Why Age?

Why Do Okinawans Live Longer, Healthier Lives?

August 25, 2007 – 8:55 am | by admin

This autumn
Why am I aging so?
Flying towards the clouds, a bird.

Matsuo Basho, haiku poet
1644-1694

The world’s top longevity and health experts are flocking to Okinawa to interview 90-year olds who climb ladders to prune their fruit trees, follow 100-year olds who cycle kilometres to their vegetable gardens for long, laborious days that culminate in hauling heavy loads of produce to market, and to detail every aspect of life in this Shangri-la no longer hidden from the world.

A prefecture of Japan, Okinawa boasts more centenarians (people 100 years or older) per 1000 of population than anywhere else on Earth. This coral atoll lies at the confluence of tropical currents hundreds of kilometres south of mainland Japan and a million miles away from the highly urbanised lives more than half the world’s people experience.

Okinawa is a perfect example of the triad of factors that encourages long, healthy life: daily physical activity, a pre-industrial, tradition-based diet, and a harmony of spiritual and community life.

In Okinawa the elderly are not marginalised or institutionalised; shut away from society and condemned to a shamefully descending parabola of irrelevance and decline. The elderly live in their own homes, are curators and administrators of Shinto tradition and its festivals, and can be seen exercising in outdoor groups every day.

Rice flails and flying side kicks

Their choice of exercise is a form of combat practised all over the world today. When fierce, helmeted and armoured mounted warriors of the Tokugawa Dynasty invaded Okinawa bent on subjugation and annexation of the island and its population in the seventeenth century, these spirited people sprang to the defence of their homeland. By law they were not allowed to carry weapons, so took up rice flails, pitchforks and wrenched the handles from their millstones to fight for their freedom and cultural integrity. They also devised an unarmed form of combat to take on the military might of their invaders.

These peasant tools are known to today’s martial artists as nunchaku, sai, and tonfa; their unarmed fighting system - the way of the empty hand- is known to us as karate. The Okinawans were defeated but not before many Tokugawa warriors had their samurai swords caught in sai, or were knocked senseless by spinning nunchaku and tonfa. The most spectacular weapon was the yoko tobi geri, or flying side kick, designed for a wiry-legged peasant to spring into the air and violently dismount a warrior from his horse.

Clearly these are a people whose energy cannot be rivalled by citified softies, but it is their diet we can most easily emulate. What do these amazing people eat?

Brace yourself and be prepared to throw away pre-conceived ideas about what constitutes the ultimate longevity diet as we go through the Okinawan menu:

Welcome to the banquet, Okinawan style

Rice - white - in huge quantities. Tofu, fish, and green and yellow vegetables in staggering amounts. Oh, and pork, introduced by the Chinese in the 12th century.

I can hear jaws dropping. What, no goji juice? No co-enzyme Q-10? No brindle berry extract? Shouldn’t all that high GI white rice be playing havoc with their insulin levels and making them vulnerable to diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and all the other afflictions many in the West believe stem from a diet dangerously high in carbohydrate? Where is the solitary miracle food that every culture attributes its vigour to?

Let’s back up and take a closer look.

Rice is an extremely nutritious food, high in protein and fibre, even when stripped of its outer bran. It feeds over half the world’s population. The Okinawan microclimate allows for several harvests a year. Tofu, a fermented soy product, is likewise rich in nutrients. Combined with rice, it provides an ideal spectrum of amino acids rivalling the beef we extol for protein. The warm, mineral-rich waters around Okinawa teem with fish and provide a bountiful catch eaten year round. Green and yellow vegetables are rich sources of beta-carotene and other anti-oxidants.

But pork? The locals boil theirs for hours, then pour off the fat, making for lean, tasty meat that will not clog their arteries.

What about the miracle food?

Okinawans nominate goya, or bitter melon as their elixir and they gorge on it. The cucumber-shaped, knobbly vegetable features in countless traditional dishes but locals never tire of it. It is freely available from Asian grocers all around the world. Most of us have probably walked past mounds of it and been intrigued by its bizarre appearance but never considered eating it.

Of course the Okinawan diet contains many other foods, but these are the pillars to the temple.

Live well, live long

When husbands die before their wives, here as everywhere else in the world, the widows do not despair and whither away to swiftly join their departed loved ones. They form close bonds with their neighbours, take on absorbing hobbies and leave their homes for community interaction. They find a purpose, a passion and a social connectedness facilitated by Japanese veneration for the elderly.

Like all beautiful stories, this one has a dark cloud looming, and the huge US airbase that has dominated Okinawan life since World War Two symbolizes the pernicious influences that eat away at this island’s fountain of youth.

In the last six decades Spam has replaced ham, emulsified and additive-laden peanut butter and jelly on white bread has displaced traditional snacks like pig’s ears fried in hand-made peanut butter, and the bounty of consumer goods disgorged from PXs on the US base act as a beacon for Okinawa’s young, drawing them to the cities on the mainland in pursuit of wealth. Okinawa’s amazingly low statistics for suicide, heart disease, diabetes and other diseases of civilization are in ascendancy as more and more turn away from traditional practices and embrace urban lifestyles and the cargo-cult glitter of consumerism.

You don’t have to take up karate, climb fruit trees or haul sacks of goya to get the benefits of traditional Okinawan lifestyle. You simply have to wean yourself off 90 per cent of the items in supermarkets that are designed simply to separate you from your money and titillate overloaded and jaded palates. Shop for, cook and eat more plant foods. Push a wobbling mass of fruit and vegetables in all colours of the rainbow to the checkout. Do some exercise every day, however mild.

And talk to your neighbour.

You will be rewarded with a longer, healthier life.