Japan’s Food Culture Probably Could Help the West’s Obesity Crisis

29 Sep, 2025

Much can be said about being overweight and the obesity crisis in the West — and indeed, much has. The conversation has even become controversial, emotionally fraught, politically charged, and often muddied. Yet at its core, a physiological truth remains crystal clear: there is an optimal body weight for health, and it can be reached by consuming fewer or more calories than we burn.

The “calories in, calories out” (CICO) model has broad scientific and practical appeal, but it leaves out something important: the messy, stupid realities of the human condition and whether we can actually apply it. I wrestled with this question for most of my life. What began as an extra 20 pounds in childhood snowballed to 50, then 100, and eventually 150. Along with the weight came hypertension and insulin resistance — signs of developing chronic disease and a shortened healthspan.

I tried exercise but lacked the energy for daily workouts. Crash diets failed because the hunger always caught up. I even tried Ozempic but had to stop due to serious side effects. All of these were my attempts to fight a single, unrelenting culprit: hunger. It was constant, physiological, and overpowering. CICO gave me a framework, but it felt like wielding a flimsy weapon against an unstoppable force. In the balance of that fight hung my health and lifespan. Sounds pretty hopeless, if you asked me — or so I thought.

And Now for Something Completely Different

But six months ago, I discovered Japanese food culture. Japan is among the leanest developed nations in the world. According to the OECD, only about 4% of Japanese adults are obese, compared with nearly 30% in the UK and over 40% in the US¹. Many researchers attribute this difference to cultural eating habits rather than genetics: portion sizes, eating norms, and what kinds of food are immediately available.

There are also countless anecdotes of people saying that moving to Japan resolved their struggles with being overweight, while moving back to the West restarted the relentless climb of the bathroom scale. Could it be that food culture itself underpins Japan’s health and world-leading life expectancy? Maybe. But I didn’t need a final answer — I was already convinced I had to give it a try.

The first cultural shock was portion size. In Japan, people often pay a premium for small single-serving meals (300–400 kcal) or snacks (100–200 kcal). In a sense, they are paying more for less. To our Western minds, it seems absurd to pay more for less, but what gets lost in translation is the health and longevity they’re buying in that transaction.

Something else that’s strikingly different is the appeal and demand for instant satisfaction. A full English breakfast is usually 1,100 to 1,700 kcal — about two-thirds of the entire day’s caloric intake in one sitting. Yet we prize it for the beastly instant punch. It’s just so GOOD! But is it actually, you know… good?

It’s not just one national dish, either. Most of our meals pack a 600–900 kcal punch, restaurant portions are designed with high caloric density to attract customers, and even family dinners are judged successful when everyone has had more than enough. And of course, don’t forget — it’s rude to leave food on your plate. The Western notion of a “proper meal” that's proving to be bad for us is deeply rooted in culture and tradition.

Instant satisfaction and meal sizes, however, don’t bring much new to the conversation. What does is satiety. Japanese culture and traditions have long valued foods with excellent satiety-per-calorie ratios: how full you feel for hours relative to the energy you consume. It’s not unheard of in the West either. The Holt Satiety Index, published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition², ranked foods by their ability to satisfy hunger. Boiled potatoes topped the list, scoring over three times as filling as white bread per calorie. Fish, porridge, and beans ranked highly too. By contrast, croissants, cakes, and pizza scored at the very bottom. In other words, our Western staples generally offer poor satiety, while Japanese culture is much more centered around the opposite.

These three factors — paying more for health, smaller portion sizes, and valuing satiety — quickly add up to a vastly different perception of and relationship with food. They drive not just the typically small Japanese bento box sizes, but also the commercial realities of food. Whereas we like items marked “20% gratis” and “king-sized,” they value “pocket-sized” drink cans 30–50% smaller than ours. My Japanese counterpart is not hounded by an immeasurable force of hunger; they are surrounded by an immeasurable force of healthy eating habits. And the same CICO framework works really well for them.

So I leaned into this model. I bought a rice cooker, shifted 80% of my meals to rice paired with spices, vegetables, and fish, and cut out foods that only made sense in oversized portions or that immediately made me hungry again. Surprise, surprise — within weeks, my hunger had quieted. For decades I thought my body was craving calories. But it wasn’t; it was craving satiety. And something else became stupidly evident: eat food that doesn’t stave off hunger, and you’ll be hungry. Yes, yes, you may laugh at how obvious this is, but do you apply this laughably basic principle in your own meals?

But look, this isn’t to say Japan is a utopia. Japanese diets are often higher in salt³, and metabolic issues like insulin resistance inevitably exist. The diet can also be difficult for newcomers to adapt to — I’ve heard more than one person say that, and my own hunger pangs were initially brutal. But the cultural baseline matters. From work lunches to convenience stores, the expectation is different: food is about health and satiety, not bang-for-buck.

All Said and Done

I am now losing between 5 and 11 pounds per month — without Ozempic, without hunger, and with far less struggle. My story is anecdotal, but I doubt it’s the only one. Western food culture sets us up for failure, and many of us don’t realize how deeply we’ve been conditioned. The ideas in this article still make me feel uneasy, even when they're bringing back years of health and life I thought I had lost. We are taught from childhood to prize calorie-dense “value” meals that gloriously satisfy us in the moment but sabotage us in the long run. The instant satisfaction is what we learned as kids, and we carry it into adulthood, building our culture around it.

If the West is serious about tackling its obesity crisis, sure, we need pharmaceuticals. But we also need to change how we see food and what we value in it. Food should be measured by its ability to stave off hunger and by how healthy the portions are — in quantity, calories, and composition. And if you personally struggle with weight, you don’t have to wait for society to change. You can experiment with food culture now.

Or that’s my two cents for today. If you found it interesting, there's an upvote button below to say “thanks.”

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