Top page ＞ Seminar on yogurt, beauty, and health ＞ Eat agar to prevent lifestyle diseases

Eat agar to prevent lifestyle diseases

Prevention of lifestyle diseases

Are you concerned about visceral fat?
Being overweight could lead to metabolic syndrome, which significantly increases the risk of adult diseases. While it has been reported in the news that there is a large population of overweight individuals, consumption of agar, which goes perfectly with yogurt, could help break the negative cycle.

Ask the expert! What is metabolic syndrome?

We asked the following questions to Dr. Osamu Tochikubo, who is emeritus and specially appointed professor at the Unit of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Yokohama City University School of Medicine.

How does metabolic syndrome occur?

Metabolic syndrome is a set of symptoms manifesting as abdominal obesity, hyperlipidemia, high blood pressure, and hyperglycemia, and which could develop into lifestyle diseases such as myocardial infarction and stroke. According to a 2006 survey conducted by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, roughly 20 million people in Japan have metabolic syndrome. The reason why so many people have it is because modern lifestyles in Japan are beset with problems such as overeating, excessive nutrition intake, lack of exercise, and heavy dinners. In addition, exposure to too much stress causes many people to drink and smoke as diversions. Such unhealthy lifestyle causes a negative synergistic cycle through which energy intake is converted into visceral fat at an increasing rate. In other words, people get metabolic syndrome as a natural consequence of our modern lifestyle.

What can we do to avoid metabolic syndrome?

First, it’s important to know whether you are obese or not. BMI is a useful international standard that can be used to find out. BMI is defined as body mass (kg) divided by the square of body height (m). If your BMI is more than 25, and your waist is 85 cm or more, you should watch your weight.

It’s also important to quantify what you eat. To do so, I recommend buying a scale that can measure your weight in 50 g increments. Then get on the scale twice a day to measure your weight accurately, every day, and make a graph of it. The first measurement is when you get up in the morning, after going to the toilet (this will be your baseline weight). You then weigh yourself again shortly after dinner, at which point you’ll know whether the amount you just ate for dinner was too much or not. As long as you can keep the difference between the two measurements around 600 g, you should be OK. If you are able to reduce your baseline weight by 50 g every day, you can lose a total of 1.5 kg in a month. Also go for a walk for 30 minutes or so each day to avoid losing muscle mass. If your muscles atrophy, your body’s insulin sensitivity decreases, and that’s not good for avoiding metabolic syndrome.

How can I avoid overeating at dinner?

Due to the functions of hormones, it’s easy for caloric intake to get converted into visceral fat after dinner, so I recommend using agar in cooking. As agar contains no calories and absorbs water by 100 times its mass, it makes you feel satiated without taking in unwanted extra calories, no matter how much you eat it. Also agar has no particular taste or smell, and can be cooked with various ingredients. I’ve actually teamed up with a hotel in Yokohama to come up with a French course meal that includes a lot of agar, which is apparently quite popular with their guests, for both lunch and dinner. Agar can be added to rice, or mixed with vegetable juice to coagulate it and served as a salad, or used as one of the ingredients to make delicious hamburgers and gratin. Because it is made of pure natural seaweed, it’s safe to eat even in large amounts.
It can also eat mitsumame (a Japanese dessert containing cubes of agar jelly) or tokoroten (a Japanese dish made from agarophytes) that we all know. If you eat them as a snack before dinner to ease your hunger, the amount of food you eat at dinner can be kept under control.

Is it OK to eat yogurt and agar together?

Absolutely! Roughly 80% of agar is dietary fiber, which is food for lactic acid bacteria and other good bacteria living in the intestines. Also, agar absorbs a lot of water and becomes semi-solid (gel), so it increases fecal mass and alleviates constipation. If your stool regularity improves, it becomes easier for the intestines to get rid of harmful substances, and your overall physical and skin condition improves as a result. So if you eat agar with yogurt, it might yield positive synergistic effects. The dietary fiber in agar also has the function of slowing down the absorption of blood glucose and lowering cholesterol, making it ideal for preventing lifestyle diseases. If you like yogurt, you can make agar jelly or pour a commercial yogurt on top of agar as a dressing. The key is to integrate agar into your diet while keeping it delicious and effortless.