What the U.S. could learn from Japan about making healthy living easier (npr.org)

I was born and raised in the American Midwest, but love visiting my parents' homeland in Japan. Central to every trip there is always the food: Oh my goodness, the food.

Eating is a raging national obsession here, with good reason. Staggering varieties of food are available everywhere; it's all delicious and — most impressively, to me — always fresh.

What's remarkable about Japan is that food like this is available almost everywhere you turn, yet obesity is not the public health threat it is in the U.S.

Both the U.S. and Japan are wealthy industrialized countries, but they occupy opposite ends of the obesity spectrum. Currently,43% of the U.S. population has obesity — nearly 10 timesJapan's rate of 4.5%.

This is not to say Japan is immune to industrialized andultra-processed food trends driving up obesity rates worldwide.Excess weight is a growing concern here, too. Yet the population is remarkably resilient in the face of that global trend.

Why? One key factor my mom reminds me of — and manyresearchers point to — is the Japanese school lunch. It is free, scratch-made and balanced, but that isn't all. Starting in elementary school, lunchtime itself is treated like a class in nutrition, saysMichiko Tomioka, a Japanese nutritionist based in New Jersey. Kids serve each other food, help with clean up, and are encouraged to eat everything they're given.

"That's not something we could even imagine here [in the U.S.]," she says.

This lunchtime ritual establishes a common cultural understanding about what healthy eating looks like. Tomioka says. And that's how it also becomes a habit that endures.