10 Simple Japanese Habits For Healthier & Longer Life

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You don’t have to be Japanese or live in Okinawa to enjoy the benefits of healthy longevity. A lot of it comes down to simple habits:

Easy to implement

We’ll not keep the 10 habits a mystery; they are:

  1. Start the day with hot water: drinking hot water in the morning helps with hydration, warming the body, and aiding digestion.
  2. Enjoy a hearty breakfast: Japanese breakfasts are traditionally filling, nutritious, and help promote energy and longevity. Typical components include rice, miso soup, fish, and pickles.
  3. Take balanced meals: Japanese education emphasizes nutrition from a young age, promoting balanced meals with proteins, fiber, and vitamins & minerals.
  4. Enjoy fermented foods: fermented foods, such as nattō and soy-based condiments, support digestion, heart health, and the immune system.
  5. Drink green tea and matcha: both are rich in health benefits; preparing matcha mindfully adds a peaceful ritual to daily life too.
  6. Keep the “80% full” rule: “hara hachi bu” encourages eating until 80% full, which can improve longevity and, of course, prevent overeating.
  7. Use multiple small dishes: small servings and a variety of dishes help prevent overeating and ensure a diverse intake of nutrients.
  8. Gratitude before and after meals: saying “itadakimasu” and “gochisousama” promotes mindful eating, and afterwards, good digestion. Speaking Japanese is of course not the key factor here, but rather, do give yourself a moment of reflection before and after meals.
  9. Use vinegar in cooking: vinegar, often used in sushi rice and sauces like ponzu, adds flavor and offers health benefits, mostly pertaining to blood sugar balance.
  10. Eat slowly: Eating at a slower pace will improve digestion, and can enhance satiety and prevent accidentally overeating.

For more on all of these, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like to read:

How To Get More Out Of What’s On Your Plate

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  • How Much Does A Vegan Diet Affect Biological Aging?

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    Slow Your Aging, One Meal At A Time

    This one’s a straightforward one today, and the ““life hack” can be summed up:

    Enjoy a vegan diet to enjoy younger biological age.

    First, what is biological age?

    Biological age is not one number, but a collection of numbers, as per different biomarkers of aging, including:

    • Visual markers of aging (e.g. wrinkles, graying hair)
    • Performative markers of aging (e.g. mobility tests)
    • Internal functional markers of aging (e.g. tests for cognitive decline, eyesight, hearing, etc)
    • Cellular markers of aging (e.g. telomere length)

    We wrote more about this here:

    Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?

    A vegan diet may well impact multiple of those categories of aging, but today we’re highlighting a study (hot off the press; published only a few days ago!) that looks at its effect on that last category: cellular markers of aging.

    There’s an interesting paradox here, because this category is:

    • the most easily ignorable; because we all feel it if our knees are giving out or our skin is losing elasticity, but who notices if telomeres’ T/S ratio changed by 0.0407? ← the researchers, that’s who, as this difference is very significant
    • the most far-reaching in its impact, because cellular aging in turn has an effect on all the other markers of aging

    Second, how much difference does it make, and how do we know?

    The study was an eight-week interventional identical twin study. This means several things, to start with:

    • Eight weeks is a rather short period of time to accumulate cellular aging, let alone for an intervention to accumulate a significant difference in cellular aging—but it did. So, just imagine what difference it might make in a year or ten!
    • Doing an interventional study with identical twin pairs already controlled for a lot of factors, that are usually confounding variables in population / cohort / longitudinal / observational studies.

    Factors that weren’t controlled for by default by using identical twins, were controlled for in the experiment design. For example, twin pairs were rejected if one or more twin in a given pair already had medical conditions that could affect the outcome:

    ❝Inclusion criteria involved participants aged ≥18, part of a willing twin pair, with BMI <40, and LDL-C <190 mg/dL. Exclusions included uncontrolled hypertension, metabolic disease, diabetes, cancer, heart/renal/liver disease, pregnancy, lactation, and medication use affecting body weight or energy.

    Eligibility was determined via online screening, followed by an orientation meeting and in-person clinic visit. Randomization occurred only after completing baseline visits, dietary recalls, and questionnaires for both twins❞

    ~ Dr. Varun Dwaraka et al. ← there’s a lot of “et al.” to this one; the paper had 16 collaborating authors!

    As to the difference it made over the course of the 8 weeks…

    ❝Various measures of epigenetic age acceleration (PC GrimAge, PC PhenoAge, DunedinPACE) were assessed, along with system-specific effects (Inflammation, Heart, Hormone, Liver, and Metabolic).

