Okinawa Diet - Indigenous Islanders' Diet

Indigenous Islanders' Diet

People from the Ryukyu Islands (of which Okinawa is the largest) have a life expectancy among the highest in the world., although the male life expectancy rank among Japanese prefectures has plummeted in recent years.

Generally, the traditional diet of the islanders contained 300% of the green/yellow vegetables. Although the traditional Japanese diet included large quantities of rice, in Okinawa, rice was consumed in smaller amounts and the staple was instead the sweet potato. The Okinawan diet has only 25% of the sugar and 75% of the grains of the average Japanese dietary intake. The traditional diet also includes a relatively small amount of fish (less than half a serving per day) and more in the way of soy and other legumes (6% of total caloric intake). Pork was highly valued, and every part of the pig was eaten, including internal organs. However, pork was primarily eaten on holidays, and the daily diet was mainly plant based. Cooking was sometimes done with lard. Their overall traditional diet would be considered a very-high-carbohydrate by modern standards, with carbohydrates, protein, and fat providing 85%, 9% and 6% of total calories respectively. The consumption of pork in Okinawa in 1979 was 7.9 kg (17 lb) per person per year. This may be contrasted with the average consumption of meat in the United States, which, by 2005, included 62.4 lb (28.3 kg) of beef, 46.5 lb (21.1 kg) of pork, and 73.6 lb (33.4 kg) of poultry per person per year. Virtually no eggs or dairy products were consumed by the Okinawans.

An Okinawan reaching 100 years of age has typically had a diet consistently averaging about one calorie per gram of food and has a BMI of 20.4 in early adulthood and middle age

In addition to their high life expectancy, islanders are noted for their low mortality from cardiovascular disease and certain types of cancers. Willcox (2007) compared age-adjusted mortality of Okinawans versus Americans and found that, during 1995, an average Okinawan was 8 times less likely to die from coronary heart disease, 7 times less likely to die from prostate cancer, 6.5 times less likely to die from breast cancer, and 2.5 times less likely to die from colon cancer than an average American of the same age.

The traditional Okinawa diet as described above has been practiced on the islands until about the 1960s. Since then, dietary practices have been shifting towards Western and Japanese patterns, with fat intake rising from about 10% to 27% of total caloric intake and the sweet potato being supplanted with rice and bread.