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Gregory Morrow
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http://www.suntimes.com/output/food/foo-news-will28.html
Why aren't the French fat like us?
January 28, 2004
BY BEVERLY LEVITT
If ever there were a reason to scowl at the French, let it begin with their healthy waistlines.
These are the people whose cuisine includes luscious Brie cheese, buttery croissants and calorie-
rich foie gras. The French diet is 35 percent to 45 percent higher in fat than that of your
average American.
Americans neurotically try to fool Mother Nature -- and their cardiologists -- by gorging on faux-
fat chocolate mousse and fat-free creme brulee (hold the "creme"!). We're the ones pouring nonfat
half-and-half (talk about an oxymoron) into our decaf cappuccinos.
The French, on the other hand, seem to have followed their group palate's fancy and enjoyed eating
what they like for generations.
Given the differences, you'd think we would be the ones sitting back smiling smugly about our
well-being.
Instead, those of us in the United States are losing the battle of the bulge. The United States has
an obesity rate 30 percent higher than France's. Add to that the fact that we have three times more
heart attacks than the French. They also have fewer strokes.
What?!
Yes, the French are not only thinner than we are, while eating food that would send the American
diet police into apoplectic fits, their lifespan is statistically longer. They live longer, even
with all that cigarette smoke curling past every diner's nose in cafes throughout France.
And thus we have the French Paradox, which a one-time no-fat believer, Will Clower, Ph.D., looks at
from firsthand experience in The Fat Fallacy, (Three Rivers Press, $12.95)
Clower and his wife, Dottie, are neuroscientists. They were invited to Lyon, France, to do research
at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences. They spent two years there with their children and Clower's
mother, Retha.
In the United States the couple had religiously observed a strict non-fat diet. They were bored with
their food and were overweight. Retha Clower was frantically fighting her surge from a Size 12 to an
unwelcome Size 14 when they left the United States. The Clower children, Ben, 10, and Grace, 4,
were, well, just typical eat-like-their-parents kids, meaning they, too, were bored with the food on
their plates.
As it turned out, the Clowers not only changed continents. Their time in France forced the entire
family to rethink everything they believed to be true about good diet and health.
After a few months they fell into the French way of eating -- French bread with butter, raw-milk
cheese -- and surprising things happened. Clower lost 20 pounds; his wife shed 15. The children
began to love their food, Grandma Retha abandoned the unsuccessful diet she'd followed at home and
ate like the French -- and dropped to a Size Six.
During his two years in Lyon, Clower threw his no-fat menus out the window and developed an entirely
new outlook on food and eating.
"This is not to say that the French make no distinctions about the ill effects of fat," Clower said
during a recent conversation. "All fats aren't created equal; some are definitely better for you
than others and the fat of some animal meats will kill you," he warns. "If you love red meat, limit
it to once a month. Learn to lean on chicken and fish."
OK, that's old news.
What is fascinating is that the French way of eating is as much cultural as scientific. Their eating
habits have been nurtured over the centuries, passed down from mother to daughter, from father to
son, from generation to generation.
"They're happy to eat that way," said Clower. "It's their comfort food."
When Clower first arrived in France he had dinner with Regine Fournier, a wonderful example of a
traditional French woman, Clower said with a smile. "She's like a perfect baguette, crusty on the
outside, warm on the inside."
She was only too happy to malign the American obsessive fear of fats.
Fournier described the French good fat-bad fat theory. Duck (and other poultry) are fine. Milk
fat, olive oil and nuts are beneficial. But stay away from pig, sheep and cow, she warned, wagging
her finger.
"I asked how she knew this," Clower said. "She flashed a grin of superiority and chastised, 'Your
country is too young to have a memory.' "
She, on the other hand, knew about healthy fats because her mother had told her who had heard it
from her grandmother who had been told by her mother and so on and so on.
"When I asked other French friends, 'How do you know what to eat?' they were flabbergasted, as if
they didn't understand the question," said Clower.
Their practice of eating good fats seems to be working.
The World Health Organization has shown that the French are three times less likely to die of
ischemic heart disease than we are. The Lyon Diet Heart Study proved the same statistics -- three
times fewer heart attacks for people on the Mediterranean diet as opposed to the diet advocated by
the American Heart Association.
In the diet-obsessed United States we latch onto to newspaper headlines -- Butter Will Kill You,
Pasta Puts on Pounds -- and are quick to jump on bandwagons to join the latest fad, whether it be no
fat, low-fat, high carbs or low carbs.
