Why is French food healthy?
It’s not, necessarily. It’s how it’s prepared, and typically traditional French food is just made with ‘healthier’ items. But nutrition is very, very complicated, and French (or really any) cuisine too broad to really encompass here. For instance, pastries – high in complex carbs, fats via butter, and sugars. Calling one cuisine ‘healthier’ is not very accurate – they all have pros and cons, and none are really generically healthy. I mean, basically everything you eat slowly poisons you, including drinking water or breathing air, it’s just a matter of whether or not you are getting generous nutrients in that as well, and that is rare.
We use three times less sugar, less milk, more vegetables. Our fats are better-fewer trans-fatty acids. We eat fewer refined cereals in the morning and fewer sandwiches. And in France, 70 percent of the population makes lunch at home, which means less premade refined foods. Are there problematic French foods? There are too many fried potatoes. When I was young, people ate them maybe once per month, because cutting and frying potatoes required a lot of work. Mostly, we ate potatoes in soup. But fried, they are catastrophic. And the bread is too white in France. It is a cultural problem. Does following your diet mean having to cook? Anyone can make their own vinaigrette, their own omelet. Recipe books look complicated, but I make meals in 10 or 15 minutes, with fresh vegetables. It takes 30 seconds to make vinaigrette. I make a mayonnaise without a mixer in a few minutes. Why doesn’t rice make Asians fat? It is an enigma. They rarely have diabetes or obesity. A study by Jenny Brown-Mille
