A Study on the Dietary Habits and Life Style of Okinawan Students

We conducted a research of 1,027 elementary, junior and senior high school students in Okinawa into their dietary habits and daily activities as well. Students' subjective symptoms of their psychosomatic ploblems were arranged into numerical values according to Hayashi's quantification I. Emphasis was put on the analysis of the correlation between such quantified values and their dietary habits or the routin patterns. Statistical correlation between the students' psychosomatic symptoms and the real condition of their breakfast intake, eating between meals, dinner intake, hours of sleep, cathartic control or obesity index were analyzed. The most significant factors to the students' subjective symptoms are hours of sleep" among elementary school students of both genders and male junior high school students, "frequency of eating between meals" among female junior high school students and senior high school students of both genders. Based on the results from animal experimentation, we analyzed the correlation between feeding time control and hours of sleep. Adult male rats of Wistar strain were used as the experimental subjects. These rats which have the natural habit of eating in the dark period were kept in the condition of 12-hour light-dark cycle (light: 8:00-20:00). In the case that feeding time was changed to the light period (limiting from 10:00 to 18:00), the hours of their sleep in the dark period, measured by electrophysiological study, tended to increase. The result suggests that the differences of eating time among the students is an important determinant factor for their subjective symptoms of drowsiness or fatigue in the daytime