The research group of Professor Yasui Ichiro of the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Professor Soichiro Kusaka of the Fujinokuni Museum of Global Environmental History, Professor Takakazu Yumoto of Kyoto University, and Professor Minoru Yoneda of the University Museum, The University of Tokyo has 1305 contemporary Japanese. The regional differences in eating habits were investigated by eating habit analysis using stable isotope analysis.
Human beings have developed regional food cultures all over the world, but with the westernization of lifestyles and the global distribution of food, the food habits will become more uniform on a global scale. There is a possibility of going.The research team evaluated the homogenization of the eating habits of modern Japanese people from the carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios of their hair, and about the eating habits of the Japanese people, which are thought to have been homogenized with the globalization of distribution and consumption. We verified whether there were any differences in each prefecture.We also tried to characterize the eating habits of modern Japanese by comparing them with gender and survey results from other countries.
The research team received hair donations from 1305 people in each prefecture and measured the stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios.As a result of the analysis, it was found that the stable carbon / nitrogen isotope ratio of modern Japanese hair has little fluctuation.The difference between prefectures is very small, and the result is significantly different from the eating habits of the Jomon period, which has been confirmed to have large regional differences.It was also suggested that females generally ingested more plants when compared by gender, and that the proportion of dependents on seafood decreased compared to the eating habits of Japanese in the 1980s.It was also found that the isotope ratio fluctuations are similar to those in the United States and Europe, and smaller than those in Asian countries.
The results of this study suggest that the stable isotope ratio of hair may indicate that the dietary habits of modern Japanese are as homogenous as those in the United States and Europe.In addition, human hair is an important document that records the eating habits of individuals, and it was shown that stable isotope analysis is effective as a method for evaluating the dietary ecology and food homogeneity of humankind. ..In the future, it will be an important issue to historically investigate the eating habits of Japanese people from the isotope ratio.
