Frenchwomen Immune to Obesity? Fat Chance!
The Indianapolis Star
PARIS—Just when two years of Franco-American strife seemed to be calming down, what better way to re-open old wounds than with the message of a best-selling book called “French Women Don’t Get Fat”?
The book is a sort of 250-page attempt to define the ‘French paradox,’ a largely unexplained phenomenon that seemingly allows the French to smoke like chimneys and consume cheese, goose liver and wine while remaining in relatively good health and irritating Americans by looking svelte and stylish.
Funny thing is, there’s a long line of French nutritionists who might suggest a new title to Mireille Guiliano, the Frenchwoman in New York who wrote the book—a title closer to her countryman Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.”
The problem is that the French have slowly been forgetting how to eat well.
Last spring, the French government released a report saying that unless the French act fast, by the year 2020, they’ll be as obese as Americans. (That’s right; we’ve become the benchmark for All Things Fat.)
The report, released by French Sen. Claude Saunier, looks at how France is slowly adopting what it calls the “American model” in its rise of obesity levels, and looks to create a national agency to combat the problem
“The United States gathers together all of the known causes of being overweight and obese,” the report states, citing a list that includes high-calorie foods, huge portions, too much sitting in front of the TV and too little exercise.
French dietitian Bridgitte Cabrol quickly dispatches the paradox: “We used to have a certain gastronomy,” she says, “but that’s history.”
“Now,” she adds, the French are “eating big quantities of food with few vegetables, and accompanying it with sugary drinks.”
She also is quick to point out that the paradox focuses more on the effects of diet on people’s cardiovascular systems, but concedes that a nation of fat Frenchmen (and women) wouldn’t leave much reason for bringing it up anymore.
In summer 2003, findings from a joint study by the University of Pennsylvania and CNRS, the French national scientific research institute, revealed that though the French diet contains a higher percentage of fat, much of the success of the paradox is due to smaller portions. Now, however, gastric bypass surgery, once considered a foreign concept, has reached French shores.
With an office in central Paris and one in the middle-class Parisian suburb of Le Kremlin- Bicêtre, Cabrol sees a wide variety of clients. She disputes the idea that obesity afflicts a certain class of people in France. “People do, however, have slightly more money than they used to, allowing them to eat quickly or eat prepared foods.”
Her clients, who arrive either on a doctor’s recommendation or by word of mouth, want to learn one of two things: how to get skinnier or how to eat better.
Ignorance goes to waist
One of the major changes the dietitian cites as leading to the expansion of waists is the loss of know-how in the kitchen. “The tendency now is for people to leave school and get a job without ever really learning how to cook,” she says. As a result, “we’ve forgotten how to eat well.”
Two statistics from the U.S. model that may stress the French and their government the most are the human toll and the cost to the health care system. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta cite more than 25,800 obesity-related deaths a year in the United States and $117 billion in “economic cost to the nation.”
In France, with a total population of 60 million, the statistics are proportionally as daunting. Saunier’s report estimates the current cost to the French health care system at about $6.6 billion, with most statistics moving in the wrong direction.
And one Parisian pharmacy worker refers to what she calls an “overwhelming” number of new weight-loss products arriving in the past year.
What has changed in the last 20 years? Some think globalization, or to put a finer point on it, Americanization. France’s first McDonald’s opened in Strasbourg in 1979; now there are more than 1,000, more than half of which have opened in the last 10 years.
With or without what the French call “Mac-Do,” more and more people are doing what only tourists used to do: eating on the go. In addition, the market for prepackaged microwaveable foods has grown by leaps and bounds over the last several years.
People, especially those outside Paris, now shop at “hypermarkets”—giant stores that are a hybrid between a supermarket and Wal-Mart. As a result, open-air markets have received an unanticipated bump in status, now attracting customers who want to make something special.
Dietician Cabrol also cites Parisians who make weekend trips to the suburbs to stock up (and economize) on a week’s worth of food, “but then when Friday night rolls around and their tiny fridge is empty, they pull out a frozen pizza.”
Vending machine blues
Along with a rise in public awareness, calls for legislation against vending machines in schools has not gone unnoticed by the food industry. Agitated vending machine companies fought back last summer with the creation of a group called “Touche pas â mon goûter!” or, roughly translated, “Hands off my snack!”
The companies, which rely on school-based vending machines for about 10 percent of their revenue, defend themselves by saying that they are testing new products such as fruit and milk-based drinks to offer in their machines.
Schools, according to dietician Cabrol, are key elements in the fight against obesity. “Right now, what we’re doing is more reaction than prevention,” she says. “Teaching nutrition in school is where this could change, but it’s not on the docket yet.”
“Obesity,” she says with irony, “has a promising future here.”
Across Paris, in the English-language bookstore The Red Wheelbarrow, owners Penelope Le Masson and Abigail Altman explain why they think “French Women Don’t Get Fat” has been so successful.
“There’s this mystique (about France) that people have wanted to grab for centuries,” says Altman, an American.
“Anglophone readers love reading almost anything about French and France,” echoes Le Masson, a Canadian.
“French people see (the book) in the window and giggle,” she says, “They think it’s funny there could be a book about this.”
