5 Ingredient Okinawan Bowl 🇯🇵🌱 (vegan) | Blue Zones Recipes - What's in the fridge? (2024)

FAQs

What is the purpose of the Blue Zones in Okinawa? ›

Blue Zones are regions of the world where people regularly live longer than average. Okinawa, Japan is a Blue Zone and home to the longest-lived women in the world. People form tight-knit friendship groups in childhood that support them into old age.

In Okinawa, residents are less likely to develop cancer, heart disease, and dementia than Americans, and the women of Okinawa have an average life expectancy of 87.44 years, nearly 10 years longer than the average American woman.

Their unique diet and lifestyle are credited with giving them some of the longest lifespans on the planet. The traditional Okinawa diet is low in calories and fat while high in carbs. It emphasizes vegetables and soy products alongside occasional — and small — amounts of noodles, rice, pork, and fish.

However, the people living in blue zones have daily rituals that reduce stress and reverse the inflammation associated with stress. Rituals varied and included activities such as prayer, ancestor veneration, napping, and happy hour. Purpose In the blue zones, people have vocabulary for purpose.

Limited Protein Sources: The Okinawa diet is predominantly plant-based, which means protein sources are primarily derived from plant foods such as legumes, soy, and whole grains.

Although the traditional Japanese diet usually includes large quantities of rice, the traditional Okinawa diet consisted of smaller quantities of rice; instead the staple was sweet potato. The Okinawa diet had only 30% of the sugar and 15% of the grains of the average Japanese dietary intake.

It turns out that it's whole plant foods, not fish, that make up 90 percent of the traditional Okinawan diet: Less than 1 percent of the diet was fish; less than 1 percent was meat; and less than 1 percent was dairy and eggs.

Okinawans also often enjoy a portion of fruit after or between meals, such as pineapple or papaya with some freshly brewed jasmine tea. It's not limited to chanpuru — many Okinawan dishes are often an assortment of different vegetables, such as Okinawan jyushi or papaya irichi.

But, Okinawan people do not consume dairy foods so much, such as milk and cheese. Bread is not so popular as a staple food.

The traditional Okinawa diet also consists of one serving of fruit per day. Citrus fruits native to the island are most common, such as papaya, passionfruit, bananas, mangos, and pineapples.

What is the purpose of the blue zones? ›

In a lot of the blue zones, that's flipped, so they know why they wake in the morning. Purpose is the convergence of values, passions, what you like to do, what you're good at.

Blue Zones Project^® is helping transform communities across North America into areas where the healthy choice is easy and people live longer with a higher quality of life.

People living in the Blue Zones eat a primarily plant-based diet and choose a lot of beans such as fava beans, black beans, soy and lentils. On average, they eat a small portion of meat about five times a month, usually pork. Animal foods only make up about 5% of their intake, and they eat very few processed foods.