S5 E03 - Japan, Longevity, and Ice Cream: Debunking Dietary Fables

Should You Eat Like the Japanese to Live Longer? The Longevity Diet Myth

This episode challenges the popular claim that Americans should copy Japanese, Mediterranean, or French diets to gain longevity, arguing the logic relies on correlation and the false assumption that all bodies respond identically to food. Using lactose intolerance and lactase persistence as a clear genetic example, it argues digestion and metabolism vary across populations and that rapid dietary shifts can create “evolutionary mismatch,” illustrated by POWs in Vietnam developing malnutrition on rice alone. It critiques moral panic over “ultra-processed” foods and the scapegoating of unprocessed red meat, while noting global dietary extremes and inconsistencies in what gets praised or blamed. The script also questions longevity obsession, pointing to suicide and fertility issues in Japan and arguing Blue Zones reflect purpose, community, moderation, and faith more than diet alone, concluding there are no unhealthy foods—only unhealthy diets.

00:00 Longevity Diet Hype

01:53 The Simplistic Eat Like Them Claim

03:36 Milk Genetics And Lactose

07:05 Digestion Is Not Uniform

09:03 Evolutionary Mismatch Story

10:13 Red Meat Numbers And Myths

11:54 Beef Logistics And Nutrition

14:36 Ultra Processed Moral Panic

15:27 Following The Logic Too Far

17:02 Culture War And Genetics

19:48 Blue Zones Beyond Food

21:07 Meaning Over More Years

#DietFads #AmericanLongevity #BlueZones #JapanDiet #FrenchParadox #redmeat #UPF #TheTenthMan

Commentary on trending issues brought to you with a moderate perspective.