Whatever the diet, we quickly embrace processed products. Until one day somebody read the
ingredients on the package. Chemicals. Additives. And the real killer -- partially hydrogenated
vegetable oil.
Back to the butter!
When the medical community prescribed pasta for dieters , we had a traffic jam in the grocery aisle
formerly known as the noodle section crammed those shiny packages into our carts. Later, scientists
announced that people on high-carb diet -- replete with pasta -- were gaining weight, so we quickly
dropped that one.
"Everything with us is black and white," Clower says. "The French and Italians add 'good fats' such
as olive oil or cheese to their pasta -- which lowers the glycemic index of the dish -- and they
walk around satisfied and smiling all day. We don't have to deprive ourselves of something that
delicious."
But they don't have it three times a day, he hastens to add. Or even every day. The French, as we
have learned from Julia Child, if we were listening, practice moderation.
We embrace fast-food establishments and expect to see them on every corner. The French have ab
entirely different view. They were up in arms when McDonald's Golden Arches popping up on Champs-
Elysees and Rue de Rivoli. They viewed fast food as an encroachment of American culinary values onto
their lifestyles.
The French also take a dim view of processed foods and artificial flavorings. After experiencing the
French way of life with meals, Clower came to agree with them.
"If it's never been alive and it doesn't come up in your spell-checker, it ain't food," Clower
jokes. "Our body has a biological relationship with things that grow on this planet. If you eat
something it's never seen and doesn't know how to process, you will introduce health problems."
Our digestive systems don't do well with items invented in chemistry labs for the sole purpose of
imitating real food. One of the problems is that the pretenders often taste just as good as the real
thing. But don't be fooled.
Clower points to a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, "Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good" by
Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation. The investigative journalist reveals that a typical
strawberry flavoring found in a Burger King milk shake has 48 chemicals.
One can just imagine what the stomach said to the small intestine when it encountered all those un-
pronounceable molecular compositions.
In their zeal to appeal to diet-obsessed American consumers, our chemists invented and food
manufacturers marketed some 15,000 low-fat, no-fat, counterfeit sweets to a very appreciative
public, the dieters who had forgotten what a melt-in-your-mouth brownie or moist sour cream coffee
cake tasted like.
The danger of these sweet impostors to folks who are being lured into indulging their sweet tooth
and not suffering the consequences is that instead of relishing a single slice of low-fat or no-
fat cake they'll invariably devour the whole thing, rationalizing, It's not fattening -- what's
the problem?
Forget that it's filled with gobs of the worst kind of fats and a plethora of chemicals already
proven to be carcinogenic. Or that there's so many sucrose and dextrose stimulants in these
products, your blood sugar shoots way up, then crashes down, causing the Sugar Blues. And, the
harshest cut of all, you're hungry right afterward.
Another difference between Americans and the French is their attitude about meals. We're the grab-and-
go, dine-on-the-run folks. For the French, a leisurely evening meal with lots of conversation is not
only a revered custom, it's emblematic of their culture.
The French think nothing of sitting at table for 2-1/2 hours, savoring their food and their company,
says Clower.
Eating together in a gracious, leisurely fashion not only bonds families and friends; it's a key
factor in the French Paradox, Clower discovered.
While you're conversing and enjoying the people around you, you're eating slowly. You put down your
fork to make a point, take a sip of red wine, maybe get up to replace the tired music on the stereo
with a glorious French opera. You're relaxed so you're not shoveling your food and you don't need to
feel full to feel satisfied. You end up eating less and digesting it better than if you gulp down
dinner in 15 minutes on your way from one activity to another.
When you eat graciously, you actually train your body to expect a lot less food, Clower says. You
don't need to feel stuffed to know dinner is over. In fact, you'll soon hate the stuffed feeling and
stop eating well in advance of that happening, he adds.
Your petit reward for spending several hours at table eating delicious food and enjoying lively
conversation? The traditional French way of ending a meal is with a bit of luscious chocolate or a
small wedge of rich, ripe cheese, preferably made of whole raw milk. Sigh...
Clower discovered that once you adopt this new relationship to food, you're not on a diet at all.
You start dropping the pounds and are looking forward to mealtimes as never before.
Now how can a way of eating that is that delicious, that pleasurable, that satisfying not be
illegal, immoral or fattening? Maybe that is the real French Paradox.