    Distinct responses were observed, with the vegan cohort exhibiting significant decreases in overall epigenetic age acceleration, aligning with anti-aging effects of plant-based diets. Diet-specific shifts were noted in the analysis of methylation surrogates, demonstrating the influence of diet on complex trait prediction through DNA methylation markers.❞

    ~ Ibid.

    You can read the whole paper here (it goes into a lot more detail than we have room to here, and also gives infographics, charts, numbers, the works):

    Unveiling the epigenetic impact of vegan vs. omnivorous diets on aging: insights from the Twins Nutrition Study (TwiNS)

    Were they just eating more healthily, though?

    Well, arguably yes, as the results show, but to be clear:

    The omnivorous diet compared to the vegan diet in this study was also controlled; both groups were given a healthy meal plan for their respective diet. So this wasn’t a case of “any omnivorous diet vs healthy vegan diet”, but rather “healthy omnivorous diet vs healthy vegan diet”.

    Again, the paper itself has the full details—a short version is that it involved a healthy meal kit delivery service, followed by ongoing dietician involvement in an equal and carefully-controlled fashion.

    So, aside from that one group had an omnivorous meal plan and the other vegan, both groups received the same level of “healthy eating” support, guidance, and oversight.

    But isn’t [insert your preferred animal product here] healthy?

    Quite possibly! For general health, general scientific consensus is that eating at least mostly plants is best, red meat is bad, poultry is neutral in moderation, fish is good in moderation, dairy is good in moderation if fermented, eggs are good in moderation if not fried.

    This study looked at the various biomarkers of aging that we listed, and not every possible aspect of health—there’s more science yet to be done, and the researchers themselves are calling for it.

    It also bears mentioning that for some (relatively few, but not insignificantly few) people, extant health conditions may make a vegan diet unhealthy or otherwise untenable. Do speak with your own doctor and/or dietician if unsure.

    See also: Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy?

    We would hypothesize, by the way, that the anti-aging benefits of a vegan diet are probably proportional to abstention from animal products—meaning that even if you simply have some “vegan days”, while still consuming animal products other days, you’ll still get benefit for the days you abstained. That’s just our hypothesis though.

    Take care!

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  • Honey vs Maple Syrup – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing honey to maple syrup, we picked the honey.

    Why?

    It was very close, as both have small advantages:
    •⁠ ⁠Honey has some medicinal properties (and depending on type, may contain an antihistamine)
    •⁠ ⁠Maple syrup is a good source of manganese, as well as low-but-present amounts of other minerals

    However, you wouldn’t want to eat enough maple syrup to rely on it as a source of those minerals, and honey has the lower GI (average 46 vs 54; for comparison, refined sugar is 65), which works well as a tie-breaker.

    (If GI’s very important to you, though, the easy winner here would be agave syrup if we let it compete, with its GI of 15)

    Read more:
    •⁠ ⁠Can Honey Relieve Allergies?
    •⁠ ⁠From Apples to Bees, and High-Fructose C’s

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  • Top 8 Fruits That Prevent & Kill Cancer

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    Dr. Amy Dee, pharmacist and cancer survivor herself, lays out the best options for anticancer fruits:

    The fruits

    Without further ado, they are:

    • Kiwi: promotes cancer cell death while sparing healthy cells
    • Plums & peaches: an interesting choice to list these similar fruits together as one item, but they both also induce cell death in cancer cells while sparing healthy ones
    • Dragon fruit: this does the same, while also inhibiting cancer cell growth
    • Figs: these have antitumor effects specifically, while removing carcinogens too, and additionally sensitizing cancer cells to light therapy
    • Cranberries: disrupt cancer cell adhesion, breaking down tumors, while protecting non-cancerous cells against DNA damage
    • Citrus fruits: inhibit tumor growth and kill cancer cells; regular consumption is also associated with a lower cancer risk (be warned though, grapefruit interacts with some medications)
    • Cherries: induce cancer cell death; protect healthy cells against DNA damage
    • Tomatoes: don’t often make it into lists of fruits, but lycopene reduces cancer risk, and slows the growth of cancer cells (10almonds note: watermelon has more lycopene than tomatoes, and is more traditionally considered a fruit in all respects, so could have taken the spot here).

    We would also argue that apricots could have had a spot on the list, both for their lycopene content (comparable to tomatoes) and their botanical (and thus phytochemical) similarities to peaches and plums.

    For more information on each of these (she also talks about the different polyphenols and other nutrients that constitute the active compounds delivering these anticancer effects), enjoy:

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    Take care!

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  • Tomato vs Cucumber – Which is Healthier?

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Our Verdict

    When comparing tomato to cucumber, we picked the tomato.

