• W Böcking, G Lenz, D Trojanus, and W Kirch.
• Institut für Klinische Pharmakologie, Medizinische Fakultät Carl-Gustav Carus, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Deutschland. wolfgang.boecking@web.de
• Dtsch. Med. Wochenschr. 2007 Oct 1;132(42):2217-20.

AbstractGermany is one of those OECD-countries with the highest per-capita-expenses in public healthcare, but is lagging behind in life-expectancy compared to other countries like Japan, where life expectancy is highest at comparatively low costs. This article investigates reasons for this discrepancy in costs and outcome, and tries to form a hypothesis how this gap could be narrowed. One key finding was that Japan's life expectancy had not always been higher, but increase continuously over the past 40 years. While reasons for this development are plenty-fold, one relevant factor could be the early introduction of the "Nutritional Guidelines for the Japanese People", with which the Japanese Government started to implement a dedicated prevention policy. The positive developments in Japan provide an indication of how this can be achieved in other countries as well and to increase life expectancy without significantly increasing expenses.

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