Beverly Levitt is a Los Angeles-based free-lance writer.
</
Why aren't the French fat like us?
January 28, 2004
BY BEVERLY LEVITT
If ever there were a reason to scowl at the French, let it begin with their healthy waistlines.
These are the people whose cuisine includes luscious Brie cheese, buttery croissants and calorie-
rich foie gras. The French diet is 35 percent to 45 percent higher in fat than that of your
average American.
Americans neurotically try to fool Mother Nature -- and their cardiologists -- by gorging on faux-
fat chocolate mousse and fat-free creme brulee (hold the "creme"!). We're the ones pouring nonfat
half-and-half (talk about an oxymoron) into our decaf cappuccinos.
The French, on the other hand, seem to have followed their group palate's fancy and enjoyed eating
what they like for generations.
Given the differences, you'd think we would be the ones sitting back smiling smugly about our
well-being.
Instead, those of us in the United States are losing the battle of the bulge. The United States has
an obesity rate 30 percent higher than France's. Add to that the fact that we have three times more
heart attacks than the French. They also have fewer strokes.
What?!
Yes, the French are not only thinner than we are, while eating food that would send the American
diet police into apoplectic fits, their lifespan is statistically longer. They live longer, even
with all that cigarette smoke curling past every diner's nose in cafes throughout France.
And thus we have the French Paradox, which a one-time no-fat believer, Will Clower, Ph.D., looks at
from firsthand experience in The Fat Fallacy, (Three Rivers Press, $12.95)
Clower and his wife, Dottie, are neuroscientists. They were invited to Lyon, France, to do research
at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences. They spent two years there with their children and Clower's
mother, Retha.
In the United States the couple had religiously observed a strict non-fat diet. They were bored with
their food and were overweight. Retha Clower was frantically fighting her surge from a Size 12 to an
unwelcome Size 14 when they left the United States. The Clower children, Ben, 10, and Grace, 4,
were, well, just typical eat-like-their-parents kids, meaning they, too, were bored with the food on
their plates.
As it turned out, the Clowers not only changed continents. Their time in France forced the entire
family to rethink everything they believed to be true about good diet and health.
After a few months they fell into the French way of eating -- French bread with butter, raw-milk
cheese -- and surprising things happened. Clower lost 20 pounds; his wife shed 15. The children
began to love their food, Grandma Retha abandoned the unsuccessful diet she'd followed at home and
ate like the French -- and dropped to a Size Six.
During his two years in Lyon, Clower threw his no-fat menus out the window and developed an entirely
new outlook on food and eating.
"This is not to say that the French make no distinctions about the ill effects of fat," Clower said
during a recent conversation. "All fats aren't created equal; some are definitely better for you
than others and the fat of some animal meats will kill you," he warns. "If you love red meat, limit
it to once a month. Learn to lean on chicken and fish."
OK, that's old news.
What is fascinating is that the French way of eating is as much cultural as scientific. Their eating
habits have been nurtured over the centuries, passed down from mother to daughter, from father to
son, from generation to generation.
"They're happy to eat that way," said Clower. "It's their comfort food."
When Clower first arrived in France he had dinner with Regine Fournier, a wonderful example of a
traditional French woman, Clower said with a smile. "She's like a perfect baguette, crusty on the
outside, warm on the inside."
She was only too happy to malign the American obsessive fear of fats.
Fournier described the French good fat-bad fat theory. Duck (and other poultry) are fine. Milk
fat, olive oil and nuts are beneficial. But stay away from pig, sheep and cow, she warned, wagging
her finger.
"I asked how she knew this," Clower said. "She flashed a grin of superiority and chastised, 'Your
country is too young to have a memory.' "
She, on the other hand, knew about healthy fats because her mother had told her who had heard it
from her grandmother who had been told by her mother and so on and so on.
"When I asked other French friends, 'How do you know what to eat?' they were flabbergasted, as if
they didn't understand the question," said Clower.
Their practice of eating good fats seems to be working.
The World Health Organization has shown that the French are three times less likely to die of
ischemic heart disease than we are. The Lyon Diet Heart Study proved the same statistics -- three
times fewer heart attacks for people on the Mediterranean diet as opposed to the diet advocated by
the American Heart Association.
In the diet-obsessed United States we latch onto to newspaper headlines -- Butter Will Kill You,
Pasta Puts on Pounds -- and are quick to jump on bandwagons to join the latest fad, whether it be no
fat, low-fat, high carbs or low carbs.
