2006/7/1

     I was surprised when I read an article which discussed why French people didn’t get fat. I used to take the British and the French as similar kinds of people who are both more slender than Americans. In the article, the author said she as a British girl was laughed at by several shopkeepers in Paris when she was eleven years old. On that occasion she was shopping with her aunt who as an adult woman was not taller and not bigger than her. She was thought that she was too big as an eleven-year-old girl.

What’s the reason that American people are bigger than the British if American culture originated from the British? And why the French women are more slender than British women?

     The article suggests that lifestyle and the way of eating are the major reasons. The author found most French restaurants did not have big chairs to let fat people sit comfortably. Not only did the waiters not feel sorry for fat people being unable to find a suitable chair but the friend or family members of fat people felt shameful of them. It seems getting fat has been stigmatized in France. In addition, the French can take up to two hours to eat a meal. They chew carefully and let each mouthful of food be fully digested in the stomach before the next mouthful of food is swallowed. If food is swallowed faster than it is digested you may eat more than you need, because your brain and body are still feeling ‘hungry’ while a lot of food has been stuffed but undigested and unabsorbed in the stomach. This argument sounds reasonable but difficult to be proved. It’s too difficult to ask non-French people to slow down their pace of eating, so we don’t have a chance to see people become slimmer after changing their eating behavior. Then another argument comes up: It’s the contents of food rather than the behavior of eating that makes the French slim. This argument seems to be proved while the French government has been putting more and more money into fighting against obesity as McDonald’s fast food is continuously growing rapidly in Paris.

     Two years ago, I heard a famous Taiwanese professor said openly that he was lucky to be Chinese, for he could maintain his shape without reducing the enjoyment of eating a lot. I agreed because many of my colleagues love going to restaurants but none of them are fat. However, my concept on this point changed last month when my daughter told me she was the slimmest girl in her class. My daughter’s body weight was 30 kilograms at the age of seven or eight. I was only 28 kilograms when I graduated from primary school at the age of 13. Taiwanese people are also getting fatter because we are eating the same kind of food as Americans eat.

Hong CJ