How is France dodging the global obesity trend?

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/global-obesity-rates/

by Brajeshwar • 2 years ago

35 41 2 years ago

jajko• 2 years ago

Well look at French culture and history - always focus on quality of the cuisine, the taste experience, quality of ingredients, preparing meal is often a family/friends social ritual. Anybody who ever went through proper Michelin * experience can tell stories.

Naturally you put healthier stuff inside compared to some cheap quick to make fast food stuff. And if +- whole nation is having this sort of mindset, you see result when rest of the world is moving to cheaper-and-faster. Also, french are comparably fanatics to being active/outdoorsy (while having properly beautiful country to utilize). Good mix for good health.

Now why China and India see similar trend can be a different topic - their cuisine is good to excellent, but mentality, genetics etc is very different.

fakedang2• 2 years ago

India is dodging the obesity trend?

India has one of the fastest growing rated of diabetes and obesity, as observed with economies where incomes are rising across the board. Not to mention Indian food being extremely unhealthy in general across the board (save for some vegetarian cuisines).

China is also seeing an uptick in obesity rates and diabetes, etc as more folks move from rice carbs to sugars, and from veggies to pork.

seatac76• 2 years ago

Indian food is not all heavy greasy curries though, I imagine the day to day cuisine is much healthier than Chicken Tikka Masala.

TheCoelacanth• 2 years ago

Not to mention Indian food being extremely unhealthy in general across the board (save for some vegetarian cuisines)

So, except for the majority of it? A lot of Indians are strict vegetarians and even among the meat eaters, they still generally eat a lot of non-meat dishes.

lm284692• 2 years ago

People also tend to be much more frank and will absolutely roast you when you start getting fat. Everyone under 30 eats the same shit as in any other western country, we don't make ratatouille and boeuf bourguignon every day, for example we are the EU country with the most mcdonald's

jicea2• 2 years ago

You can also take a green salad in the standard McDonald's menus instead of french fries, and I think this is specific to French McDonald's.

throwaway220323• 2 years ago

This is the key distinction IMO.

The French smoke and drink and eat crap food just like everyone else.

They just don't mess about in my experience. If you are fat, you are fat. You're not body positive, you're not big boned, you don't have a slow metabolism, you're not in a food desert, you're not even obese, you're just fat. Sort it out.

They're not afraid of calling a spade a spade.

It really is that simple when you aren't surrounded by enablers.

giraffe_lady• 2 years ago

I have a lot of family in france, I have citizenship and lived there for about a decade earlier in my life. Not really as a french person but not quite as an expat either.

The thing that struck me wasn't so much about the quality of the food per se but just how much weight of ritual there was around it. I would see average working class families sit down for an hour+ dinner with appetizer, salad, cheese course every single day. It wasn't particularly fancy or extremely labor-intensive, usually at least one course was just repurposed leftovers from a day or two earlier. It was pretty "normal" food but set out so that eating it just took a while.

Similarly basically every worker, even low-prestige hourly laborers, was fully entitled to take a 90 minute lunch and they did, every single day. These rhythms of time and food were clearly valued highly, respect for them was built into the structures of daily life at the legal and social level. It communicates to people that how you eat matters, that it is something to pay attention to.

Snacking between meals was heavily discouraged as well, almost stigmatized even. It was considered childish, something you were expected to have grown out of needing to do routinely as an adult.

I also remember a clear sense of skepticism and even contempt for convenience and fast foods. This was about twenty years ago now and I understand that's relaxed considerably since then, especially with young people. But I think it's clear that natural french conservatism served them right here: they were correct to resist incorporating these foods into their lifestyle.

gpsx• 2 years ago

I think you right. Oddly, celebrating food will keep you from getting fat, as the alternative is putting crap in your body.

b3ing2• 2 years ago

Many “skinnier” countries use natural foods and cook all their meals. And that means no shortcuts with canned food, few spice bottles, etc.

I think that is part of it, plus their plates have more vegetables.

A lot of our meats in the US have hormones these days. Plus almost everything boxed, canned or packaged has sugar, fructose, corn syrup or the fake sugar for zero calories- none of which are good.

cjrp• 2 years ago

I also wonder if work/life balance is a contributing factor. If your work ends promptly at 5pm, you have more time and energy to cook a real meal, rather than pick up something like fast food.

rightbyte• 2 years ago

The length of the work day is probably really important. 8h days are way to long to have the energy to do house keeping in my experience. You need atleast one at home working part time...

DrBenCarson• 2 years ago

Intense but ultimately effective “fat people are ugly” culture

Der_Einzige3• 2 years ago

This is also the source of why much of SE/east asia is super thin despite a heavily rice based diet. It's not because the food is uniquely healthy, it's that being overweight is a social death sentence there.

