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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    Slash through the fitness fads; “Solitary Fitness” brings you functional strength without the frills—Manson’s method works, at home or a jail cell.

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  • Do CBD Gummies Work?

    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.

    It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

    Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!

    In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

    As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

    So, no question/request too big or small

    ❝I take CBD gummies. I don’t know if they are worth buying. Can you find a study on the effectiveness of gummies❞

    If you take them, and you’re not sure whether they’re worth it, then it sounds like you’re not getting any observable benefit from them?

    If so, that would seem to answer your question, since presumably the reason that you are taking them is for relaxation and/or pain relief, so if you’re not getting the results you want, then no, they are not worth it.

    However! CBD gummies are an incredibly diverse and not-well-studied product, so far, given the relative novelty of their legality. By diverse we mean, they’re not well-standardized.

    In other words: the CBD gummies you get could be completely unlike CBD gummies from a different source.

    CBD itself (i.e. in forms other than just gummies, and mostly as oil) has been studied somewhat better, and we did a main feature on it here:

    CBD Oil’s Many Benefits

    And while we’re at it:

    Cannabis Myths vs Reality ← This one is about cannabis products in general, and includes discussion of THC content and effects, which might not be so relevant to you, but may to some readers.

    Companies selling CBD and CBD gummies may make bold claims that are not yet backed by science, so if you are buying them for those reasons, you might want to be aware:

    Selling cannabidiol products in Canada: a framing analysis of advertising claims by online retailers

    One thing that we would add is that even though CBD is generally recognized as safe, it is possible to overdose on CBD gummies, so do watch your limits:

    A Case of Toxicity from Cannabidiol Gummy Ingestion

    Take care!

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  • Is white rice bad for me? Can I make it lower GI or 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.

    Rice is a culinary staple in Australia and around the world.

    It might seem like a given that brown rice is healthier than white and official public health resources often recommend brown rice instead of white as a “healthy swap”.

    But Australians definitely prefer white rice over brown. So, what’s the difference, and what do we need to know when choosing rice?

    Dragne Marius/Unsplash

    What makes rice white or brown?

    Rice “grains” are technically seeds. A complete, whole rice seed is called a “paddy”, which has multiple parts:

    1. the “hull” is the hard outer layer which protects the seed
    2. the “bran”, which is a softer protective layer containing the seed coat
    3. the “germ” or the embryo, which is the part of the seed that would develop into a new plant if was germinated
    4. the “endosperm”, which makes up most of the seed and is essentially the store of nutrients that feeds the developing plant as a seed grows into a plant.

    Rice needs to be processed for humans to eat it.

    Along with cleaning and drying, the hard hulls are removed since we can’t digest them. This is how brown rice is made, with the other three parts of the rice remaining intact. This means brown rice is regarded as a “wholegrain”.

    White rice, however, is a “refined” grain, as it is further polished to remove the bran and germ, leaving just the endosperm. This is a mechanical and not a chemical process.

    What’s the difference, nutritionally?

    Keeping the bran and the germ means brown rice has more magnesium, phosphorus, potassium B vitamins (niacin, folate, riboflavin and pyridoxine), iron, zinc and fibre.

    The germ and the bran also contain more bioactives (compounds in foods that aren’t essential nutrients but have health benefits), like oryzanols and phenolic compounds which have antioxidant effects.

    Brown rice
    Brown rice is cleaned and dried and the hard hulls are removed. Sung Min/Shutterstock

    But that doesn’t mean white rice is just empty calories. It still contains vitamins, minerals and some fibre, and is low in fat and salt, and is naturally gluten-free.

    White and brown rice actually have similar amounts of calories (or kilojoules) and total carbohydrates.

    There are studies that show eating more white rice is linked to a higher risk of type 2 diabetes. But it is difficult to know if this is down to the rice itself, or other related factors such as socioeconomic variables or other dietary patterns.

    What about the glycaemic index?

    The higher fibre means brown rice has a lower glycaemic index (GI), meaning it raises blood sugar levels more slowly. But this is highly variable between different rices within the white and brown categories.

    The GI system uses low (less than 55), medium (55–70) and high (above 70) categories. Brown rices fall into the low and medium categories. White rices fall in the medium and high.