Transcript

0:11

Eat like the Japanese and you'll live longer they say. Trade red meat for rice, and you'll live to be a hundred. Pseudoscience, fads and illogical expectations today on The Tenth Man We, Americans are being told that we eat too much red meat, too much fat, too much processed food. And they've invented a new one, ultra processed food. And meanwhile, the Japanese who do not eat such things, they live longer than us. The Italians live longer too, and even the French live longer and. And they eat differently from us too, so, Aha, we should eat like them, right? Well, should we, should we trade ribeye for miso soup? Swap hamburgers for sardines and replace butter with olive oil. You've probably noticed something lately. That longevity is everywhere. Blue zone documentaries, supplement stacks, biological age calculators and diets promising you extra years. Everyone seems to want more time on this earth and the message is constant. Other countries live longer, therefore their cuisine must be the key. But before we. Reorganize our grocery card before we start throwing things back. Let's just slow down and take a closer look. The argument usually sounds quite simple. It's actually just kind of simplistic. It's. Goes Japan has one of the highest life expectancies in the world, and traditional Japanese diets emphasize fish and vegetables. Therefore, just eat like Japan. No meat and potatoes, no butter. And the Mediterranean diet argument runs the same way. Olive oil, fish, tomatoes, and whole grains. Tomatoes, that's interesting. That's actually an American fruit, vegetable or whatever. And of course, they ignore the fact that the French eat butter and still live long. They just give that a name of the French Paradox and move on. But hidden inside this argument is a huge, very powerful assumption they're making. That all human bodies respond the same way to food. So that if a cuisine works in one population, it will also transfer quite cleanly to another, and that's the part that's rarely examined. So let's just ask a a question more basic, because isn't this just the correlation causation fallacy? Just because two things go together doesn't mean that one causes the other. Because are human populations biologically identical when it comes to digestion, metabolism, and disease risk? And I'd say if the answer is no, if genetics actually shapes how we process food, then"eat like them" becomes not merely a weaker claim, but actually a harmful one. And there's one very simple place to get started in order to see this. And that's with milk. In American culture, lactose intolerance is treated like a, a joke, like a punchline. The famous TV sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, ran for 12 years, and the main character on that, one of the main, Leonard was famously and humorously, outrageously funny, had lactose intolerance, and they made it a joke. They made it a part of being weak and a nerd. So in America, we act as if being unable to digest milk is something unusual, but actually the opposite is true. On the global scale, most adult humans cannot comfortably digest lactose. Americans can. Northern Europeans can, but many African populations cannot. Most American Indians cannot. Large portions of South America cannot, and much of East Asia cannot. Getting back to the Big Bang theory, India has more cows than the other, any other country, and yet lactose intolerance is the norm. It should have been the character Rajesh on Big Bang Theory who was lactose intolerant. But then again, when is pop culture ever actually accurate? The ability to digest milk into adulthood is the genetic exception, not the rule, and it is genetic. There's only certain populations, primarily Northern Europeans, as we said, and some. Pastoral African groups who developed widespread lactase persistence. And that's what we should be calling it. And why? Well, because for thousands of years, they depended on milk from cows, goats, sheep, camels, and their genetics adapted. That's what scientists say. It actually could be the other way around that the other populations lost the ability, but. For that reason. In the West, we have milk and cereal. We have cookies and milk. These are just common combinations. We invented ice cream. We consider dairy as its own food group, and yet most others, most other populations of the world don't have that adaptation. So there's an irony here. God has given us something like 10 different animals that produce milk, mostly cows, but also goats, sheep, buffalo, camels, yaks, reindeer. But here in America, people who can drink milk are leaving it for oat milk, almond, or soy milk. Huh? Ultra processed milk, right, if you will? Meanwhile, the Asians who cannot drink milk are feeding it to their kids trying to develop lactose persistence. That's right. Our model longevity culture Japan ironically cannot digest one of the staples long promoted in Western nutrition charts. While we are being told to avoid dairy. So we should copy the Japanese, except not when they copy us apparently. Now, this is just common basic genetics for you. And if something as fundamental as lactase, persistence varies dramatically between populations. Then digestion as a whole is not uniform. And we ran into this problem before back in the fifties, sixties, seventies with the C.A.R.E. packages? The West has always sent food to poor countries, wheat, powdered milk, canned meat, and we were criticized then for sending them our food because they had trouble digesting it. So if we've established that digestion is not uniform, why would you assume that longevity responds uniformly to cuisine? I mean, we already accept that biological variants exists elsewhere in other areas. Kenyans dominate long distance running. The Sherpas can tolerate low oxygen at extreme altitudes. And of course, women live longer than men almost everywhere on Earth. But we don't say, if you ate like a Sherpa, you could summit Mount Everest. Just drink some salted butter tea and you won't need oxygen at altitude. And while the Japanese are people very much like us genetically, yet, it just could be that they're just going to live longer. A Great Dane and a Chihuahua. After all, they share 99.9%. my numbers it's probably more of the same DNA, but the big dog will never live as long as the little one. And no one would be so foolish as to think eating the Chihuahua's food is gonna change that. You have to wonder why do people obsess with what they put into their mouths and then expect magic from it. And we do it all the time. Pink Himalayan sea salt. Well, pink Himalayan salt tells you all you need to know about that. Now, if we tried that, the fact is that when populations rapidly change diet, metabolic stress can follow. That's called evolutionary mismatch. A body adapted over centuries to use one food pattern doesn't always respond smoothly to another introduced quickly. And there's a book called Five Years to Freedom. I read it years ago. It's written by Nick Rowe, an American Green Beret who was taken prisoner in Vietnam. Rowe was one of the few men to escape imprisonment by the communist and went on to develop the SERE school, SERE, Survival, Evasion Resistance and Escape that all pilots and Special Forces attend. And I've heard some good stories from some of those guys, both pilots and Special Forces who went to the school. So in the prison camp Rowe and the other men were given all the I, all the rice they could eat simultaneously as they slowly developed malnutrition. Captain Rowe himself hand fed a comrade, cradling his head in his arms as he watched him die. They could have done with a little red meat. So let's talk a little bit about red meat. We're told America's eat too much beef over a pound a week. Well, I don't eat a pound of beef every week, and you probably don't either. And I know that just statistically speaking, because the vegetarians don't eat any of it, but someone. Is eating it and studies show that 12% of the population is eating half of all that beef in America. So the rest of us are eating the other half. And there are heavy eaters of any food group. And I'd wager that those guys in the 12% are in fact eating too much red meat. But it's just like someone who eats too much of any food that you could name. So along that vein, if Americans eat too much red meat. Did you know that half of all the butter eaten on earth is produced by and eaten by India? 