The Japanese in Okinawa have much less cancer and Alzheimer's than Europeans - they are also the longest living people in the world. Sounds great, but their daily diet includes 10 servings of fruit and veg and 10 of whole grains - how would we find the time? Kathryn Holmquist reports.
Drunk any mugwort tea lately? Me neither. Flaxseed, goya, hechima mahi-mahi fish and soy smoothies aren't big in my house either. How's your Nuchi Gusui (pronounced nooshy gooshy) going? Thought so. And yes, I would like to live longer and healthier, but not necessarily if it means a diet of bland tofu in all its splendour - tofu croquettes, Mexican herbed tofu, baked tofu with cheese, tofu à la sesame, spinach and tofu curry . . . the culinary imagination reels.
Yet we're going to have to change our thinking. Because these are the kinds of East-West fusion foods we should be eating if we want to live as long and as healthily as the people of Okinawa, Japan.
Are you managing your five servings of vegetables and fruits per day, as the Department of Health recommends? That's for wimps. We should be eating between 10 and 17 servings. And now the VHI is telling us that if we revolutionise our eating habits and live like Okinawans, we could delay or even avoid heart disease, strokes and cancer and add eight to 10 healthy years to our lives.
The health insurers are yet to offer discounts for those following the diet, however.
I've tried it over the past week or two, spending a fortune on vegetables, trying to find tofu that tastes fresh, putting flaxseed in the coffee grinder and changing from coffee to tea. Supposedly by not drinking, not smoking, eating well, meditating and banning stress from my life I can add one or two years of longevity, while enjoying better health during the last years of my life.
To really benefit, you should be born and grow old in Okinawa, which has laid claim to being a real Shangri-La as the result of a 25-year study into longevity and lifestyle which shows that Okinawans live longer, and have better quality of life, than any population in the world. And it's not all due to good genes - because when Okinawans adopt Western diets, they get cancers and heart disease at the same rate as we do.
If you're a 40-year-old Irish person who drinks and smokes, you may find your Shangri-La pass has already expired. The earlier you start the Okinawa diet, the better, say Bradley Willcox and Craig Willcox, the authors of the US bestseller, The Okinawa Way.
The two doctors are identical twins who, with Makoto Suzuki, have translated the Okinawan elixir of youth into a diet programme that has impressed even Oprah - and that woman knows her diets.
The VHI is bringing the Willcox brothers to Dublin later this month to speak at the Zest for Life Show at the RDS. Bradley Willcox, of the Division on Ageing at Harvard Medical School, says that while Irish people rank a poor 25th on the life expectancy scale, we're actually built to live until age 100 - and a relatively healthy 100 at that. And before the age of 90, in an ideal world nothing should stop you but a bus.
Okinawans - who have an average life expectancy of 81 years, compared to the 76 years of people in Ireland - have come closer than any other population in the world to achieving active lives in their 90s. Okinawa has more centenarians than anywhere else in the world.
Okinawans' annual rate of deaths from breast cancer - six per 100,000, compared to 36 per 100,000 in Ireland - is so low that many Okinawan doctors have never seen a case. The Okinawan rate of death from prostate cancer, at four per 100,000, is one-seventh of Ireland's rate. The Okinawans are half as likely to die from colon cancer as we are. Okinawans have 40 per cent fewer hip fractures, despite not eating dairy products, and a minimal risk of heart disease and stroke. Dementia affects one in seven Okinawans by the age of 90 years, compared to more than one in five Europeans.
As Okinawan women grow older, they flow through menopause naturally, avoid ovarian cancer and have fewer hip fractures. It's all down to the amount of soy protein they eat - tofu, in other words.
Okinawan men don't keel over with heart attacks in their 50s, like so many Irish men do. Their diet gives them low levels of homocysteine, an amino acid that contributes to clogging of the arteries when the body cannot process it. New research is showing that homocysteine may be more important than cholesterol in the development of heart disease. Irish men have homocysteine levels five times that of Okinawan men, because Irish men drink too much alcohol and don't get enough folate from leafy green vegetables, orange juice and whole grains.
The Okinawan eating pattern of East-West fusion is beginning to look better and better. This low-fat, high-fibre diet is based on whole grains, vegetables, fruits, soybeans and fish and, as the 25-year longevity study shows, is scientifically proven to be the healthiest in the world. Second in its life-preserving properties is Asian cooking, as found in Japan and Hong Kong, followed by Nordic (gravad lax anyone?), Mediterranean and American.
