In the two or so
decades that the so-called French paradox
has been discussed widely [1], a variety of explanations for the lower
rates of heart disease in France and some other Mediterranean countries have
been examined. Yes, consuming wine (and probably specifically red wine) does
offer some protection. Beyond that, at least outside of academic epidemiology,
it seems a little hazy. The paradox in popular accounts has also come to
encompass obesity. Look at all that rich food they eat! Those cheeses! Creamy
desserts! It’s amazing that the French aren’t popping the buttons on their Chanel
suits!
As a current
visitor to a research institute in the lovely medieval town of Dijon, I have
been experiencing my own French food paradox. Eating lunch at the lab canteen
is a daily ritual in which an entrée, main course and most often dessert and
yoghurt are consumed. My colleagues here reliably inform me that the evening
meal is somewhat similar in structure, except that an additional cheese course
is always included. Wine is a regular feature of the evening meal if not lunch.
Back at home, I would be anxious that this sort of regular intake would
permanently double my already ample frame. Perhaps it's the change of scene but
after a couple of weeks here, this is starting to seem normal. Certainly, from
a weight perspective, none of my colleagues have to worry. But, why not?
In terms of sensory
palatability, the food consumed is neither boring nor lacking in those
ingredients that tend to make us worry, especially fat and sugar (although the
canteen’s main strength is probably its low prices). My colleagues and I are
not eating lettuce leaves and celery, and the (evening) wine is definitely not
low alcohol. What does this tell us about those in the US, Britain, Australia and
elsewhere desperately trying to control their weight by eating rye crackers and
low fat cheese for lunch? The most obvious answer, discussed often previously,
is that the French eat smaller portions during meals than we would. If that
seems an easy solution, then there is also the fact that eating for the French
is a mealtime activity that you undertake in company, and snacking between
meals is relatively rare.
But these two
phenomena create their own little paradox. If you eat less food, won’t you be
hungry before the next meal and inclined to want to snack? Perhaps, but we know
that so-called between meal hunger has, most of the time, little to do with the
body demanding required nutrients. It is about habit and the search for
pleasure from food.
And then there’s
the question of the healthiness of the food. The obesity ‘epidemics’ in Western
countries have led to worries about the energy content of individual foods.
While I would argue that the issue ought to be about diet rather than
ingredients, there is a popular belief that obesity can be beaten if only delicious
foods can be reduced in fat and sugar, and that notion generally supports an
underlying attitude that delicious foods are commonly intrinsically unhealthy. Hence,
surveys in the USA show that Americans tend to worry a lot about food and its
health consequences.
What about the
French – don’t they worry about food and health? The answer seems to be no, or
at least not in the way that many other nationalities do. Their focus seems to
be much more on the pleasure afforded by food [2]. If you don’t need to worry too much whether
the food you eat satisfies your need for pleasure, then you can clearly let
your body tell you when you have had enough, and this is what the French appear
to do [3].
Most importantly,
the French do not have to worry excessively about whether to eat either healthy food or delicious food, a major concern for American consumers. A recent
study has shown that, in contrast to Americans, the French see no conflict
between food pleasure and health. Werle and colleagues [4] used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as of way of determining how
closely related the concepts of healthy/unhealthy
were to tasty/untasty for male and
female French undergraduate students. The advantage of the IAT is that it
requires no overt statement from participants about these relationships.
Instead, it relies on comparisons of the speeds to respond to different
combinations of the concepts being investigated. Using both pictures and words
presented on a screen, items reflecting tastiness
could be paired with different key presses for healthy and unhealthy
(and the same for untasty). For
example, a strong association in the participant’s mind between tasty and unhealthy would mean that such key presses should be faster than
for tasty and healthy. In other words, congruent concepts when tied to the same
response (key press) are responded to more quickly that incongruent concepts.
These researchers
found no difference in the meaning of unhealthy foods; as in the USA, the French
idea of unhealthy food involves fat and sugars. However, their IAT results
revealed that French participants were faster to respond to a combination of healthy and tasty than they were to healthy
and untasty. In a second study, as a
direct test of these results, they provided a novel milk-based fruit juice, labeled
as either “generally considered healthy” or “generally considered unhealthy”.
Consistent with the first study’s conclusions, those participants in the healthy label condition rated the drink
as tastier than did the participants in the unhealthy
label group.
What are the
origins of the contrasting views of tastiness and healthiness between French
and American consumers? Paul Rozin, and more recently Oakes [5], have shown that many American consumers
have adopted very simplistic approaches to categorizing foods. In the consumer
mind, foods are broadly either good
(healthy) or bad (unhealthy) and this
distinction is typically made in terms of fat content. To a large extent, this
results from long-stranding government and media-based emphases on fat intake
as the major cause of both obesity and heart disease. From the consumer’s perspective,
adopting undemanding rules about foods is understandable given the potential complexity
of nutritional information, but may have unforeseen consequences, beyond simply
a guarantee of boring mealtimes.
Putting foods into good and bad baskets may also be counterproductive in attempts to loose
weight. Thus, the notion of tasty = unhealthy
= fat is sufficiently ingrained in the USA that consumers can ignore the potentially
greater weight gain from a higher calorie “good food” if it is contrasted with
an obviously fat containing, but lower calorie “bad food”. One study of US college
students who were given cookies to eat reveals where this can lead. The
researchers assigned the students to receive information about the healthiness
of the cookies. Those students who were told that the cookies were a ‘healthy
snack’ ate 35% more than did those told that they were unhealthy [6]. Dieting never tasted so good!
The link between
dieting and equating tastiness with unhealthiness is even evident among the
French participants in the Werle et al. study. There, the strength of the
association between healthy and tasty was found to be weaker for highly
restrained eaters (that is, those who try to consciously restrict their food
intake) than for less restrained eaters. It is not clear in which direction(s)
the arrow of causation points here, but such a finding does make us wonder
whether the process of food restriction acts to distort attitudes towards foods
and health.
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