- Joined
- Feb 4, 2005
- Messages
- 7,297
- Reaction score
- 1,002
- Location
- Saint Paul, MN
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Independent
From Slate, French Women Do Too Get Fat
As for eating disorders, well they seem to know no boundaries.
Hunh, but the most interesting part of the article is this:According to a recent article in the Times of London, the traditional French meal is eaten by only 20 percent of the population. Instead, they increasingly favor the abbreviated, on-the-go meals of Americans. The national rate of obesity is rising fast. While only 6 percent of the population was obese in 1990, today the proportion is 11.3 percent. That is still well behind the same figure for the United States (22 percent) but on track to match our levels by 2020. The French are not happy about it. In a parliamentary report last spring highlighting the dramatic increase in obesity, legislators proposed launching a new government agency to fight weight gain, to be funded by a tax on high-calorie or high-fat foods.
To each their own really, but, IMHO, the less government intrusion the better.Which brings us to the second way in which the American/French divide is more complicated than Guiliano acknowledges. The French accept a level of government paternalism that would not go over easily here.
As for eating disorders, well they seem to know no boundaries.
, French women are not necessarily more balanced in their attitudes about food. While many people think of eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia as an American problem, they are, as far as can be measured (and these statistics should always be taken with some degree of skepticism), equally prevalent in France. In the United States, somewhere between 0.5 percent and 3.7 percent of women will be anorexic in their lifetimes, while 1.1. percent to 4.2 percent will suffer from bulimia. Between 2 percent and 5 percent of Americans binge eat. Among young French women, an estimated 1 percent to 3 percent are anorexic; 5 percent are bulimic; and 11 percent have compulsive eating behaviors. Certainly, young French women today are as interested in eating disorders as their American counterparts.