Irish cooking doesn't even get a look in - although our black tea, smoked salmon and brown bread fit the Okinawa ethos nicely (as long as the bread isn't buttered and the tea is unmilked).
East-West fusion means that your plate should have at least five different colours, with a preponderance of whole grains, vegetables and fruits. These should fill three-quarters of your plate. Meat and dairy - or, ideally, fish - should fill no more than one quarter of your plate. The Okinawan lifestyle suggests that you should avoid red meat and dairy products if you want to avoid cancer and heart disease.
But that's only the beginning - the magic extra ingredients are the "healing" foods and herbs you use to flavour the food. Ucchin, or turmeric, can halt cancer progress at all three stages, reduces cholesterol absorption and even inhibits the HIV virus. Goya, or bitter melon, inhibits viruses, cancers and keeps skin looking young. Hechima, or vegetable sponge, tastes like sweet courgettes and is anti-cancer, anti-viral and anti-AIDS.
Huchiba, or mugwort, which smells like rosemary, is a new and effective treatment for malaria and is used in Okinawa to treat everything from the common cold to skin cancer and by traditional Chinese medicine to treat emotional disturbance. Sweet potatoes are high in vitamin C, fibre, carotenoids and lycopene, a powerful antioxidant. The list of wondrous foods goes on and on.
EVEN if you manage to fill your shopping trolley with such exotic ingredients, that won't be enough because diet is only one-quarter of the Okinawan lifestyle programme advocated by the Willcox brothers. It's equally important to be physically fit, actively spiritual and to have a "healing web" of family and friends. The Willcoxes describe these four elements as being like the four legs on a chair - without one, you fall over.
"Living on Okinawa time" is how they describe their approach to stress.
Craig Willcox, a medical anthropologist who lives in Okinawa and is married to an Okinawan nurse, is as laid-back as you can get. He advocates ancestor worship, but if that's a bit much recommends that stressed people learn to breathe stress away, or try hypnosis, Shiatsu, time management skills, humour or practising "conscious awareness". The latter involves avoiding stressful situations, "reframing" stress in a more positive way, choosing nourishing rather than toxic friends and working on coping skills.
By now you are probably thinking, like I am, that to achieve such a lifestyle change around diet, stress, exercise and social life you would have to take six months off work, hire a chef, give away your children and find a shop that sells hechima and goya.
Actually, the Willcox brothers say that the lifestyle change only takes four weeks to implement - and you don't have to quit work. They believe that anyone can fit the Okinawan way into their lives. "It's never too late to change,"they insist. There's my excuse gone out the window, then.
The Okinawa Way, by Bradley Willcox and Craig Willcox, is published by Penguin/Michael Joseph (£12.99 sterling)
Zest for Life is at the RDS on Saturday, April 27th, 10 a.m.-2 p.m., seated show. Tickets cost €22 from Ticketmaster. Further information: www.vhihealthe.com
Nuchi Gusui - Eating the Okinawa way
1. Eat at least 10 servings of vegetables and fruits daily (one serving equals one cup of raw leafy vegetables, half a cup of other vegetables, or three-quarters of a cup of vegetable juice), especially carrots, courgettes, dried kelp, cabbage, onions, beansprouts, soybeans, sweet potatoes and green peppers.
2. Eat at least 10 servings of whole grains daily (one serving equals half a cup of cooked cereal, rice or pasta; one ounce of ready-to-eat cereal, or one slice of wholegrain bread). Whole grains are complex carbohydrates that release glucose slowly, making less work for your pancreas and thus preventing diabetes, while also eliminating sugar highs and lows.
3. Eat three calcium-rich foods daily, such as calcium-fortified tofu, juice or soymilk.
4. Eat three flavonoid foods daily (these plant compounds are anti-cancer and strengthen bones. Find them in soy products, beans, black tea, onions and apples)
5. Eat two Omega-3 foods daily (flax or fatty fish such as salmon) to boost brain power. These contain long-chain fatty acids essential for optimal brain function.
6. Drink fresh water and tea.
7. Limit animal foods such as meat and eggs to seven servings per week (or one per day). Eat less protein, no more than two to three ounces of meat a day. Avoid saturated fats found in animal products and transfatty acids in shop-bought biscuits, crackers and cakes. Favour olive, flaxseed, peanut and canola oils.
8. Consume alcohol moderately, if at all, and take folate supplements (folic acid) if you do. Women drinkers who take folate cut their breast cancer risk by half.
9. Take vitamin and mineral supplements that provide 50-100 per cent of daily recommended amounts of micronutrients, but don't overdose. More isn't better.
10. Now comes the hard part: limit sweets to three portions per week.