French PAradox

French Paradox

Blog Post 4

April 20, 2015

By: Jack D. Nelson

            While searching various French foods and researching for these past three blog post I kept thinking to myself, “Wow, I haven’t seen one healthy dish yet” and as it turns out the French don’t have the healthiest diet. It’s so unhealthy; in fact there is a name for it. The French Paradox. The French Paradox became a known term in 1991 when it was said during an airing of 60 minutes. The paradox is that the French have a relatively large intake of saturated fats in comparison to most countries, including America, yet their rate for CHD, or Coronary Heart Disease, is considerably lower than these countries. During the airing of 60 minutes it left the conclusion that the French’s low CHD rate is all because of their high consumption of red wine. Therefore we silly Americans bought forty-four percent more red wine in 1992 than we did in 1991. Also wine makers used this to their advantage and started to advertise their wines as “health foods” However there are several possibilities on why the French have such a low CHD for how many saturated fats they intake. These reasons are much more feasible than and not as ridiculous as the red wine solution previously suggested. For example it is possible that close to 80 percent of their fat intake is from dairy and vegetables, making it much healthier for them. Another theory is that since they only eat three meals a day and don’t snack as much as we do here in America, it is better for them.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1768013/