[nasional_list] [ppiindia] Meanwhile: The real reason the French don't get fat New Feature
- From: "Ambon" <sea@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <"Undisclosed-Recipient:;"@freelists.org>
- Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 22:19:43 +0100
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REFKEKSI: Katanya ibu-ibu petinggi negara yang datang ke Paris untuk berbelanja
atau liburan, bila tiap hari makan di restaurant Indonesia Paris pasti tidak
akan gendut a la bendot.
Meanwhile: The real reason the French don't get fat New Feature
Jessica Seigel The New York Times
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
NEW YORK In her best-selling diet book, "French Women Don't Get Fat," Mireille
Guiliano says that when she was an exchange student in the United States she
gained 20 pounds from the American way of eating - specifically from junk food.
.
Even after returning home, she continued to gorge on pastries, but finally
slimmed down by learning to eat with élan the feminine French way. Considering
the strain in French-American relations these days, I thought it very gracious
of her to share this story.
.
So I'll share mine. When I was a college student in France for a year, I also
picked up a bad habit: a pack of cigarettes a day. That's what you do in Paris
- sit in cafés drinking coffee and smoking.
.
I acquired a newly svelte figure not from chewing slowly through four-course
dinners, supping on oysters, or setting out fine china at every meal - among
the sensuous eating pleasures from the land of Chanel that the author
recommends. The régime français I learned was cigarettes, and it took me 15
years to quit. Merci beaucoup.
.
In the j'accuse department of bad habits, the French still smoke more, and in
more places, than Americans. In fact, the Paris city council recently conceded
the utter failure of its voluntary ban on smoking in restaurants and cafés. "It
was a disaster," says Sylviane Ratte, tobacco program director of France's
cancer society. "People just ignored it."
.
So s'il vous plait shut up (even if the French do have a point about portion
control and scarf-tying).
.
According to major surveys from both nations, the percentage of French women
who smoke is five points higher than the percentage of American women.
Researchers have dismissed this difference as statistically insignificant.
.
A stark gap emerges, however, if you compare elites from both countries. In
America, where cigarettes now have a loser image, only about one-tenth of those
with college and graduate degrees smoke, compared with about 40 percent of high
school dropouts. But in France, nearly a third of upper-income earners smoke, a
slightly higher percentage than in the lower classes.
.
So those chic uppercrust French women trotting around not getting fat smoke far
more than their American counterparts.
.
Of course, kicking the habit is fattening - quitters gain six to nine pounds on
average. Not that I'm suggesting that America is so Rubenesque because we gave
up smoking. (We're just big-boned!)
.
To be fair to the French - not as if I should be - they are smoking less than
they used to. But it can't be just a coincidence that they're also worrying
more about obesity. The point is, if sensuous eating works so well, why does
the most beautiful woman in France smoke to stay slim?
.
Catherine Deneuve quit a three-packs-a-day habit in the mid-1980s, then
agonized about gaining weight. As a nonsmoker, she even felt positively
un-French, worrying that if she'd lived in Existentialist days she would not
have felt comfortable hanging out with Camus, Sartre and Beauvoir, talking
being and nothingness in hazy cafés. As she told a Washington Post reporter, "A
cigarette helps to think, you know?"
.
By the millennium, Deneuve was chain-smoking again, puffing through no-smoking
zones from Australia to Canada. Still slim, still breathtaking, she unabashedly
hails cigarettes as her beauty secret.
.
She's unrepentant - just like French cinema, which continues to film smoking as
a plotline. In one recent high-profile puff-fest, "Intimate Strangers," a
mysterious woman dandles smoldering butts seductively while opening up to an
impostor psychoanalyst.
.
Speaking of delusions, I don't need Frenchwomen promoting the "art of
self-deception," as Guiliano recommends, to tell me that the pleasures of
butter are slimming, though actually, it is quite nice.
.
But in the end, I do see areas for détente. If the French prohibit smoking in
restaurants so we can visit without choking, maybe our eateries will start
serving smaller portions with guilt-free crème fraîche.
.
Now that would be a lovely cultural exchange.
.
(Jessica Seigel teaches journalism at New York University and reports as the
''Countess of Culture'' for National Public Radio's ''Day to Day'' program.)
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