Category Archives: Japanese

Why Are the Japanese so Healthy?

Hippocrates said thousands of years ago, “Let food be your medicine and medicine your food.”

Most people forgot that simple bit of wisdom, but in the 1940s when there was no medicine for hypertension and kidney disease, one brave doctor, Walter Kempner, devised a rice diet that worked on his patients… and it worked to heal many other diseases (including obesity) as well!  Voila! The origins of food as medicine in our modern age.

Here, Dr. Frank Neelon, a student of Dr. Kempner’s talks about the diet. He seems to still be astonished at the effects of the rice diet on other problems, but it makes sense to me that simplifying one’s diet – eating only whole, natural foods – would benefit the entire body – and the mind as well.  See my review of “Food & Behavior”, a wonderful book on the subject.