What Western Writers Won’t Tell You about the Real Okinawan Diet
And why there isn’t anything really remarkable about it.
Okinawa is one of the so-called “blue zones.” Coined to refer to a collection of places on the Earth where people live long lives, its proponents also claim that following the diet eaten by the people living in the Blue Zones will also give you a shot at living to 100.
Unsurprisingly, the “traditional Okinawan diet” has become promoted to mythical proportions. According to the Blue Zoners,
“it’s whole plant foods, not fish, that make up 90 percent of the traditional Okinawan diet: Less than 1 percent of the diet was fish; less than 1 percent was meat; and less than 1 percent was dairy and eggs. Most of the diet was based on vegetables and beans, with the most calories coming from purple and orange sweet potatoes. It’s not only a highly anti-inflammatory diet but also a highly antioxidant one. - The Okinawa Diet: Eating and Living to 100 — Blue Zones
Unfortunately, one only needs to visit Okinawa to know that this account makes no sense. As Paul S. Marshall writes in his article Do We Need to Rethink Okinawa as a Blue Zone, pork is king, and trying to find vegetarian dishes to keep (his) familial hypercholesterolemia down has proven to be a little more difficult than…
