Locked article, doesn't explain why in the ingress.
I think that there is a lot of issues with modern agriculture, but that people is eating rice is most likely not one of them. Just travel to Japan, they are more fit and it's rare to see overweight people.
In my country of birth Sweden, about 50% of the adult population is overweight and an alarming amount of them is obese. I don't think eating rice is the problem tbh. It's really alarming how bad journalism has become.
Extra ordinary claims require extra ordinary evidence.
The Japanese just eat less calories. There isn't anything particularly fancy about it, it's just less overall, be it rice, donuts, or fluffy Hokkaido milk bread.
The answer is not a simple yes or no. While there are many factors that influence individual diets, the overall Japanese diet is generally lower in calories than that seen in some Western countries. On average, Japanese adults consume 2,150-2,900 calories per day, while the average American adult consumes 2,742-3,657 calories every day.[1]
Assuming the middles of those ranges that's like 500-1000 calories less than your average American. This does not mean they're more "fit" either, though things like pull-ups and 5K runs are easier when you're skinny vs. 50lbs overweight due to excess adipose tissue.
The Japanese are also shorter and smaller than Westerners, on average. Of course they'd eat less calories. Many women I've talked to can't even find clothes in their size in America; they have to get clothes in children's sizes.
The big difference I see is that Japanese walk a LOT more than Americans, at least in the cities (which is where the large majority of Japanese live).
Yes I think that is obvious. But I also think the main reason is why the eat less calories is because they have a healtier culture where eating less calories is simply easier.
If I drive my car to the city where my parents live, the only real options I have on the way are fast foods that are very unhealthy.
If I go to the store, we have sections of candy and sodas but buying an ice tea is hard.
If I go out for dinner most options are unhealthy etc etc.
Our culture is eating bread and other wheat products that are filled with calories and also have an agriculture that uses pesticides like 5-10 times a year.
another rice-specific issue is the huge amount of arsenic. curiously, there's more arsenic in highly processed rice products (rice crackers), I have no idea why.
Both naturally from rocks and soil, and latent arsenic from decades of arsenic pesticide use. Arsenic pesticides have been banned for a while, but they’re still in the soil.
Depends on your definition of "process", but parboiled rice can use the same arsenic contaminated groundwater and can raise the arsenic content depending on the process used, whereas mechanical hulling reduces it.
Seems like a lot of the issues reside in the heavy use of pesticides and I totally agree here, it's bad and scary. I don't like it and is one of the reasons why I'm beginning to grow as much food as possible myself.
This is a problem with agriculture and not rice specifically. I would say it's bad and fake news to say that a crop is bad due to bad practices used when growing it. We could ban it for example and produce less food but don't die of scary diseases that pesticides most likely creates. We could do a lot of things that would make food production a bit harder but healthier for us and the environment.
Altough it's easier to say that "rice sucks" or "red meat sucks" we shouldn't because it's untrue and I think it is misinformation and that is a big part of the reason I dislike modern journalism. It is lazy and focuses on the symptoms instead of the root cause. Modern media has convinced most people that eating soy beans badly produced and processed in china is better than eating cow meat from a local small farm that does everything right.
People always argue like there is no changing how we produce the foods and it annoys the hell out of me.
I'm completely unaware of the health of Japanese people, but fitness is not only a visual appearance. Plenty of people who are diabetic with terrible cholesterol that are skinny-fat.
Even so, being overweight is unhealthy and if you go into a store in Japan it's hard(er) to find unhealthy foods. In Sweden, the amount of candy that is available is almost scary and because I'm used to it, it wasn't until I visited other countries like Japan that this became clear to me how bad it is for me and society in large. It is really, really hard to avoid buying unhealthy foods when so many of the options are unhealthy. You have to read all packages very intimiately in order to know.
Swedes usually eat sandwiches in the morning while many Japanese people eat rice and fish. There were no almost no bread available in the stores when I visited and I think that is also telling. When I went to the cinema in Japan, it was only us foreigners that bought candy (which there were very little of and very expensive). I saw no one else buy anything, they just went in and enjoyed the movie. When eating out, there were a lot of choices of good quality restaurants and even the fast food seems quite healthy or at least have options that isn't dripping with fat and sugars like the alternatives in the west.
