity is the same.

  • It's all the extra antioxidants that they're getting from their diet

  • that may be making the difference.

  • Most of their diet is vegetables!

  • So 8 to 12 times fewer heart disease deaths than the U.S.

  • You can see they ran out of room for the graph for our death rate.

  • Two to three times fewer colon cancer deaths,

  • seven times fewer prostate cancer deaths,

  • and five and a half times lower risk of dying from breast cancer.

  • Some of this protection may be because they were only eating

  • about 1800 calories a day, but they were actually eating a greater mass

  • of food, but the whole plant foods are just calorically dilute.

  • There's also a cultural norm not to stuff oneself.

  • The plant-based nature of the diet

  • may trump the caloric restriction though,

  • since the one population that lives even longer than the Okinawa Japanese

  • don't just eat a 98% meat-free diet, they eat 100% meat-free.

  • The Adventist vegetarians in California,

  • with perhaps the highest life expectancy of any formally described population.

  • Adventist vegetarian men and women live to be about 83 and 86,

  • comparable to Okinawan women, but better than Okinawan men.

  • The best of the best were Adventist vegetarians

  • who had healthy lifestyles, too, like being exercising nonsmokers,

  • 87 and nearly 90, on average.

  • That's like 10 to 14 years longer than the general population.

  • Ten to 14 years extra years on this Earth from simple lifestyle choices.

  • And this is happening now, in modern times,

  • whereas Okinawan longevity is now a thing of the past.

  • Okinawa now hosts more than a dozen KFCs .

  • Their saturated fat tripled.

  • They went from eating essentially no cholesterol to a few Big Mac's worth,

  • tripled their sodium, and are now just as potassium deficient

  • as Americans, getting less than half

  • of the recommended minimum daily intake of 4700 mg a day.

  • In two generations, Okinawans have gone

  • from the leanest Japanese to the fattest.

  • As a consequence, there has been a resurgence of interest

  • from public health professionals

  • in getting Okinawans to eat the Okinawan diet, too.

"The Okinawa Diet: Living to 100"

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it