One of the factors that is believed to contribute to Japanese longevity is their dietary life, which is unique and distinct from Westerners. However, there has been no study that examined whether the Japanese diet in itself is effective for health maintenance. Therefore, we investigated whether Japanese diet is beneficial to health maintenance compared with American diet in rats. As a result, we revealed that modern Japanese diet is useful for health maintenance compared with modern American diet. We subsequently investigated the health benefits of Japanese diet from different eras. The menus of Japanese diets from 2005, 1990, 1975 and 1960 years were prepared, cooked, and powderized. Each of the Japanese diets was provided to mice. We revealed that the Japanese diet from 1975 exhibited health benefits with respect to the stages of growth, adolescence, maturity and old age. Since there were many ingredients in the Japanese diet of 1975, it was suggested that ingestion of small amounts of a variety of foods is desirable. In this paper, I define the diet that Japanese people eat daily as the Japanese diet, and outline its health benefits from the aspect of lifestyle-related disease prevention in particular.
