Maxim Kerkula

The Okinawan longevity diet was written down in 1949, on an island where a quarter of the civilians had been killed 4 years earlier and the fields had been shelled flat. That is the survey. The American occupation authorities went round asking people what they had eaten. The answer came back at 1,785 calories a day, 69 per cent of them from one root, with animal food of every kind, all the pork and fish and eggs together, under 4 per cent. Everything you have ever been told about Okinawa comes out of that piece of paper. The sweet potato was not an ancestral wisdom. The sweet potato is what comes up out of ground that has been fought over. It grows in poor soil, it grows fast, it does not need a mill or a granary or anything else the war had taken, and the people eating it were eating it because it was there and almost nothing else was. Then there is the 80% rule. Hara hachi bu. Stop eating when you are 80% full, printed on posters in wellness clinics from California to Cheltenham as the discipline of the world's longest-lived people. Makoto Suzuki ran the Okinawa Centenarian Study for decades. He interviewed the centenarians. He asked them. They told him they ate small amounts because there was not enough food. Somebody else supplied the mindfulness afterwards. Now the awkward part, which is that Okinawa has not stopped being measured. The Japanese government runs one of the largest continuous nutrition surveys on earth, going back decades and covering almost the whole population. On its own government's numbers, Okinawa eats the fewest vegetables of any prefecture in Japan, eats less sweet potato than almost anywhere in the country, and has the worst obesity figures in Japan year after year. Decades of data saying the plant-based island is the least plant-based place in Japan, sitting in a filing cabinet, while the books sell. The real cuisine is a pig. Okinawans eat the ears, the trotters, the face, the belly, the offal, the blood. Rafute is pork belly braised in the local spirit and soy until it gives up. The old saying on the island is that they eat everything of the pig but the squeal, and after the Americans arrived they added Spam to it, which they eat more of than anyone else in Japan. That is the food culture. It has been in plain sight the entire time. It simply does not fit on the poster. Which leaves the centenarians themselves, and this is where it stops being a nutrition argument. Saul Newman took an Ig Nobel in 2024 for going through the world's extreme old age data and finding that the places with the most hundred-year-olds are not the healthy places. They are the poor places, the high crime places, and above all the places with bad paperwork. Okinawa has a poverty rate close to double the Japanese average. His Okinawan finding is the one to sit with. The strongest single predictor of where the island's centenarians are is where the American bombing destroyed the halls of records. If you die, no registry ever confirms it and you stay on the books. If you live, your age is written down by an occupying government working in a language you do not speak and off a calendar you do not use. In 2010 the Japanese government finally audited it and found more than 230,000 registered centenarians who were dead or could not be found. The audit happened because somebody went to visit Sogen Kato, listed as the oldest man in Tokyo, at home. And found him. He was in a back room. Mummified. He had been dead since 1978, and his family had been drawing his pension for 30 years. The healthiest diet on earth, then. Recorded in a famine, contradicted by decades of the government's own data, practised by a population that eats pig from the ears down, and demonstrated by a man who managed to keep it up for 3 decades after he died.