Due to something I haven’t yet been able to correct, no pictures for a while. Hope that’s okay with everyone!
I want to say some more about food. French, and American. There are plenty of fat people in France, but it’s not the norm, as it is in the US. And, I believe, the American obsession with low fat foods is largely to blame. (I’m stealing ideas left and right here, but they are public domain ideas.) Sometime, I think in the current century even, researchers experimenting with dogs demonstrated that fat has a flavor. If that sounds gross, well, don’t eat this post and you should be fine. I’m pretty sure that is true, and furthermore, fat is a good flavor. And, I suppose that all fat isn’t created equal, I’ll have to grant that. Milkfat (butterfat) buffers the effects of sugar ingestion. At the University of Minnesota in the 80s they were experimenting with foods that cause a sugar rush. Honey was, they said at the time, the best (or worst, if you don’t like sugar rushes.) The food that they could never get anyone’s blood sugar to spike with was ice cream. This was good news for Minnesota’s dairy industry. The reason was good old milkfat. Other fats don’t do that. Crisco and sugar is about as good as sugar for making a sugar rush happen. And, yummy, huh?
Recently (within a few years) it has come out that the US sugar industry paid researchers to find things that made fat bad for us. Some of it may have been real, some of it they actually did make up. But, fat tastes good, and if you take it out of food you lose a lot of good flavor. So, to make the stuff palatable, you add, what else? Sugar! Sugar does taste good. I eat the stuff, but not in the amounts in which I was eating it in the US. Because in France, fat is okay. The main base underneath a lot of French cooking is butter. Not margarine, but butter. Fatty, slippery, gooey, tasty butter! And butter contains what? Contains? It mostly is milkfat. Which is, in fact good for you and tastes good too. French people eat a lot of butter, but they aren’t as frequently obese as Americans, who tend to use low-fat alternatives. Think about that. Whole milk and butter taste really good, they help you stay thinner, and they reduce the need to add sugar to everything.
And added sugar in everything is the problem. Read the ingredients label on the food you buy. Most of it has sugar in it. It can be very difficult to avoid sugar in the US, unless you’re rich enough to afford Whole Foods! In France, the sort of thing Whole Foods sells is just what they sell in most supermarkets. And it isn’t expensive, either.
I’m not trying to preach; I’m just trying to lay out some reality. The rule of thumb is that you weigh ten pounds less in Europe than you do in America. I think I know why that is. Sweets, anyone?
