Why French Women Are Thin
Okay, we’ve all been bombarded with messages that French women are so much slimmer than us, and there are competing views as to why this is so. Could it be the diet that they eat? Could it be the amount of walking that they do? Could it be that French women are more style conscious and therefore more determined to stay thin than us? Perhaps they are fed on more nutritious food, so don’t get the same cravings that we do. Or perhaps its because they smoke, asks Daniel Gross in the New York Times
“As the United States lost the battle against the bulge, it waged a more successful campaign against another menace to public health: smoking. Because of an aggressive public information campaign, new restrictive laws and huge increases in federal and state taxes, the percentage of the population that smoked fell to 22.5 percent in 2002, from 37 percent in 1970.
Strange as it may sound at first, many economists and health care experts say they believe that the two trends may be related. Experts blame factors ranging from urban sprawl to junk-food-laden diets for the increase in the number of Americans who are obese - defined as having a body mass index of over 30.
But smoking, or the decline of smoking, may also play a role. Nicotine is a stimulant, which means that smokers burn calories faster. And it’s an appetite suppressant, which means that smokers eat less. Consider “French Women Don’t Get Fat,” the best selling book. Some critics said that the real reason chic Parisian women stayed trim while gorging themselves on croissants was that they smoked more than their American counterparts.
Indeed, conventional wisdom, soundly rooted in the personal experience of millions of former smokers and in several studies, has long held that short-term weight gain is the price to be paid for quitting smoking. But economists are increasingly applying their tools to measure the way monetary incentives, or disincentives, affect all sorts of human behavior - and hence the ability of government policy to alter it. And they’ve been wondering whether high cigarette taxes, which are intended to encourage people to quit smoking, may have the unintended effect of redirecting them from one form of unhealthy behavior to another.”You can read the full text of the article here
I disagree with this article. Not all slim French women smoke, for one thing. I worked in France and none of the thin women I knew smoked. I did notice that there was a difference between the way they ate, and the way I ate. Here are my observations - they are not based on “French Women” as a whole, but generalisations on the women that I worked with in France.
- They always ate breakfast
- They drank espresso coffee upon arriving to work and mid-morning
- They had a good lunch, and included a full fat yogurt for dessert
- They drank espresso coffee after lunch
- They drank that damned coffee mid afternoon
- They never snacked
- They ate a light supper with very well seasoned meat or dairy products
- They ate salads (but with full fat dressing)
- They only ate when hungry
- They wouldn’t even taste a mint I offered them (on the grounds of not being hungry)
- They exercised a bit (mainly walking or something gentle like yoga or swimming)
- They were not obsessed with food and never commented on the amounts of trips I made to the vending machine
- They ate really stinky cheese that tasted foul and thought it was funny that I could only eat medium cheddar
Oh yeah, here’s an important one I almost missed out.
- They ate really small portions
Last time I went shopping in Paris, I was a little overweight. I couldn’t get a damned thing to fit me. I guess there’s also the pressure that if you get fat, you have to wander around naked too….