Whatever the diet, we quickly embrace processed products. Until one day somebody read the
ingredients on the package. Chemicals. Additives. And the real killer -- partially hydrogenated
vegetable oil.
Back to the butter!
When the medical community prescribed pasta for dieters , we had a traffic jam in the grocery aisle
formerly known as the noodle section crammed those shiny packages into our carts. Later, scientists
announced that people on high-carb diet -- replete with pasta -- were gaining weight, so we quickly
dropped that one.
"Everything with us is black and white," Clower says. "The French and Italians add 'good fats' such
as olive oil or cheese to their pasta -- which lowers the glycemic index of the dish -- and they
walk around satisfied and smiling all day. We don't have to deprive ourselves of something that
delicious."
But they don't have it three times a day, he hastens to add. Or even every day. The French, as we
have learned from Julia Child, if we were listening, practice moderation.
We embrace fast-food establishments and expect to see them on every corner. The French have ab
entirely different view. They were up in arms when McDonald's Golden Arches popping up on Champs-
Elysees and Rue de Rivoli. They viewed fast food as an encroachment of American culinary values onto
their lifestyles.
The French also take a dim view of processed foods and artificial flavorings. After experiencing the
French way of life with meals, Clower came to agree with them.
"If it's never been alive and it doesn't come up in your spell-checker, it ain't food," Clower
jokes. "Our body has a biological relationship with things that grow on this planet. If you eat
something it's never seen and doesn't know how to process, you will introduce health problems."
Our digestive systems don't do well with items invented in chemistry labs for the sole purpose of
imitating real food. One of the problems is that the pretenders often taste just as good as the real
thing. But don't be fooled.
Clower points to a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, "Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good" by
Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation. The investigative journalist reveals that a typical
strawberry flavoring found in a Burger King milk shake has 48 chemicals.
One can just imagine what the stomach said to the small intestine when it encountered all those un-
pronounceable molecular compositions.
In their zeal to appeal to diet-obsessed American consumers, our chemists invented and food
manufacturers marketed some 15,000 low-fat, no-fat, counterfeit sweets to a very appreciative
public, the dieters who had forgotten what a melt-in-your-mouth brownie or moist sour cream coffee
cake tasted like.
The danger of these sweet impostors to folks who are being lured into indulging their sweet tooth
and not suffering the consequences is that instead of relishing a single slice of low-fat or no-
fat cake they'll invariably devour the whole thing, rationalizing, It's not fattening -- what's
the problem?
Forget that it's filled with gobs of the worst kind of fats and a plethora of chemicals already
proven to be carcinogenic. Or that there's so many sucrose and dextrose stimulants in these
products, your blood sugar shoots way up, then crashes down, causing the Sugar Blues. And, the
harshest cut of all, you're hungry right afterward.
Another difference between Americans and the French is their attitude about meals. We're the grab-and-
go, dine-on-the-run folks. For the French, a leisurely evening meal with lots of conversation is not
only a revered custom, it's emblematic of their culture.
The French think nothing of sitting at table for 2-1/2 hours, savoring their food and their company,
says Clower.
Eating together in a gracious, leisurely fashion not only bonds families and friends; it's a key
factor in the French Paradox, Clower discovered.
While you're conversing and enjoying the people around you, you're eating slowly. You put down your
fork to make a point, take a sip of red wine, maybe get up to replace the tired music on the stereo
with a glorious French opera. You're relaxed so you're not shoveling your food and you don't need to
feel full to feel satisfied. You end up eating less and digesting it better than if you gulp down
dinner in 15 minutes on your way from one activity to another.
When you eat graciously, you actually train your body to expect a lot less food, Clower says. You
don't need to feel stuffed to know dinner is over. In fact, you'll soon hate the stuffed feeling and
stop eating well in advance of that happening, he adds.
Your petit reward for spending several hours at table eating delicious food and enjoying lively
conversation? The traditional French way of ending a meal is with a bit of luscious chocolate or a
small wedge of rich, ripe cheese, preferably made of whole raw milk. Sigh...
Clower discovered that once you adopt this new relationship to food, you're not on a diet at all.
You start dropping the pounds and are looking forward to mealtimes as never before.
Now how can a way of eating that is that delicious, that pleasurable, that satisfying not be
illegal, immoral or fattening? Maybe that is the real French Paradox.
Beverly Levitt is a Los Angeles-based free-lance writer.
</