    There are specific low-GI types available for both white and brown types. You can also lower the GI of rice by heating and then cooling it. This process converts some of the “available carbohydrates” into “resistant starch”, which then functions like dietary fibre.

    Are there any benefits to white rice?

    The taste and textural qualities of white and brown rices differ. White rice tends to have a softer texture and more mild or neutral flavour. Brown rice has a chewier texture and nuttier flavour.

    So, while you can technically substitute brown rice into most recipes, the experience will be different. Or other ingredients may need to be added or changed to create the desired texture.

    Removing more of the outer layers may also reduce the levels of contaminants such as pesticides.

    We don’t just eat rice

    Friends eat dinner on a rooftop terrace
    You’ll likely have vegetables and protein with your rice. Chay_Tee/Shutterstock

    Comparing white and brown rice seems like an easy way to boost nutritional value. But just because one food (brown rice) is more nutrient-dense doesn’t make the other food (white rice) “bad”.

    Ultimately, it’s not often that we eat just rice, so we don’t need the rice we choose to be the perfect one. Rice is typically the staple base of a more complex dish. So, it’s probably more important to think about what we eat with rice.

    Adding vegetables and lean proteins to rice-based dishes can easily add the micronutrients, bioactives and fibre that white rice is comparatively lacking, and this can likely do more to contribute to diet quality than eating brown rice instead.

    Emma Beckett, Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Nutrition, Dietetics & Food Innovation – School of Health Sciences, UNSW Sydney

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Captivate – by Vanessa van Edwards

    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.

    This book isn’t just for one area of human interactions. It covers everything from the boardroom to the bedroom (not necessarily a progression with the same person!), business associates, friends, partners, kids, and more.

    She presents information in a layered manner, covering for example, chapter-by-chapter:

    • the first five minutes
    • the first five hours
    • the first five days

    She also covers such things as:

    • starting conversations in a way that makes you memorable (without making it weird!)
    • the importance of really listening (and how to do that)
    • collecting like-minded people appropriately
    • introducing other people! Because a) it’s not all about you, but also b) you’re the person who knows everybody now
    • where to stand at parties / networking events!
    • dating and early-days dating messages
    • reading the room, reading the people

    All in all, a great resource for anyone who wants to make (and maintain!) meaningful relationships with those around you.

    Grab Your Copy of “Captivate” on Amazon Now!

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Related Posts

  • 25 Healthy Habits That Will Change Your Life
  • The Burden of Getting Medical Care Can Exhaust Older Patients

    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.

    Susanne Gilliam, 67, was walking down her driveway to get the mail in January when she slipped and fell on a patch of black ice.

    Pain shot through her left knee and ankle. After summoning her husband on her phone, with difficulty she made it back to the house.

    And then began the run-around that so many people face when they interact with America’s uncoordinated health care system.

    Gilliam’s orthopedic surgeon, who managed previous difficulties with her left knee, saw her that afternoon but told her “I don’t do ankles.”

    He referred her to an ankle specialist who ordered a new set of X-rays and an MRI. For convenience’s sake, Gilliam asked to get the scans at a hospital near her home in Sudbury, Massachusetts. But the hospital didn’t have the doctor’s order when she called for an appointment. It came through only after several more calls.

    Coordinating the care she needs to recover, including physical therapy, became a part-time job for Gilliam. (Therapists work on only one body part per session, so she has needed separate visits for her knee and for her ankle several times a week.)

    “The burden of arranging everything I need — it’s huge,” Gilliam told me. “It leaves you with such a sense of mental and physical exhaustion.”

    The toll the American health care system extracts is, in some respects, the price of extraordinary progress in medicine. But it’s also evidence of the poor fit between older adults’ capacities and the health care system’s demands.

    “The good news is we know so much more and can do so much more for people with various conditions,” said Thomas H. Lee, chief medical officer at Press Ganey, a consulting firm that tracks patients’ experiences with health care. “The bad news is the system has gotten overwhelmingly complex.”

    That complexity is compounded by the proliferation of guidelines for separate medical conditions, financial incentives that reward more medical care, and specialization among clinicians, said Ishani Ganguli, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

    “It’s not uncommon for older patients to have three or more heart specialists who schedule regular appointments and tests,” she said. If someone has multiple medical problems — say, heart disease, diabetes, and glaucoma — interactions with the health care system multiply.

