Rice as a staple food and side dishes rich in dietary fiber such as pickles and tsukudani

There is not much difference in the amount of dietary fiber in a bowl of cooked rice and a slice of bread. A bowl of rice contains 2.25g of dietary fiber, and a slice of bread contains 2.5g, so you could say they are about the same.

The difference is that Japanese people used to eat a lot more rice. In 1962, Japanese people used to eat 4.9 bowls of rice a day, but now (in 2021) that amount has decreased to 2.1 bowls.
　As Japanese people can't eat a lot of bread at once, as a result, the amount of dietary fiber they consume has decreased.

In order to eat a lot of rice with a small amount of side dishes, pickles and tsukudani (preserved food boiled in soy sauce) were used as side dishes that were effective for preserving food.

　Pickles are a fermented food made from vegetables, and vegetables with a high dietary fiber content were chosen. Tsukudani is made by boiling down kelp and other seaweed, which are high in dietary fiber, in soy sauce, which is also a fermented food.
As the amount of rice eaten has decreased, the consumption of pickles and tsukudani has also decreased.

As a result of these changes in dietary culture, the amount of dietary fiber consumed by the Japanese has decreased.
In the next post, we will introduce how to catch up with this situation.