    Why?

    Both are certainly great, but there are some nutritional factors between them:

    In terms of macros, everything is approximately equal except that tomato has more than 2x the fiber, so that’s a win for tomato.

    When it comes to vitamins, tomatoes have more of vitamins A, B1, B3, B6, B9, C, E, and choline, while cucumber has more of vitamins B2, B5, and K. In short, an 8:3 victory for tomatoes.

    In the category of minerals, tomatoes have more copper, potassium, and manganese, while cucumber has more calcium, iron, magnesium, selenium, and zinc. So, a win for cucumber this time.

    Both have useful phytochemical properties, too; tomatoes are rich in lycopene which has many benefits, and cucumbers have powerful anti-inflammatory powers whose mechanism of action is not yet fully understood—see the links below for more details!

    All in all, enjoy either or both (they make a great salad chopped roughly together with some olives, a little garlic, and a drizzle of olive oil and balsamic vinegar with a twist or three of black pepper), but if you have to pick just one (what a cruel world), we say the tomato has the most benefits, on balance.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Take care!

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  • Migraine Mythbusting

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    Migraine: When Headaches Are The Tip Of The Neurological Iceberg

    Yesterday, we asked you “What is a migraine?” and got the above-depicted, below-described spread of responses:

    • Just under 46% said “a headache, but above a certain level of severity”
    • Just under 23% said “a headache, but caused by a neurological disorder”
    • Just over 21% said “a neurological disorder that can cause headaches”
    • Just under 10% said “a headache, but with an attention-grabbing name”

    So… What does the science say?

    A migraine is a headache, but above a certain level of severity: True or False?

    While that’s usually a very noticeable part of it… That’s only one part of it, and not a required diagnostic criterion. So, in terms of defining what a migraine is, False.

    Indeed, migraine may occur without any headache, let alone a severe one, for example: Abdominal Migraine—though this is much less well-researched than the more common with-headache varieties.

    Here are the defining characteristics of a migraine, with the handy mnemonic 5-4-3-2-1:

    • 5 or more attacks
    • 4 hours to 3 days in duration
    • 2 or more of the following:
      • Unilateral (affects only one side of the head)
      • Pulsating
      • Moderate or severe pain intensity
      • Worsened by or causing avoidance of routine physical activity
    • 1 or more of the following:
      • Nausea and/or vomiting
      • Sensitivity to both light and sound

    Source: Cephalalgia | ICHD-II Classification: Parts 1–3: Primary, Secondary and Other

    As one of our subscribers wrote:

    ❝I have chronic migraine, and it is NOT fun. It takes away from my enjoyment of family activities, time with friends, and even enjoying alone time. Anyone who says a migraine is just a bad headache has not had to deal with vertigo, nausea, loss of balance, photophobia, light sensitivity, or a host of other symptoms.❞

    Migraine is a neurological disorder: True or False?

    True! While the underlying causes aren’t known, what is known is that there are genetic and neurological factors at play.

    ❝Migraine is a recurrent, disabling neurological disorder. The World Health Organization ranks migraine as the most prevalent, disabling, long-term neurological condition when taking into account years lost due to disability.

    Considerable progress has been made in elucidating the pathophysiological mechanisms of migraine, associated genetic factors that may influence susceptibility to the disease❞

    Source: JHP | Mechanisms of migraine as a chronic evolutive condition

    Migraine is just a headache with a more attention-grabbing name: True or False?

    Clearly, False.

    As we’ve already covered why above, we’ll just close today with a nod to an old joke amongst people with chronic illnesses in general:

    “Are you just saying that because you want attention?”

    “Yes… Medical attention!”

    Want to learn more?

    You can find a lot of resources at…

    NIH | National Institute of Neurological Disorders & Stroke | Migraine

    and…

    The Migraine Trust ← helpfully, this one has a “Calm mode” to tone down the colorscheme of the website!

    Particularly useful from the above site are its pages:

    Take care!

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  • The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need

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    Take Your Mental Health As Seriously As General Health!

    Sometimes, health and productivity means excelling—sometimes, it means avoiding illness and unproductivity. Both are essential, and today we’re going to tackle some ground-up stuff. If you don’t need it right now, great; we suggest to read it for when and if you do. But how likely is it that you will?

    • One in four of us are affected by serious mental health issues in any given year.
    • One in five of us have suicidal thoughts at some point in our lifetime.
    • One in six of us are affected to at least some extent by the most commonly-reported mental health issues, anxiety and depression, in any given week.

    …and that’s just what’s reported, of course. These stats are from a UK-based source but can be considered indicative generally. Jokes aside, the UK is not a special case and is not measurably worse for people’s mental health than, say, the US or Canada.