    Ganguli is the author of a new study showing that Medicare patients spend about three weeks a year having medical tests, visiting doctors, undergoing treatments or medical procedures, seeking care in emergency rooms, or spending time in the hospital or rehabilitation facilities. (The data is from 2019, before the covid pandemic disrupted care patterns. If any services were received, that counted as a day of health care contact.)

    That study found that slightly more than 1 in 10 seniors, including those recovering from or managing serious illnesses, spent a much larger portion of their lives getting care — at least 50 days a year.

    “Some of this may be very beneficial and valuable for people, and some of it may be less essential,” Ganguli said. “We don’t talk enough about what we’re asking older adults to do and whether that’s realistic.”

    Victor Montori, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, has for many years raised an alarm about the “treatment burden” that patients experience. In addition to time spent receiving health care, this burden includes arranging appointments, finding transportation to medical visits, getting and taking medications, communicating with insurance companies, paying medical bills, monitoring health at home, and following recommendations such as dietary changes.

    Four years ago — in a paper titled “2022 paper on reducing treatment burden.

    Consider what Jean Hartnett, 53, of Omaha, Nebraska, and her eight siblings went through after their 88-year-old mother had a stroke in February 2021 while shopping at Walmart.

    At the time, the older woman was looking after Hartnett’s father, who had kidney disease and needed help with daily activities such as showering and going to the bathroom.

    During the year after the stroke, both of Hartnett’s parents — fiercely independent farmers who lived in Hubbard, Nebraska — suffered setbacks, and medical crises became common. When a physician changed her mom’s or dad’s plan of care, new medications, supplies, and medical equipment had to be procured, and new rounds of occupational, physical, and speech therapy arranged.

    Neither parent could be left alone if the other needed medical attention.

    “It wasn’t unusual for me to be bringing one parent home from the hospital or doctor’s visit and passing the ambulance or a family member on the highway taking the other one in,” Hartnett explained. “An incredible amount of coordination needed to happen.”

    Hartnett moved in with her parents during the last six weeks of her father’s life, after doctors decided he was too weak to undertake dialysis. He passed away in March 2022. Her mother died months later in July.

    So, what can older adults and family caregivers do to ease the burdens of health care?

    To start, be candid with your doctor if you think a treatment plan isn’t feasible and explain why you feel that way, said Elizabeth Rogers, an assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School. 

    “Be sure to discuss your health priorities and trade-offs: what you might gain and what you might lose by forgoing certain tests or treatments,” she said. Ask which interventions are most important in terms of keeping you healthy, and which might be expendable.

    Doctors can adjust your treatment plan, discontinue medications that aren’t yielding significant benefits, and arrange virtual visits if you can manage the technological requirements. (Many older adults can’t.)

    Ask if a social worker or a patient navigator can help you arrange multiple appointments and tests on the same day to minimize the burden of going to and from medical centers. These professionals can also help you connect with community resources, such as transportation services, that might be of help. (Most medical centers have staff of this kind, but physician practices do not.)

    If you don’t understand how to do what your doctor wants you to do, ask questions: What will this involve on my part? How much time will this take? What kind of resources will I need to do this? And ask for written materials, such as self-management plans for asthma or diabetes, that can help you understand what’s expected.

    “I would ask a clinician, ‘If I chose this treatment option, what does that mean not only for my cancer or heart disease, but also for the time I’ll spend getting care?’” said Ganguli of Harvard. “If they don’t have an answer, ask if they can come up with an estimate.”

    We’re eager to hear from readers about questions you’d like answered, problems you’ve been having with your care, and advice you need in dealing with the health care system. Visit http://kffhealthnews.org/columnists to submit your requests or tips.

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

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  • Superfood-Stuffed Squash

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    This stuffed squash recipe is packed with so many nutrient-dense ingredients, yet it feels delightfully decadent—a great recipe to have up your sleeve ready for fall.

