Diet is one of the most important factors for our health and longevity, or we can even say it is the most significant element, can’t we? According to Dr. Shouji Kondo, who conducted research on longevity after traveling to 990 towns and villages throughout Japan to see which areas have high life expectancies and which areas don’t, diet is the most influential factor to determine our longevity.
We eat three times a day, and what we eat determines our physical and mental condition. In fact, we spend a lot of our time on eating; producing food, shopping, and cooking. We even work to eat.
So I am going to talk about diet today and things we need to consider when we think of our diet, stick around.
This article series is a rewritten version of the series I have already written in my other blog Omi-merchant’s way of Sustainable Prosperity. I am adding some new features here since my knowledge is upgrading day by day.
We need to think of three elements when we think of diet.
1, What to eat
2, How to eat
3, How to produce our food
What we eat is crucial. That is to say what kind of food we eat. There are certain foods which are good for our health and I illustrated the types of food the healthiest people in the country with the longest life expectancy eat in my book IKIGAI DIET.
A lot of us pay attention to what we eat and there are so many recipes introduced these days, from a plant-based diet to a raw food diet, and yet, we often forget how we eat. Even though you eat organic and natural food, if you eat too much, you lose the effect of it.
In IKIGAI DIET, I also shared how the healthiest people in the world eat, such as how much they eat, how many times they chew, how often they eat, and so on. It also includes your mentality; how you feel when you eat.
How to produce our food is tied with how we eat. A lot of diet books only talk about eating the food which is already produced and don’t deal with the food production itself. Therefore sometimes they end up bringing concepts like eating 100 bananas a week, which is not sustainable if you live in the temperate zones.
The thing is we want to eat healthy food because we want to be healthy, don’t we? In that case, we want to live in a healthy environment and a healthy planet. Many of you may not think there is a direct link between our health and environment, but there is if you think about the world of microbiomes, let alone having access to clean air and clean water..Our way of producing food determines the state of our planet, and we need to shift our agricultural system to create a sustainable planet.