Fat shaming has amazing ROI from a public health perspective. Luckily we invented Ozempic, which gives us a way out from the wallmart scooter obese hellscape that the USA is in - but the social "restigmatization" of obesity may be necessary because - like it or not - it's better to have been bullied into living to be 80, than it is to be "happy-go-lucky" into an early grave (after the diabetes induced amputations). Certainly this is true for the kids of these folks, anyway. We've normalized a society of dying young and dying from preventable stuff that was ultimately induced from metabolic syndrome

Ylpertnodi• 2 years ago

....why much of SE/east asia is super thin despite a heavily rice based diet.

I would say: ....why much of SE/east asia is super thin because of a heavily rice based diet.

silverquiet2• 2 years ago

it's that being overweight is a social death sentence there

The US isn't really all different. There's a veneer of acceptance, but it's just that.

sofixa• 2 years ago

As someone living in France, there's something which doesn't get enough attention.

Everyone in France (okay, almost everyone) "does sport". It's drilled into kids that they need to have some sort of physical activity, and it's one of the things people getting to know each other ask one another - what sort of sport do you take a part in. There are "hype" sports like wall climbing, quite popular in some of the big cities; there are more communal (football/basketball/etc.) ones; there's swimming etc etc. But it's normal and expected that you do something.

IMO this is more important contributor than the cuisine, which although quite "natural", includes lots of meat, cheese, sauces (not American style sauce with sugar + corn syrup + a bunch of chemicals, more like blue cheese-based sauces) etc. which aren't the most calorie light foods.

orwin2• 2 years ago

Regular exercise help with being overweight, what you eat help too, but not that much compared to how much you eat.

One of the advantage of regular exercise not talked about enough is how it makes your metabolism faster, thus increasing your baseline calory expanse, but still from an ex-obese: the quantity matters.

Which is helped with eating slowly, and taking time between dishes (and we do this, a lot).

novariation• 2 years ago

I have to confirm this as a nerdy french person: I don't like sports and it always felt awkward because it's not something I enjoy, people keep asking for it and it makes me uncomfortable. I tried hard to fit in though: I tried judo, tennis, swimming, running, rowing. But couldn't make any stick, 2 years each (except judo for a few years).

French moms really force you to exercise and my immigrant dad always felt weird about it.

throwaway220323• 2 years ago

I agree with this and think that the role of exercise and sport in body composition is often misunderstood.

The calories burned playing a five a side football match aren't that big a deal, neither is the BMR adjustment from going to the gym unless you really go hard on it. It makes a difference, yes, but it's not the real key.

What matters is that it forces you to be to some degree mindful about what you are eating, because most sports become really shit and unenjoyable if you are out of shape, you can literally see and feel your performance decreasing.

nonameiguess• 2 years ago

I imagine this is the classic Hacker News "everyone reads the title but not the article" effect, but the question posed here isn't why is France's obesity rate low. It's lower than global leaders like Egypt and the US but that's true in a lot of places. However, in those places, including places like India and China being cited in other comments, as well as places like Japan with historically very low rates, they've still increased, often very drastically, since 1990. It's only in Germany, where obesity rates have been pretty flat since around 2008, and France, which actually has a lower obesity rate today than in 1990, that this increase hasn't happened.

The answer can't just be "well, their cuisine is X, Y, Z" or "they shame fat people more." Those things were also true in 1990. Something during these 30 years had to have actually changed to counteract an otherwise globally consistent trend seen across all cuisines and cultures. I don't feel remotely qualified or informed enough to judge the reality of it, but the article has hypotheses. Specifically, German food culture has changed, with younger generations favoring less calorie dense foods than traditional German food, and in France, government campaigns to get people to eat less and move more seem to have actually worked in spite of failing just about everywhere else they've been tried.

And, for what it's worth, I have plenty of personal experience with fat shaming culture. I served in the active duty US Army in my 20s, and there is tremendous pressure to stay lean and fit. It's a literal job requirement. The military is the only employer I'm aware of that legally can and will fire you for being fat even when you have a non-public facing office job. You'll be brutally mocked by peers, often with the encouragement of command, no one will have any respect for you, and your chances of advancing are nil. Nonetheless, even in the active duty military, all data I can find indicate that rates of overweight and obesity have at least doubled during this same period. This, in spite of being forced to exercise and having all the healthy food in the world available at a low price. A whole lot of people simply choose fast food and beer anyway, even with every economic incentive pointing in the other direction.

Taikonerd2• 2 years ago

Yes! Looking at the graph, it seems like the real question should be, "what has changed in France since roughly 2008?"

I wonder if there's some food additive they banned at around that time...

r00fus• 2 years ago

I’ve lived in France for a year and visited numerous times for a few weeks or a month.

I have eaten quite well over there including foods that aren’t exactly healthy.

I never gained weight while in France. I often come back having lost weight. My exercise isn’t consistent there either.

I suspect it’s the quality of the ingredients and the cuisine.

rajnathani• 2 years ago

See also, the "French Paradox" [1] of how despite high saturated fat intake via cheese that heart health is still fine in France.

To add to the point about milk fat, butter has been shown to not be much related to heart disease in observational studies (/study) [2], which is not the case for eggs despite popular belief supporting eggs as gram-for-gram being healthier than butter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_paradox

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4927102/

How is France dodging the global obesity trend?

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