    You will need

    • 1 large or two medium butternut squashes, halved lengthways and seeds removed (keep them; they are full of nutrients! You can sprout them, or dry them to use them at your leisure), along with some of the flesh from the central part above where the seeds are, so that there is room for stuffing
    • 2 cups low-sodium vegetable stock
    • 1 cup wild rice, rinsed
    • 1 medium onion, finely chopped
    • ½ cup walnuts, roughly chopped
    • ½ cup dried cranberries goji berries ← why goji berries? They have even more healthful properties than cranberries, and cranberries are hard to buy without so much added sugar that the ingredients list looks like “cranberries (51%), sugar (39%), vegetable oil (10%)”, whereas when buying goji berries, the ingredients list says “goji berries”, and they do the same culinary job.
    • ¼ cup pine nuts
    • ½ bulb garlic, minced
    • 1 tbsp dried thyme or 2 tsp fresh thyme, destalked
    • 1 tbsp dried rosemary or 2 tsp fresh rosemary, destalked
    • 1 generous handful fresh parsley, chopped
    • 1 tbsp chia seeds
    • 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
    • 1 tbsp black pepper, coarse ground
    • ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
    • Extra virgin olive oil, for brushing and frying
    • Aged balsamic vinegar, to serve (failing this, make a balsamic vinegar reduction and use that; it should have a thicker texture but still taste acidic and not too sweet; the thickness should come from the higher concentration of grape must and its natural sugars; no need to add sugar)

    Method

    (we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)

    1) Preheat the oven to 400°F / 200°C.

    2) Brush the cut sides of the squash with olive oil; sprinkle with a pinch of MSG/salt and a little black pepper (grind it directly over the squash if you are using a grinder; hold the grinder high though so that it distributes evenly—waiters in restaurants aren’t just being dramatic when they do that with pepper or Parmesan or such)

    3) Arrange them cut-sides-down on a baking tray lined with baking paper, and roast for at least 30 minutes or until tender.

    4) While that is roasting, add the chia seeds to the wild rice, and cook them in the low-sodium vegetable stock, using a rice cooker if available. It should take about the same length of time, but if the rice is done first, set it aside, and if the squash is done first, turn the oven down low to keep it warm.

    5) Heat some oil in a sauté pan (not a skillet without high sides; we’re going to need space in a bit), and fry the chopped onion until translucent and soft. We could say “about 5 minutes” but honestly it depends on your pan as well as the heat and other factors.

    6) Add the seasonings (herbs, garlic, black pepper, MSG/salt, nooch), and cook for a further 2 minutes, stirring thoroughly to distribute evenly.

    7) Add the rice, berries, and nuts, cooking for a further 2 minutes, stirring constantly, ensuring everything is heated evenly.

    8) Remove the squash halves from the oven, turn them over, and spoon the mixture we just made into them, filling generously.

    9) Drizzle a lashing of the aged balsamic vinegar (or balsamic vinegar reduction), to serve.

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

    For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

    Take care!

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  • The Truth About Chocolate & Skin Health

    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.

    It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

    Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

    In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

    As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

    So, no question/request too big or small

    ❝What’s the science on chocolate and acne? Asking for a family member❞

    The science is: these two things are broadly unrelated to each other.

    There was a very illustrative study done specifically for this, though!

    ❝65 subjects with moderate acne ate either a bar containing ten times the amount of chocolate in a typical bar, or an identical-appearing bar which contained no chocolate. Counting of all the lesions on one side of the face before and after each ingestion period indicated no difference between the bars.

    Five normal subjects ingested two enriched chocolate bars daily for one month; this represented a daily addition of the diet of 1,200 calories, of which about half was vegetable fat. This excessive intake of chocolate and fat did not alter the composition or output of sebum.

    A review of studies purporting to show that diets high in carbohydrate or fat stimulate sebaceous secretion and adversely affect acne vulgaris indicates that these claims are unproved.

    ~ Dr. James Fulton et al.

    Source: Effect of Chocolate on Acne Vulgaris

    As for what might help against acne more than needlessly abstaining from chocolate:

    Why Do We Have Pores, And Could We Not?

    …as well as:

    Of Brains & Breakouts: The Neuroscience Of Your Skin

    And here are some other articles that might interest you about chocolate:

    Enjoy! And while we have your attention… Would you like this section to be bigger? If so, send us more questions!

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

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