Another example is ice tea. It's very popular in Japan it seemed like. It existed everywhere in shops and vending machines. Here it's almost impossible to buy. You can buy hundreds of different kinds of expensive sugar water but ice tea is hard to find in the general store.
If rice is so bad that the article claims, japanese people should be extremely unhealthy but in reality it seems it's the complete reverse at least from my personal experience. I don't know the health status of Japanese people in general and a lot of them smoke but they still at least seem more healthy than Swedes on a society level.
Okinawa, which I visited, has a lot of old people and is one of the "blue zones" of the world were a lot of people live to be 100 years old or older.
I'm just saying that I don't believe what the article claims since my experience that I have seen with my own eyes tells me a different story. The article seems extremely likely to be click-bait and possible just false information. I'm expecting to at least get some notion of what the claims are by reading the ingress and I'm not going to pay for reading what I assume is going to be clickbait.
I just think this is common practice by "journalists" today and I think it's depressing.
Swedes usually eat sandwiches in the morning while many Japanese people eat rice and fish. There were no almost no bread available in the stores when I visited and I think that is also telling.
What century did you last visit Japan? Bread is very, very common here. A typical "Japanese" breakfast these days at a cafe is toast and coffee, and every grocery store has bread easily available for 100-300 yen (depending on quality). Bread is typically sliced thicker here though, and you can buy the bread with different slice thickness. Bakeries are also common, with many European-style breads and pastries.
A more traditional Japanese breakfast might be natto (fermented beans), rice, and raw egg with a little fish, but toast and coffee are extremely common and popular these days.
I don't know the health status of Japanese people in general and a lot of them smoke but they still at least seem more healthy than Swedes on a society level.
Smoking is going down lately; with the 2020 Olympics, they passed new laws restricting indoor smoking, so people are quitting. It's gotten really hard to find restaurants that allow smoking inside.
But yes, overall, Japanese still eat a lot of rice, and are much thinner on average than Americans (I don't know about Swedes). The idea that rice eaters are all diabetic is utterly ridiculous and defies reality; any "journalist" who writes this obviously has never been to Asia.
Comments
Locked article, doesn't explain why in the ingress.
I think that there is a lot of issues with modern agriculture, but that people is eating rice is most likely not one of them. Just travel to Japan, they are more fit and it's rare to see overweight people.
In my country of birth Sweden, about 50% of the adult population is overweight and an alarming amount of them is obese. I don't think eating rice is the problem tbh. It's really alarming how bad journalism has become.
Extra ordinary claims require extra ordinary evidence.
The Japanese just eat less calories. There isn't anything particularly fancy about it, it's just less overall, be it rice, donuts, or fluffy Hokkaido milk bread.
Assuming the middles of those ranges that's like 500-1000 calories less than your average American. This does not mean they're more "fit" either, though things like pull-ups and 5K runs are easier when you're skinny vs. 50lbs overweight due to excess adipose tissue.
[1] https://www.thedonutwhole.com/do-japanese-eat-less-calories/....
The Japanese are also shorter and smaller than Westerners, on average. Of course they'd eat less calories. Many women I've talked to can't even find clothes in their size in America; they have to get clothes in children's sizes.
The big difference I see is that Japanese walk a LOT more than Americans, at least in the cities (which is where the large majority of Japanese live).
Yes I think that is obvious. But I also think the main reason is why the eat less calories is because they have a healtier culture where eating less calories is simply easier.
If I drive my car to the city where my parents live, the only real options I have on the way are fast foods that are very unhealthy.
If I go to the store, we have sections of candy and sodas but buying an ice tea is hard.
If I go out for dinner most options are unhealthy etc etc.
Our culture is eating bread and other wheat products that are filled with calories and also have an agriculture that uses pesticides like 5-10 times a year.
One issue is methane emissions from the rice paddies, which is a rice-specific phenomenon which you wouldn't have growing wheat, millet etc.
another rice-specific issue is the huge amount of arsenic. curiously, there's more arsenic in highly processed rice products (rice crackers), I have no idea why.
Sure, I only buy rice grown in italy due to that they have a much lesser amount of arsenic in the ground.
Italian rice also doesn't have the methane problem.
Pesticide runoff? Arsenic is commonly used a pesticide. Best of all, it's considered organic, so farmers are encouraged to use it.
Both naturally from rocks and soil, and latent arsenic from decades of arsenic pesticide use. Arsenic pesticides have been banned for a while, but they’re still in the soil.
