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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.

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