Japan was once reputed for being a diet conscious country. Now, as more young Japanese travel around the globe, they are replacing their low-fat fish-and-rice diets with calorie rich junk food and are giving-in to the temptations of fried foods and bigger portions.
Health officials in Japan are concerned over the increasing waistlines among the Japanese especially those who are in their 20s and 30s. It was found that around 50% of the Japanese men were at risk of metabolic syndrome, a term for a cluster of conditions associated with obesity, high cholesterol and increased risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
Japanese have come up with an innovative solution to solve this problem.They are hoping that the advice on the cell phones by diet experts could solve the growing obesity problem in the country.
All the Japanese need to do, is just take a picture of the food they eat on their cell phone and send it across to a nutritionist who‘ll study the photographs and send in the analysis, advise and the nutritional values of the meal they have had. But, the drawback here is that they’ll have to wait for three days to get the results.
Patients used to fill out meal logs, but people tend to forget things or underestimate their portions, photographing meals and e-mailing them in is easier and gets more accurate results.
The program charges an initial fee of about $37 and $21 a month thereafter. This program could work for the simple reason that people are lazy to write their food logs in a diary and find it easy and convenient to just capture the image on the cell phones and mail it across. In fact, this also solves the problem of having to remember all they have eaten when food-log is written at the end of the day.
Cell phones are everywhere here, we’re hoping they can now make it easier for people to get help improving their diet.
Let’s hope this program works or people may just have to search for a normal Japanese guy in a sea of Sumos in the Sumo-land!