Rice, for whatever reason, can take up this element more readily than other crops. There has been some research on this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29749629/
what confuses me is not the origin of the arsenic in rice, but why there's more after you process the rice... where does it come from??
Depends on your definition of "process", but parboiled rice can use the same arsenic contaminated groundwater and can raise the arsenic content depending on the process used, whereas mechanical hulling reduces it.
I think we should stop focusing on how much waste FOOD that humans live on produces and focus more on renewable energy.
I can see good intentions turning into famine very quickly.
This should answers your questions better I hope : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsuZGHfSa34
Seems like a lot of the issues reside in the heavy use of pesticides and I totally agree here, it's bad and scary. I don't like it and is one of the reasons why I'm beginning to grow as much food as possible myself.
This is a problem with agriculture and not rice specifically. I would say it's bad and fake news to say that a crop is bad due to bad practices used when growing it. We could ban it for example and produce less food but don't die of scary diseases that pesticides most likely creates. We could do a lot of things that would make food production a bit harder but healthier for us and the environment.
Altough it's easier to say that "rice sucks" or "red meat sucks" we shouldn't because it's untrue and I think it is misinformation and that is a big part of the reason I dislike modern journalism. It is lazy and focuses on the symptoms instead of the root cause. Modern media has convinced most people that eating soy beans badly produced and processed in china is better than eating cow meat from a local small farm that does everything right.
People always argue like there is no changing how we produce the foods and it annoys the hell out of me.
I'm completely unaware of the health of Japanese people, but fitness is not only a visual appearance. Plenty of people who are diabetic with terrible cholesterol that are skinny-fat.
Even so, being overweight is unhealthy and if you go into a store in Japan it's hard(er) to find unhealthy foods. In Sweden, the amount of candy that is available is almost scary and because I'm used to it, it wasn't until I visited other countries like Japan that this became clear to me how bad it is for me and society in large. It is really, really hard to avoid buying unhealthy foods when so many of the options are unhealthy. You have to read all packages very intimiately in order to know.
Swedes usually eat sandwiches in the morning while many Japanese people eat rice and fish. There were no almost no bread available in the stores when I visited and I think that is also telling. When I went to the cinema in Japan, it was only us foreigners that bought candy (which there were very little of and very expensive). I saw no one else buy anything, they just went in and enjoyed the movie. When eating out, there were a lot of choices of good quality restaurants and even the fast food seems quite healthy or at least have options that isn't dripping with fat and sugars like the alternatives in the west.
Another example is ice tea. It's very popular in Japan it seemed like. It existed everywhere in shops and vending machines. Here it's almost impossible to buy. You can buy hundreds of different kinds of expensive sugar water but ice tea is hard to find in the general store.
If rice is so bad that the article claims, japanese people should be extremely unhealthy but in reality it seems it's the complete reverse at least from my personal experience. I don't know the health status of Japanese people in general and a lot of them smoke but they still at least seem more healthy than Swedes on a society level.
Okinawa, which I visited, has a lot of old people and is one of the "blue zones" of the world were a lot of people live to be 100 years old or older.
I'm just saying that I don't believe what the article claims since my experience that I have seen with my own eyes tells me a different story. The article seems extremely likely to be click-bait and possible just false information. I'm expecting to at least get some notion of what the claims are by reading the ingress and I'm not going to pay for reading what I assume is going to be clickbait.
I just think this is common practice by "journalists" today and I think it's depressing.
What century did you last visit Japan? Bread is very, very common here. A typical "Japanese" breakfast these days at a cafe is toast and coffee, and every grocery store has bread easily available for 100-300 yen (depending on quality). Bread is typically sliced thicker here though, and you can buy the bread with different slice thickness. Bakeries are also common, with many European-style breads and pastries.
A more traditional Japanese breakfast might be natto (fermented beans), rice, and raw egg with a little fish, but toast and coffee are extremely common and popular these days.
Smoking is going down lately; with the 2020 Olympics, they passed new laws restricting indoor smoking, so people are quitting. It's gotten really hard to find restaurants that allow smoking inside.
But yes, overall, Japanese still eat a lot of rice, and are much thinner on average than Americans (I don't know about Swedes). The idea that rice eaters are all diabetic is utterly ridiculous and defies reality; any "journalist" who writes this obviously has never been to Asia.