    While this is not an inherently cheery topic, we think it’s an important one.

    Depression, which we’re going to focus on today, is very very much a killer to both health and productivity, after all.

    One of the most commonly-used measures of depression is known by the snappy name of “PHQ9”. It stands for “Patient Health Questionnaire Nine”, and you can take it anonymously online for free (without signing up for anything; it’s right there on the page already):

    Take The PHQ9 Test Here! (under 2 minutes, immediate results)

    There’s a chance you took that test and your score was, well, depressing. There’s also a chance you’re doing just peachy, or maybe somewhere in between. PHQ9 scores can fluctuate over time (because they focus on the past two weeks, and also rely on self-reports in the moment), so you might want to bookmark it to test again periodically. It can be interesting to track over time.

    In the event that you’re struggling (or: in case one day you find yourself struggling, or want to be able to support a loved one who is struggling), some top tips that are useful:

    Accept that it’s a medical condition like any other

    Which means some important things:

    • You/they are not lazy or otherwise being a bad person by being depressed
    • You/they will probably get better at some point, especially if help is available
    • You/they cannot, however, “just snap out of it”; illness doesn’t work that way
    • Medication might help (it also might not)

    Do what you can, how you can, when you can

    Everyone knows the advice to exercise as a remedy for depression, and indeed, exercise helps many. Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy.

    Did you ever see the 80s kids’ movie “The Neverending Story”? There’s a scene in which the young hero Atreyu must traverse the “Swamp of Sadness”, and while he has a magical talisman that protects him, his beloved horse Artax is not so lucky; he slows down, and eventually stops still, sinking slowly into the swamp. Atreyu pulls at him and begs him to keep going, but—despite being many times bigger and stronger than Atreyu, the horse just sinks into the swamp, literally drowning in despair.

    See the scene: The Neverending Story movie clip – Artax and the Swamp of Sadness (1984)

    Wow, they really don’t make kids’ movies like they used to, do they?

    But, depression is very much like that, and advice “exercise to feel less depressed!” falls short of actually being helpful, when one is too depressed to do it.

    If you’re in the position of supporting someone who’s depressed, the best tool in your toolbox will be not “here’s why you should do this” (they don’t care; not because they’re an uncaring person by nature, but because they are physiologically impeded from caring about themself at this time), but rather:

    “please do this with me”

    The reason this has a better chance of working is because the depressed person will in all likelihood be unable to care enough to raise and/or maintain an objection, and while they can’t remember why they should care about themself, they’re more likely to remember that they should care about you, and so will go with your want/need more easily than with their own. It’s not a magic bullet, but it’s worth a shot.

    What if I’m the depressed person, though?

    Honestly, the same, if there’s someone around you that you do care about; do what you can to look after you, for them, if that means you can find some extra motivation.

    But I’m all alone… what now?

    Firstly, you don’t have to be alone. There are free services that you can access, for example:

    …which varyingly offer advice, free phone services, webchats, and the like.

    But also, there are ways you can look after yourself a little bit; do the things you’d advise someone else to do, even if you’re sure they won’t work:

    • Take a little walk around the block
    • Put the lights on when you’re not sleeping
    • For that matter, get out of bed when you’re not sleeping. Literally lie on the floor if necessary, but change your location.
    • Change your bedding, or at least your clothes
    • If changing the bedding is too much, change just the pillowcase
    • If changing your clothes is too much, change just one item of clothing
    • Drink some water; it won’t magically cure you, but you’ll be in slightly better order
    • On the topic of water, splash some on your face, if showering/bathing is too much right now
    • Do something creative (that’s not self-harm). You may scoff at the notion of “art therapy” helping, but this is a way to get at least some of the lights on in areas of your brain that are a little dark right now. Worst case scenario is it’ll be a distraction from your problems, so give it a try.
    • Find a connection to community—whatever that means to you—even if you don’t feel you can join it right now. Discover that there are people out there who would welcome you if you were able to go join them. Maybe one day you will!
    • Hiding from the world? That’s probably not healthy, but while you’re hiding, take the time to read those books (write those books, if you’re so inclined), learn that new language, take up chess, take up baking, whatever. If you can find something that means anything to you, go with that for now, ride that wave. Motivation’s hard to come by during depression and you might let many things slide; you might as well get something out of this period if you can.

    If you’re not depressed right now but you know you’re predisposed to such / can slip that way?

    Write yourself instructions now. Copy the above list if you like.

    Most of all: have a “things to do when I don’t feel like doing anything” list.

    If you only take one piece of advice from today’s newsletter, let that one be it!

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