Huge miso fan here. I grew up in Monterey Park, a suburb of L.A. where a high percentage of our neighbors at the time were Japanese and Chinese, and I grew up eating lots of Asian food.

I went through withdrawal when I moved to Tampa Bay, and even more so now in Tennessee, but at least I have a local reliable source of organic miso paste.

Are you aware of the so-called "miracle hospital" during WWII?

The short version is that there were two hospitals within the area of the blast zone in Nagasaki, when the second atomic bomb was released there, on 9 August 1945.

One hospital had adopted an essentially typical Western diet, and saw horrific symptoms of radiation poisoning in its patients and staff, as was to be expected.

The second hospital, St. Francis Hospital, by contrast, which was even closer to the blast radius, was run by a doctor who insisted upon a traditional Japanese diet for all patients and staff, including traditionally fermented miso soup.

The patients and staff in this hospital did not exhibit the expected symptoms, despite many on the staff continuing to venture into the worst-affected areas of the blast zone to bring back survivors in need of medical treatment.

Those survivors suffered symptoms in varying degrees, which ultimately came down to whether they had been consuming miso regularly before the blast, or only once they had been brought back to the hospital.

For obvious reasons, St. Francis Hospital in Nagasaki came to be known as "the miracle hospital."

In the 1970s, the Japanese government funded a clinical study which showed strong evidence of miso's strong ability to protect against oxidative damage from radiation exposure, especially when made with sea vegetables, as is traditional in Japan.

Many cancer patients all over the world are now advised to begin taking miso a couple of weeks before beginning radiation treatment and chemo.

Pretty fascinating.

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