世論 What Japan Thinks

UPDATE: marxy beat me to the punch!

Just a day after my posting of the top 100 natto-related searches, I see that Hakkutsu! Aruaru Daijiten’s producers have admitted to making up the whole story!

Some of the lies and distortions of the truth made by the program included:

1. Some people in the USA did lose weight on a diet program based around boosting DHEA levels, but the before and after photos the program used to illustrate weight loss were of totally different people!

2. A foreign professor from Temple University in Japan was interviewed in English and he did actually make the translated comments attributed to him, but thanks to selective editing, some of his caveats or qualifications of his statements were omitted.

3. They said that two of the eight people they tried the natto diet out on saw drops in their cholesterol levels, but in fact their levels were never measured.

4. They claimed that people eating just one pack of natto per day had lower isoflavone levels than those eating two packs, but they in fact just invented these numbers.

5. Similarly, DHEA levels in the blood of their eight volunteers were also invented!

UPDATE: This diet does not work!

I’m sadly unable to find any surveys related to the biggest buzz on the English-language internet last week, the release of Apple’s iPhone, so instead I’ll report on goo Ranking’s look at the biggest buzz on Japanese web sites, namely what keywords people are using in goo’s search engine to look for natto. The data was collected between the 7th and 16th of January 2007, or Heisei 19 in the Japanese calendar, thus the title.

Natto is fermented soya beans, and if you search YouTube for natto you can see rather a lot of foreigners (and one cat) trying to eat it. (link flood coming up!) The shortage of natto has been widely blogged about, and was sparked by Aruaru Daijiten, a popular health (and quackery) show, who in their first show of the New Year introduced the natto diet, which is basically one pack of natto before breakfast and evening meals, then eat just as much as you normally do, assuming the natto hasn’t put you off your food altogether! The most beneficial way to eat natto is to stir it at least 50 times then leave it to stand at room temperature for 15 minutes. It’s something to do with assisting the production of DHEA to increase your metabolic rate, apparently.

In other related news, World Net Daily (I can’t believe I’m linking to that rag!) reported how soy beans turn you gay; natto may be one of the most potent soy bean products, if this video is to be believed! (Note – not really recommended for viewing at work, and probably highly offensive to the typical World Net Daily reader)
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Watching Aru Aru Daijiten (“Encyclopedia of Living” is the official translation) on television last night, they were talking about diagnosing problems with internal organs via acupressure, that is acupuncture pressure points, but just pressing them instead of sticking needles in. Whether on not you accept the medical validity or not (I personally do not), the program did, and presented some rather dubious statistics to back up their thesis, and to top it all off, accompanied it with some extremely poor, almost dangerous, advice.

One of the figures that stuck in my mind was that from their 40 guinea pigs, ordinary members of the public aged from 30 to 50 or so, 18 had pain when pressing either or both of the pressure points associated with kidney problems. These 18 were then given blood tests and six were found to actually have unusually high figures for protein in the urine or other kidney problems. Whilst everyone in the studio was amazed, to me that was just one in three who was correctly diagnosed, and there was not even the simple comparative figure of checking the other 22 to see if more or less than seven had similar kidney problems.

Next, when they did liver problems, they claimed (with no evidence to back up this statement) that with a simple one-minute massage of three pressure points one could metabolise alcohol faster and avoid hangovers!

With the people from the sample above where they had detected kidney or liver problems, after just one week of thrice-daily massage of the pressure points, they showed that on average these people had lowered their cholesterol or other indicators by about 5% to 10%, but failed to mention if these people had in addition changed their diet or started taking medicine.

Finally, my pet hate as a holier-than-thou ex-moderately-heavy drinker, was that when two of the regulars confessed to starting drinking before lunchtime and continuing until late at night on a regular basis, they were treated almost with respect for being so strong, and rather than being advised to cut down, massage of said pressure points was the recommended and sufficient activity. There was also no mention of the most basic disclaimer like “if symptoms persist, please see a doctor.”