For Sachiaki Takamiya, people should incorporate mago wa yasashii in their meals as much as possible. It may not be possible to include everything in one meal, but at least covering the idea of mago wa yasashii weekly will do. The goal is to have a balanced diet and not limit their meals to only one type of food.
Nick: So are there any rules about this mnemonic device? This idea of mago wa yasahii? For example, is it encouraged for people to try and eat all of these types of foods every day? Or is it just a general guide?
Sachiaki: Well, a general guide. It's better to include them every day as much as you can -- as many mago wa yasahii as you can in each meal. But it is often impossible to include everything in one meal.
Therefore, if you can cover within a day, if you have three meals a day, maybe if we can cover mago wa yasashii within those three meals, that's good. But if you cannot then you can think of weekly.
So try to cover as many mago wa yasashii as you can in all meals you have each week. The idea is to have a balanced diet. So not eating only one type of food but try to diversify your eating and try to include I vegetables.
Definitely you want to eat vegetables every day and possibly in every meal. And for beans to if you want to get your protein from plant-based and beans are essential. So you want to have beans in almost every meal.
But for potato, mago wa yasashii doesn't include grains, but you can also have grains too. So potatoes and grains are interchangeable. I mean for some meals, you can have potatoes as your staple; other meals you can have grains as your staple, too.
But I would say, try to cover as many mago wa yasashii as you can within a day except fish and try to cover as many mago wa yasashii as you can within a week. So I suppose you can have fish maybe once a week.
So if you think of weekly menu, you want to include fish somewhere.
Nick: I think it's a really good open, simplistic guide for people. So we're not recommending just one type of bean or one type of mushroom or one type of potato or one type of fish -- people do have choices.
And it would be very easy to cook some of these ingredients. I know it from myself when I make miso soup, I usually put in shitake mushrooms or poured in sweet potato, I might put in pumpkin, add a bit of wakame, maybe I cube a little bit of soy.
So it's possible to make something quite easy like what you taught me, a rustic miso soups, where I'll make a big bowl of it, and I'll put in quite a few ingredients. And I'm getting all the benefits of these different food groups of mago wa yasashii.
Obviously, there's no mention of meat or processed foods or no dairy. So it really is a general guide for healthy eating. And it's something that vegetarians or even vegans can appreciate.