40% of all the eggs in the world are eaten by the Chinese. And 80% of all the blue fin tuna in the world is eaten by, guess who? Our model country, Japan. Do we have to eat more tuna to to achieve longevity because, sorry, it's not even possible. Mathematically, we can't both eat 80% of the tuna in the world. So you see, anything that we do is automatically criticized, but the fact is beef, any meat, it's just another food. And the thing about beef is beef is nutrient dense. That's a good thing. Just for logistics purposes. You know Chicago, the city of Chicago used to have stockyards feed lots. Upton Sinclair wrote his famous book, The Jungle, about the huge feedlots where cattle went to be fed fattened and to awai, and while they awaited slaughter. But Chicago no longer has stockyards, and it's not'cause we're not eating beef is it? But it's because refrigeration changed the whole system. Instead of shipping live cattle to the cities and then shipping feed there with them instead, meat is processed near the source, the source of the meat, and then refrigerated and shipped cold. So. We're moving concentrated nutrition across the country, not bulk biomass. And when you tell us to eat more plants, what you're actually saying is ship that grain to some mill to be turned into flour or another food staple, then ship it to another factory to be turned into whole grain bread. Or some other product and then ship that to us when you could just feed the plants to the cows in the Midwest and ship us the meat. And you know, the propagandists, they have all their, they have all their, their arguments. They'll raise feed conversion ratios. They'll say, well, it takes more calories of grain to make the meat, blah, blah, blah. Yes, that's true. Cattle don't convert grain to meat one-to-one. But cattle don't just eat grain cattle, eat forage, they eat grasses. You can feed them crop residues, you can feed them agricultural byproducts that would otherwise have little or no direct human use. What do you think they do with all the orange peels after they make the orange juice that you drink? They feed it to cows. If it weren't for animal feed, much plant waste would have no purpose at all. So these wonderful animals, cattle, they convert low value biomass into usable nutrition. Because what we need isn't just calories. You can't just get calories. We, when you eat sugar or starch, we call that empty calories. Humans require nine essential amino acids. Those are proteins that we cannot synthesize, but meat provides them in a highly bioavailable form. And this new bogeyman, the ultra processed foods. If processing is a concern, households could eliminate much of it themselves. You could buy flour. You could buy rice, buy dry beans, and then then do your cooking from staples, and you'd eliminate layers of processing overnight. But instead one of the last remaining traditional staples, meat, the one that people actually do buy in its unadulterated state, we make that one our symbolic villain. In an age where there's a new buzzword, the ultra processed food, the buzzkills attack, the one food we have available that goes through no processing at all, the sirloin steak. Isn't it interesting which foods attract our moral scrutiny? It's much more morality than it is science. So we're told the Japanese live longer, therefore eat like the Japanese or the French or Italians fine. Let's follow that logic. The French also smoke more cigarettes than the Americans and the Italians smoke more and the Japanese also smoke more, historically so and to this day. Maybe we should adopt that too. Maybe that's the key. And as to their diet. Well huh. The French also eat horse meat. And the Italians do too. Come to think of it, the Japanese eat horse meat. Should we add that to the longevity plan? As to not eating beef funny, but Japan produces the Kobe beef, some of the most marbled red meat on earth. I said red meat. Actually, it's so marbled that it's actually pink. And if they don't eat beef, it seems, they sure do like it. And you probably don't know this, but the reason they don't eat eat as much beef as we do is because they had a ban on it. For over a thousand years, up until 1872, their religion made it illegal to eat beef. During the heyday of the Chicago Beef industry, the Japan beef industry was outlawed. Is that what they really want us to do here? Do they want us to eat Onami, Siroko, and Fugu? Which is whale meat and cod seamen and blowfish, like the Japanese do? All this preaching, it's really less about health reasons and more a case of America, bad other countries good. Actually, it's only a case of white Americans bad. Have you noticed that the shaming of Americans stops with the white man? The average lifespan of the American is actually brought down in large part by our black population who have a much shorter lifespan for whatever reason, a topic for another day. Yet, when you talk about the general population, our mortality is our own dumb fault. We are too fat, too sedentary, and we don't eat right. But when the black man dies and dies much sooner of the same overweight diabetes and hypertension, in that case, it's caused by systemic racism. You know, we wouldn't think of blaming someone else for our problems, but we get blamed for everyone else's problem. And sadly that blame game helps no one least of all the black man. Something else about genetics. Whenever we visit relatives in Florida, we notice how scrawny the. Squirrels down south are compared to the ones up north who have to fatten up for the winter. It's the exact same species, the gray squirrel. But if you move to Florida squirrel or a Alabama squirrel to Michigan, he'd freeze to death in the winter, and it's a principle known as Bergman's rule. By the same token, Americans and Northern Europeans. Run heavy. Yeah. We know we're fat, so, okay. Uh, we're fat and there's no changing it, in my opinion. Yes, obesity is a problem, but the counter problem is the fact that the Japanese who run more slender actually develop diabetes at a lower BMI body mass index than do North Americans. Now, most of us could stand to lose a few pounds, but does that mean we'll match the Japanese in longevity? Maybe, but it will be by losing weight itself. Not by eating the Japanese way And what is it with longevity anyway? Some of the saddest people on earth seem to be wanting to live longer, and that doesn't make any sense. And longevity does not equal contentment. In fact, there's evidence of the opposite. The Japanese have a terribly high rate of suicide and they have an unsustainably low rate of fertility. They're not having enough kids. Those facts don't point to contentment to happiness. We briefly mentioned the Blue Zones. The Blue Zones are areas studied by National Geographic because they have so many people who live to be over a hundred, And the Blue Zones are often cited by food evangelists because the people there eat a lot of plants. But they eat a lot of plants because historically they were poor. And even then, that's only one piece of the picture. What really defines the Blue Zones isn't kale. It's multiple other factors such as moderation. A sense of community having a purpose. More importantly, and this matters a lot, they are not trying to live a long life. They're trying to live a meaningful life. They believe in family. They take care of their own community. They have a daily purpose, and most important, they are people of faith who believe in a higher power and in service to others. Living long is not their obsession. It's just a byproduct, and it's extremely shortsighted to attribute their health, their longevity to diet alone. All these people surrounding us who are obsessed with living longer may simply be aiming at the wrong target. Maybe the goal isn't to stretch life. Maybe the goal should be to fill it, and when you stop obsessing over adding years, you're free to enjoy the ordinary pleasures of the years that you do have. Because the Japanese might live longer or it might just seem longer because they can't eat ice cream. Me, I can eat all the ice cream. I want as long as I'm willing to put in the time to burn it off and I'm comfortable trading a year of two on earth for ice cream and for a purpose-filled life. The Tenth Man says, question certainty. Respect biology. And remember, there are no unhealthy foods. There are only unhealthy diets.