Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs

by Johann Hari

“Japanese culture is neither timeless nor unchanging.” It was only when Japan’s imperialist government was creating an army to attack other parts of Asia that they were disturbed that the population ate so badly and was so weak, and a new food culture began to be invented, quite consciously, to produce healthier soldiers. After the defeat of Japan in the Second World War, when the country was in ruins, the new democratic government realized that if they didn’t have a healthy population, they would have nothing, and they stepped up this transformation. “The Japanese only really started eating what we think of as Japanese food in the years after the Second World War,” Bee says. “Instead of being dispirited by the way the Japanese eat, we should be encouraged by it. Japan shows the extent to which food habits evolve.”