The French Secret

Here’s a long article from the International Herald Tribune that reports that the French, like the rest of the world, are finally getting fat.

Doctors here are perplexed by the runaway success in the United States of the best-selling advice book “French Women Don’t Get Fat.”

“Oh, but they do!” said Dr. France Bellisle, a prominent obesity researcher here. “I work in a nutrition department where we see lots of people who are overweight. And I can tell you that French women are getting obese - and some massively obese - these days.”

In fact, France is suffering something of an obesity crisis, with rates here rising “at an alarming rate,” particularly among young people, Bellisle said. True, absolute rates are still lower here than in the United States and most other European countries: 11.3 percent of the French are obese and nearly 40 percent overweight, compared with more than 50 percent overweight in Britain and the United States.

But the sudden sharp rise - 5 percent annually since 1997 - is causing great alarm in a society renowned for thinness, a country that long seemed exempt from a worldwide epidemic of obesity.

Yes, the French are getting fat. Most of us never thought they were genetically exempt from obesity, only that the traditional French diet and way of eating, combined with their habit of walking everywhere, kept them from the acheiving the levels of obesity we’ve seen elsewhere in the developing world.

Here’s our good friend Mireille Guiliano to remind us of that.

In her book “French Women Don’t Get Fat,” Mireille Guiliano, a French-born executive who now lives in New York, attributes her own slimness to traditional French meal culture, which she suggests infuses in women an appreciation of healthy diet, exercise and the discipline to consume smaller portions.

In theory, researchers heartily agree. But, they say, that way of eating is no longer the French norm, and no longer practical, either.

As for Guiliano, still svelte at nearly 60, they suggest there may be more going on.

“Educated women have less of a tendency to get fat in any culture,” Dr. Bellisle said. “They have the financial means to buy the right food and the right clothes, which is a big incentive to stay thin.”

Whatever works, is what I say.