The French Secret

I’ve added a page that has a few brief reviews of travel guides for France. There’s not much there yet, but I’ll be adding to it as we go forward here.

Catherine Deneuve should be the official mascot of this blog. She’s everything that this blog stands for, the meeting of French culture, French habits and French beauty.

Here she is at 61 looking better than most women look at 21. Yes, she started out nearly perfect, but time has not been unkind to her. Perhaps it is that chain smoking, after all.

There’s a very good, funny article in the International Herald Tribue about the French Paradox, one which points at the one of the French Ssecrets to a slim figure is smoking like a chimney. Here a taste.

According to major surveys from both nations, the percentage of French women who smoke is five points higher than the percentage of American women. Researchers have dismissed this difference as statistically insignificant.

A stark gap emerges, however, if you compare elites from both countries. In America, where cigarettes now have a loser image, only about one-tenth of those with college and graduate degrees smoke, compared with about 40 percent of high school dropouts. But in France, nearly a third of upper-income earners smoke, a slightly higher percentage than in the lower classes.

So those chic uppercrust French women trotting around not getting fat smoke far more than their American counterparts.

The writer, Jessica Siegel, is also quick to note that French beauty Catherine Deneuve credits chain-smoking as her beauty secret.

Of course, we here that French Secret would never recommend a three-pack-a-day habit as the sure course to svelteness, beauty and well-being.

Here’s a link to yet another article about the French paradox. This one, by Dr. Andrew Weil, notes that the key to the French diet is quality, not quantity.

[W]ithout a doubt, the French do enjoy their food. Although they are picking up some of our bad habits, they still take time to enjoy food with family and friends. They have no guilt about indulging in really good meals and getting full pleasure from them. The French eat much less processed food than we do and generally have access to higher-quality ingredients. Their food - from fruits and vegetables to cheese and poultry - tastes better than ours. By emphasizing better food, they are able to be satisfied with less.

Overall, Americans are eating more low-quality foods and getting less satisfaction from them. The French do it better.

Indeed, the French do do it better where food is concerned. Americans are catching up in the culinary department, at least on the coasts. Unfortunately, until we can convince most people that eating moderate quantities of high quality food is preferable to bellying up to the crap-filled buffet, we’ll be fighting a losing battle against obesity.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be following the French diet at home. It’s never been easier to do so.

Since most of what I’m posting today is about what I hope to do in this space over the next few weeks, one of the items that deserves mention is my blog roll. If you look at the right hand side of this page you’ll find my list of links, which is a work in progress. Please tell me if you know of any blogs or sites about France that should be added to my list. I’m eager to learn.

In the meantime, while I put the finishing touches on the blogroll, allow me to recommend to you two or three of my favorites: The Paris Photo Journal, which is exactly as its name implies, a blog with many pictures of Paris; A Day in Paris which is full of Parisian goodness; and fianlly, La Coquette, who just makes me laugh.

All of them are worth visiting.

One of the things I’m hoping to do in the next several days is review, one by one, the many books that have come out in the past few years touting one version or another of the so-called French diet. All of these, of course, are some play on the French Paradox, the well-known phenomena by which the French eat a diet high in saturated fats yet, in general, remain thin and healthy.

Right now one of the most popular books going is French Women Don’t Get Fat, a book written by Mireille Guiliano, the C.E.O. of the French champagne maker Veuve Cliquot. (Tomorrow’s New York Times will have a long reiview of this very work.)

Of course, Guiliano’s book is only the latest, and best promoted, in a long string of French Paradox diet books, all offering one the hope that weight can be melted off on a diet of croissants and red wine. The reality, of course is different, and portion control and much walking figure heavily into the equation.

In any event, I’ll be going through these books in the next few days, trying to sort out the strong from the weak, the silly from the useful.

From the inimitable Manolo comes word that the feet of the average French woman have grown more than an inch in the past forty years.

The average French foot has grown by three centimetres in the past 40 years, and the French now buy more shoes, mostly made in Asia, than any other nation barring the United States, a new survey said.

The average shoe size for a French woman has risen from a 37 to a 40 (a seven in Britain and Australia, and a seven and half in the US), said the survey by the Centre Technique Cuir (Technical Leather Centre).

The French also now buy an average of 5.3 pairs of shoes a year, compared with 4.8 in the rest of Europe. The Americans remain the top buyers, treating themselves to 6.3 pairs of new shoes a year.

Of course, it’s no suprise here that the French are shoe shoppers. What’s more surprising to me is that Americans are the biggest shoe buyers of all. Hard to believe given the shabbiness of the shoes worn by many of the people I see on the street.

More on this subject from Jason at NYC à Paris.

Welcome! This blog is not just a celebration of all things French, it’s also a serious exploration of, as the subtitle says, French diet, beauty, culture, and style, in short those very things that make the French the French.