Day 269 - 25 Jun 96 - Page 78
1 A. Yes, because of the olive oil.
2
3 Q. What about France?
4 A. France has been called the French paradox.
5
6 Q. Yes?
7 A. I actually have never thought of it as paradox because
8 my wife studied in Paris, in France, so we have very close
9 French friends and very often stay with them and their
10 families, and the whole attitude in France is totally
11 different, as you may well know, to food. That food is one
12 of the most important items in their budget whereas in
13 Britain the house and the motorcar are rather more
14 important, and the fact of the matter is that they are very
15 insistent on two things.
16
17 One, is a wide diversity of foods and, 2, fresh foods,
18 and with almost every meal in France you will find French
19 people will have a salad of fresh vegetables with oil and
20 vinegar, sometimes referred to as French dressing, on it.
21 And, of course, what they are, in fact, doing is providing
22 themselves with a much more diverse diet than we have been
23 customarily used in Britain, a much wider range of
24 nutrients, much higher proportion of anti-oxidants and, in
25 general, the saturated fat intake is not that high. Serge
26 Renault in Lyon made a study in France amongst French
27 farmers where he asked the very similar simple question,
28 can you, within France, find differences, regional, in
29 relation to dietary fats and mortality, as the French
30 describe it because there is some doubt about the way the
31 French describe mortality from heart disease. But this was
32 a French study, done by French people, using their own
33 figures.
34
35 So any differences in French classification to British
36 classification do not exist, and what Serge Renault found,
37 and this was for INSERNE, which is the French equivalent of
38 the Medical Research Council, what they found was that the
39 dietary patterns of the French farmers, particularly in the
40 north where they ate much more saturated fats than in the
41 Southern or middle parts of France, followed the predicted
42 or expected changes in cardiovascular risk factors as far
43 as they could see. So within France itself the evidence is
44 there.
45
46 Q. Now, can we return to our chart, please? If you look in
47 the right hand side you will see in 8 and 6, 14 tables,
48 estimated daily consumption per person for different food
49 stuffs?
50 A. Yes.
51
52 Q. Sometimes they calculate in grammes per day and
53 occasionally, as with milk, for example, or cheese, in
54 calories per person per day?
55 A. Yes.
56
57 Q. Can we look, first of all, at potatoes. Cereals, you like,
58 first. Now, from the point of view of somebody in your
59 field is the consumption of cereals a good thing or a bad
60 thing?
