The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [21]
Here are the facts: the French take in about as many calories as we do in the United States, but they consume more cholesterol and saturated fats because they eat four times as much butter as we and more than twice as much cheese and lard. I made a quick calculation that the French consume more saturated fat just from the forty pounds of cheese they eat each year than the surgeon general says we should take in from all sources combined.
If the French have heard of oat bran, it does not show up in the statistics—they eat only one-fifteenth the number of oats we do. They consume less sugar and beef and less whole milk, but the rest of their diet differs from ours in unremarkable ways: slightly less meat of all types and slightly less fresh fruit, a little more seafood, twice the garlic, half the onions, rather more potatoes and bread, and the same number of eggs.
I was about to launch an arduous search for detailed health statistics comparing France and the United States when my doctor friend sent me an excellent article by Edward Dolnick called “Le paradoxe français.” It had appeared in the May/June issue of Hippocrates magazine, and it did all the work for me. Only 143 out of every 100,000 middle-aged French men die each year of coronary heart disease, compared with 315 among middle-aged American men. French men live about as long as men in the United States, but French women outlive American women by at least a year and have even fewer fatal heart attacks than the Japanese—without jogging or health clubs.
Within France the lowest rate of heart disease is found in the southwest, an earthly paradise of goose and duck fat, sausages and foie gras, and very little olive oil or fish. (So much for the Mediterranean-diet hypothesis.) In Normandy, where the people swim in butter and cream, the heart disease rate is higher than in the rest of France, but it’s still lower than in the United States. The French smoke as much as we do, but wherever you go in France, heart disease kills at a lower rate than here and kills later in life. For reasons nobody understands, a Frenchman with the same cholesterol level as an American has only half the chance of suffering a heart attack. Even in France, blood cholesterol levels do count, but something else in the French diet seems to count for much more.
One possibility is that the plentiful calcium in all that cheese binds with the fat and prevents its absorption into the bloodstream, allowing it to be excreted before it kills. Another is wine. The average Frenchman drinks ten times more wine than the average American. Dolnick cites one study demonstrating that the more wine a nation drinks, the lower its rate of fatal heart disease. The French may die more often from cirrhosis than we do, but liver disease still accounts for only 3 percent of all deaths in France.
Could Americans cut their heart disease rate in half by switching to a high-cheese, high-wine, high-goose-fat French diet? If I were the surgeon general or head of the National Institutes of Health, I would immediately shift every available resource to answering that question. Last week, I tried unsuccessfully to reach the surgeon general to propose this idea. Then I telephoned the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, but nobody cared. Finally I reached Dr. Millicent Higgins, head of epidemiology at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. She was attending some kind of heart attack conference in Houston, where I tracked her down during breakfast in her room. Intelligent and well informed, Dr. Higgins conceded that the French statistics are extremely puzzling. But she refused to drop everything and find out why. And she grew obstinate when I suggested that she send back her fresh fruit with yogurt and bring on the bacon and eggs.
When I explained the reasoning behind my high-goose-fat diet, she objected that she knew of no epidemiological research that would support the idea. Which is precisely my point.
March 1991
Author’s Note:
Edward Dolnick and I are usually given credit for having independently “discovered