Introducing: Saku Miso

Saku Miso owner Yuko Smith wants to share the health benefits of miso with Eugeneans

When a U.S. Air Force B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, killing around 75,000 people and effectively ending the war in the Pacific, Dr. Tatuichiro Akizuki was less than a mile from the center of the explosion.

But Akizuki, his 20 employees and 70 patients in the Uragami Daichi hospital didn’t experience radiation sickness. He attributed their tolerance of high levels of radiation to drinking miso soup every day.

After the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster in 1986, Europeans bought truckloads of miso from Japan, according to the Japan Federation of Miso Manufactures Cooperative, believing it would reduce their risk of getting cancer. In the 2000s, researcher Hiromatsu Watanabe at Hiroshima University linked eating miso to reduced risks of colon, lung, breast and liver tumors in a population of rats exposed to radiation.

In Eugene, Yuko Smith, the owner of Saku Miso, wants to share the food’s numerous health benefits with Americans. She started selling her miso dips and butters in stores in February.

*News sourced from eugeneweekly.com