The annual ranking of bestselling books in Japan for 2011 was released a few days ago. Ranked first was a mystery novel, which was not so surprising, but more worthy of note was the fact that two books from a series of cookbooks were ranked both second and third. The name of the series is "Taishibokei Tanita no Shainshokudo," or "From the Cafeteria of Tanita, Maker of Body-Fat Scales."

Tanita was established in 1923, and has been a leading maker of not only body-fat scales, but also of various kinds of scales, such as weighing scales, pedometers, cooking scales, blood pressure scales, and so on. Their mission is to help their customers maintain a healthy life through regular measurement, and so it is quite natural that they also care a lot about their own employees' health.

At their office in Tokyo, they have a cafeteria mainly used by their employees, but also open to the public. They serve a set menu every day that has rice, soup, a main dish and two side dishes, but still the average number of calories totals only around 500. When the recipes for their healthy cafeteria dishes were published as a cookbook in January 2010, it soon became a hit and the sequel was published in October. These two cookbooks had sold more than 3.2 million copies by September 2011.

In response to the public’s high demand for a healthy diet, Tanita now intends to open a cafeteria in the business district of Tokyo in January 2012. Basically, they will only have two set menus, which will be namely "Special of the day" and "Special of the week." But each set will be quite healthy, containing only around 500 calories of energy and less than 3 grams of salt. A lot of businesspeople in Japan have to work long hours, thus they eat outside quite often. Tanita's cafeteria may be the solution for some of them to eat healthily and stay fit.