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Report
No.240502 |
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- Domestic - |
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First White Paper Urges a National Campaign for Food Awareness Education The government, on November 24, finalized at the cabinet meeting the first ever 'White Paper (Annual Report on Implementation of Promotional Measures for Food Awareness Education in FY2005),' drafted based on the Basic Law for Food Awareness Education. The paper warns of people's food habits going into disorder as symbolized by the crumbling of rice-centered 'Japanese-style diet,' and increase in life style-related diseases such as diabetes. It calls on the government and a wider range of people including those responsible for education, people in agriculture, forestry and fisheries and so forth to have a shared sense of 'crisis about food habits' and to be engaged in promoting of food awareness education as a national campaign. This is the first ever white paper that deals with the situation around 'foods' in a comprehensive manner, and puts together the result of surveys conducted by government agencies, which reveals how people's food habits are going into disorder and how that is affecting health of the people etc. For example, it shows that one in two males of 40 years of age and older is suspect of metabolic syndrome (excessive internal organ fat), and that 30% of males in the age bracket from 30's to 60's suffers from obesity, while one in five female in their 20's is skinny. It also reveals that no generation is taking vegetables enough to reach target volume (of 350 grams a day). The white paper suggests to make more active use of the 'Balanced Food Guide' that tells how much and which food to eat per day by the category of foods in order to get out of the skewed pattern of diet. The paper also reports that the percentage of families in which all the members take evening meals together every day fell from 36.5% in 1976 to 25.9% in 2004. As regards school age kids, 19.7% of fifth graders in primary schools either "do not eat breakfast almost always," or "do not eat breakfast now and then," while the corresponding figures for second graders in middle schools was 25.1%, according to a survey in FY2000. The paper points out that a higher percentage of kids not taking breakfast feels tired and is irritable, while conversely, kids who eat breakfast everyday tend to do better in paper examinations. The government puts up targets, for example, to 1) reduce the number of kids not taking breakfast to zero, and to 2) reduce the percentage of males in their 20's not taking breakfast from what is higher than 30% at present to lower than 15% by FY2010. In an effort to achieve these goals, the government will promote a national 'Early to bed, early to rise from bed and take breakfast' campaign as a way to promote food awareness education at homes. The paper also points out that the food self-sufficiency ratio of Japan has stayed at about 40% in terms of calories in recent years, and that it is the lowest among the industrialized countries. |
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