Who has the global bragging rights to slimness? First there was Mireille Guiliano's book, "French Women Don't Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure," published in 2004. Hot on the heels of this best-seller, Naomi Moriyama threw down the gauntlet less than a year later with "Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat: Recipes from My Mother's Tokyo Kitchen" (Delecorte Press) -- taking it one step further by adding longevity to the equation.

For those who travel to places like the United States, Europe or Australia, it is often a great shock to see how many people are overweight or outright obese, but how few plus sizes we encounter when walking the streets of Japan. According to the latest figures from the International Obesity Task Force and the World Health Organization (WHO), Japanese women have the lowest obesity rate in the industrialized world -- a tiny 3 percent, compared with 11 percent in France and a whopping 34 percent in the United States. Japanese women also enjoy the world's highest life expectancy -- 85 years. (It's a close race though: Italian and French women are just behind at 84 years and Swedish, Swiss and Australian women are on 83 years).

The virtually nonexistent rates of obesity in Japan is intriguing when you consider how food obsessed the country really is, with more cooking programs and gourmet magazines than you can throw a breadstick at. Part of the explanation, says Moriyama, lies inside the nutritional value of Japanese cooking, and in the kind of food prepared by her mother and millions of other Japanese mothers.